Claiming Christmas: A Mountain Man Romance Novella (Untouched Book 5) by Suzanne Hart

Author:Suzanne Hart [Hart, Suzanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-11-15T16:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

Lara

My heart was hurting for Declan. How could he think he was responsible for this?

After he told me his story, Declan returned to chopping wood. I followed him, refusing to let this go so easily.

I put my hands on my hips.

“I need you to stop this for a minute.”

Declan looked up at me. His eyes wandered from my face down my body. Even though I was covered in what felt like a dozen layers of clothes—when he looked at me like that, I felt beautiful.

“What more do you want from me, Lara? Now you know everything there is to know about me. Go sell it to the media if you want. I don’t care what you do with this information.”

“Sell it to the media?”

I was shocked he would even entertain this thought.

“Is that what you think of me?” I snapped.

Declan swung his ax up again. Despite the cold, he was wearing nothing more than a plaid shirt and jeans. I saw his muscles bulge as he brought the ax down again.

“What makes you think I think anything of you at all?”

I shook my head. He was still refusing to look at me.

“I didn’t come here asking for an explanation from you because I want to make money from your secret!”

“Then why are you here, Lara?”

I glared at him, but he still barely looked at me.

“I wanted to help you! I could see how upset you were…how you still are. And nobody deserves to go through suffering like this alone.”

Thankfully, he finally stopped chopping the piece of wood and focused all his attention on me.

“You’ve done your duty towards me, so you can go now.”

“Not until you start believing you are not responsible for your sister’s death.”

I had every intention of holding my ground. I wasn’t afraid of Declan, and he knew it.

“All my life, I did nothing but neglect my sister. The only family I had. She felt so isolated from me that when I called her on her birthday, she didn’t tell me she’d been diagnosed with cancer. My sister. My flesh and blood!”

Declan threw his ax to the ground again and he dusted his hands and stepped towards me.

Every word that came from his mouth, sounded like a threat.

“You couldn’t have cured cancer.”

“I could have. I may have been able to pay for it. If I’d known a year before she told me, I could have helped her. I would have done anything to make her better. Absolutely anything. And she didn’t know that. She had no clue how I felt about her. And that was my fault. For never being there for her.”

Declan spoke through gritted teeth. There was red rage firing in his eyes. He looked like he was ready to erupt.

“You made a mistake.”

“It wasn’t just one mistake, Lara. It was mistake after mistake, till I reached a stage in my life when nothing other than my bike and booze mattered to me. My sister’s safety, her health and happiness—didn’t matter to me either. Peggy couldn’t trust me with her life.

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