Page 79 of Renegade Ruin

Bishop presses his lips together and shakes his head, visibly holding back. “I can’t take them there, Willow. They aren’t?—”

I hold up my hand, cutting him off. “Let me ask you this. Do they wear the black and orange?”

“Yes,” he grumbles.

“Then they are Renegades as much as you are.” Twisting so I can take his face between my hands, my thumbs trace the stubble on his cheeks. “You are so focused on how you are goingto replace your team, but maybe it’s not replacing more than welcoming them into the family.”

Bishop’s eyes widen as he processes my words before he settles into a worried silence. I’m desperate to know what he’s thinking, but I don’t dare say anything more. This is something he needs to work through on his own. I can lead him, but I can’t do it for him.

“How do you do that?” he whispers, soft eyes searching mine.

“What?”

“Make things make sense when I can’t.”

I shrug, letting my hands fall away from his face. “It’s a gift.”

I move to settle back into his side, but Bishop is quick to tighten his grip on my waist. Using the knuckle of his free hand, he tilts up my chin and presses his mouth to mine. It’s soft and intimate. A stark contrast to how we started this hotel endeavor.

He breaks our kiss, his breath still hot on my lips as he presses his forehead to mine. “Thank you.”

“No thanks needed,” I reply, searching for air between us but finding none that isn’t charged with his presence. “I told you—we have to learn to live. Part of that is asking for help.”

He chuckles. “Jolene said the same thing.”

“Smart woman,” I say, ignoring the fact that I’m the biggest hypocrite of them all, considering I would rather drown in these emotions than ask for help.

Bishop exhales and lets slip, “You are not what I expected.”

“What did you expect?”

His hands find my hips and tug me so I’m once again straddling his lap. My arms wrap around his neck. His cock twitches beneath my pussy, separated only by the terrycloth robe I insisted we wear for this conversation. It’s easy to forget we are nothing to each other when he looks at me like he is right now, with his lip caught between his teeth and fire in his stare.

Instead of answering my question, he does the last thing I expect.

He apologizes.

“I’m sorry.” His deep brown eyes lock on mine.

I open my mouth to tell him it’s okay, but he reaches up and thumbs my lip, stopping me.

“No, please let me get this out.”

“Okay,” I whisper as I manically try to rebuild the walls around my heart before the verbal battering ram of his apology blows through the last whims of my defenses.

“I’m sorry for everything,” he rasps, gently. “For the locker room and the plane. I wish I had an excuse, but all I’ve got is an impossible amount of grief I’ve been hiding behind, but that’s not your fault and you didn’t deserve my anger.”

Tears rim my eyes, and unlike every other moment when I try to keep it together for him, I don’t have it in me to stop them from falling.

And like the knight he is, Bishop is there to catch them, wiping them away with his thumb the moment they stain my cheek.

He takes a deep breath, holding my teary gaze. “I’m sorry for hurting you and for shutting you out after the crash. I’m sorry for all of it. I don’t deserve this agreement with you, but I’ll forever be grateful for what you’ve done for me—what you are doing for me.”

Processing his apology feels like going through a hurricane. In a convertible. With the top down.

On the one hand, I’m elated at the show of Bishop finding his way through the darkness and the promise of healing between us, but it’s overshadowed by the selfish hurt that every apology he made was not what I wanted to hear.

I’ve long forgiven him for all those things. They are water under the bridge. What I want to hear is that he was wrong—that he wants me the same way I want him. I need him to say he’s sorry, but he can no longer continue with our arrangement because there isn’t a world in which I can only be a distraction to him.

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