Page 102 of This Wild Heart

My hand raised before I made the decision, and I rapped lightly on the door, nerves flooding my entire body in a great, swooping rush. I could practically hear millions of wings battering my insides while I waited.

Then … nothing.

My brow furrowed, the nerves sliding into something bigger. Something scarier and far more vulnerable. I knocked again.

“You better not wake the baby, or you’ll be in so much trouble,” a deep voice came from the bottom of the stairs.

I whirled, hand slapping to my pounding chest as I watched him slowly ascend the steps. “Holy shit, Parker, you scared the hell out of me.”

His face was shadowed because it was dark downstairs, and it was only when he came closer that the light from my bedroom cut across his face—his jaw and mouth and cheekbones briefly highlighted in a way that made him look dangerous.

Hewasdangerous.

Everything in my body screamed it. It was in the goose bumps on my arms. The nervous pitch of my belly. The racing pulse and thundering heart. My senses were on high alert as he came closer, my head swimming as his scent got stronger as he took the last few steps.

There was a cocky glint in his eye, and God, I wanted to smack him.

“Quit looming,” I snapped. “You don’t intimidate me.”

“Not trying to,” he murmured, gaze tracing over my face, then down to the Voyagers T-shirt that I found in the guest closet, the one bearing his name. “What did you need, golden girl?”

Words. I needed words. And my sanity. And … I needed him.

When did Parker Wilder become the one thing that would make me feel better? How had that happened?

Dredging up the last shred of my sanity, I forced myself to say the thing I didn’t want to say. Mention the thing I didn’t want to mention.

“How did you deal with this?” I asked quietly.

His brow wrinkled. “What?”

I laid my hand over my chest, my eyes closing briefly. “The … explosions in your chest. I’ve tried … I’ve tried to ignore them. And I keep thinking about training camp tomorrow, and how I’ve been to so many, and it’s never felt this big. It’s never felt this …” My voice trailed off because the way Parker looked down at me made my stomach flip dangerously.

“Felt this what?” he whispered.

“Important,” I whispered back. “It feels like a performance. I don’t know how to do that with all those eyes watching.”

He took another step closer. “We just did.”

I dropped my gaze. “No, that was different. They weren’t judging. They wanted us to be happy. Your family wasn’t looking to pick us apart.”

Parker sucked in a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “And you think the rest of the world will?”

“Yes,” I breathed. “Maybe not at first. But they will. They’ll search for a chink in the armor, and the second they find it, it’s a bloodbath.”

His Adam’s apple bobbed on a swallow, and he dropped his chin into his chest for a moment. He opened his mouth to say something, and I heard my ringtone inside my bedroom.

“I fucking knew it,” I muttered.

“Do you need to get that?”

It was so dark in the hallway, and it made him seem taller. Made him seem bigger. No matter what he said, hewaslooming, and my weak little heart wanted to lean into him, to let him take some of my weight for a while.

“No.”

“You sure?”

“I think it’s Max,” I whispered.

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