I was stepping into the greatest unknown there was. Not knowing if I would send her running for the hills. Or if this could last. But I couldn’t imagine my life without Shay, and I needed her to understand that.

Nothing but silence greeted me.

34

Shay

He loved me. The words Brody said ricocheted around in my brain, snowballing from one emotion to another, gathering them all up in a mess I might never be able to untangle. “You can’t love me,” I whispered.

His brow quirked, but there was pain in his eyes. “Why not?”

It was a stupid thing to say. But some tiny part of my mind had decided that if we didn’t say the words aloud, I could keep Brody safe. That if those three tiny words were never uttered, he wouldn’t be at risk. My eyes burned and filled. “I want to keep you safe.”

“Hell,” he muttered, pulling me into his chest so his strength surrounded me. “Nothing’s going to happen to me. Or you, either.”

The tears came faster, my chest shuddering. “I love you, too. I didn’t want to say it because if we say it, then it’s real. And if it’s real, you become the person Michael would want to hurt most of all.”

Brody held me tighter against him. “Not letting those words free doesn’t change anything. The truth still exists. That love is still there. Nothing’s going to erase it.”

“I know.” For a normal woman, one who’d had a typical childhood, who’d dreamed of the perfect man, a white dress she’d walk down the aisle in, his words would’ve been a dream come true. But for me, someone whose past meant that she’d had to hide every single thing she even remotely cared about, it brought ice-cold fear. The kind that froze everything inside of a person and made it impossible to move.

“Caring about someone doesn’t make you weak. It makes you stronger. Those feelings give breath and life.”

He spoke the words against my hair, his lips grazing the strands. I tried to take them in, grab hold and anchor myself to them. To the hope that our love could make me more powerful than I ever had been before. “I want to believe that. But everything I’ve ever loved has been ripped away and out from under me. Either destroyed or twisted beyond recognition.”

My parents, gone. My aunt, someone I couldn’t even see in person for fear it would lead Michael to either of us. I’d lost friends, my cat, any toys that I’d seemed to especially love. Everything just…gone. And if things like that happened enough, you stopped reaching for the stuff you wanted.