Harlequin Presents February 2023--Box Set 2 of 2 by Heidi Rice

Author:Heidi Rice
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2023-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

He wished she had not asked that.

It was the splinter in the glass that set the whole pain fracturing.

Do you love me?

He could lie. He had lied so many times in his life about so many things. To himself, to everyone else.

Do you love me?

“Yes,” he said, the word raw. It was destroying him. From the inside out. She was destroying him. He would gladly jump back into that car, and that twisted heap of metal, before facing this. But he had not been given a choice. It was killing him. Because there was nowhere to hide. There was no way to protect himself.

He had told himself, he had told her, that he needed nothing. That he did not care, that he did not love. Yes, he had told her that. And he had believed it. But here he was, confronted with the truth.

He had, all these years, wanted love more than he had ever wanted anyone other thing in all the world. He was broken with his need of it, and it was that which scared him above all else.

He’d had to close himself down to survive. And perhaps the thing that angered him most about his own part in Irina’s death was that he had not even given himself a chance to care for her. Because it was there. That ability.

It was only he refused to share it because he was small and mean and terrified, like the boy he had been out on the streets.

The boy who’d had to learn how to sell his body without selling his soul.

But you can have your soul back now. And you can give it to her. That’s what you want.

It was true. It was what he wanted more than anything.

And in the end of all things, if he did not do this, what did his life matter?

If he could love Athena, and she could love him in return, and he had survived that accident, and he had survived that childhood, and he had survived selling himself, over and over again, only to find the reality of intimacy and love and sex now, at thirty-eight years old, then if he turned it away, what was the point of surviving at all.

“I love you,” he said again.

But it wasn’t easy, and the words didn’t get any easier. He pulled her to him, her naked body against his, and he kissed her. Desperately. Deeply. All over. “I love you. I love you, dammit, Athena, and it hurts.”

“That’s okay,” she said, pushing his hair out of his face. “I don’t want an easy love. And I came to that conclusion all the way back when we were walking along the river in Paris. I watched all those people with their soft gazes, the way that they held each other, and I knew that for us it could never be that. I had an idea of romance. But this... This is real. Jagged and sometimes painful, but it’s worth fighting for. You and I.

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