Page 100 of The Anchor Holds

“I’ve lived a happy life.” His thumb moved from stroking my jaw to my bottom lip. “With some obvious blips…”

I sensed a story there. Some rock left unturned, something I was ignorant to.

I knew about the blips regarding his mother dying and his niece battling a cruel illness—huge fucking blips if you asked me.

“Is there something else that I don’t know about?” I probed as gently as I was able. Which was about as gentle as a prosecutor asking the question to a defendant on the stand.

“I was engaged,” Elliot answered without pause, without considering keeping it hidden.

My fingers tightened around my seltzer, sufficiently shocked.

“It didn’t work out.”

“Obviously,” I chuffed dryly. I kept my simmering jealousy underneath the surface, along with a healthy hatred for a woman whom I didn’t know yet needed to throat punch.

“She was my high school sweetheart,” he continued, glancing out the window.

“I’m not surprised,” I muttered. Elliot seemed like the kind of guy who married his high school sweetheart then popped out a bunch of kids.

“Yeah, I’m kind of predictable.” He smiled good-naturedly. “I have no desire to leave Jupiter, to be anything more than Iam now. I’m happy working on my family’s boat, in our family’s restaurant.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that.” I defended him as if there was shame in his tone. There wasn’t.

“I know that,” Elliot stated confidently. “But Janine, my ex…”

I fucking hated Janine, I decided.

“She wanted more.” He shook his head. “Nothing wrong with that, though I wish she would’ve realized that before we paid for the wedding, sent out the invitations.”

“No fucking way,” I hissed. “SheRunaway Bridedyou?”

He grinned, showing that he didn’t seem to hold any unhealthy resentments toward the woman I’d make a voodoo doll of in the near future. “Not entirely. She realized she wanted bigger. And…” He scrubbed a hand down his face.

“And?” I asked.

“And she wasn’t exactly comfortable with my needs. How I communicated them.” He rubbed my thigh.

I got the picture. She didn’t like the Dom/sub stuff. Everyone was entitled to their kink or lack thereof. But how any woman couldn’t like Elliot Shaw telling them what to do was baffling to me.

“Stupid bitch.” It was rather undignified of me, since I was meant to be on the side of women. Though I wasn’t exactly a girl’s girl.

“Wrong for me.” Elliot shook his head.

“You got that right,” I muttered.

“It broke me for a while,” he admitted, rubbing his chest.

My thirst for her blood for causing Elliot pain was unyielding.

“As far as relationships go, it was a lesson,” he continued, eyes bright on me. “My brother and I didn’t get out unscathed, losing our mother at young ages. Coping mechanisms, looking for the wrong things in the wrong women.” He shrugged. “Mytherapist thought it was a kind of unconscious reenactment, being drawn to someone I knew I’d lose, knowing in my gut that it was wrong for me to use women as a way to relive the loss of my mother, get a different outcome. Likely Beau’s situation too, with some unhealthy attachment styles thrown in.”

“You have a therapist?” I gaped at the easy way he spoke in Freudian psychological terms.

He nodded.

“Must be a good one,” I assumed, considering how easygoing and well-regulated he was in general. Though I knew some of that was just him.

“She is,” he agreed.

---