“Because, sweetheart,” he’d mastered numbness long ago. Casting his head on a slant he looked up at her and saw every piece of hurt and love she had for him. It was easy to put coldness in his voice. “The first pussy I was ever inside was my own mother. That’s not the kind of man you invite into your bed for the rest of your life.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
“Suffering.” - Gia
He wouldn’t let her near him.
She tried to go to Hawk. To wrap her arms around him and he shrugged her off by pacing the length of the kitchen until a chasm of space was between them.
She felt his detachment in the way he locked his arms around his chest.
Why did she make him talk? Look what it had done to him. This was the Hawk she knew. The aloof, closed off, dangerous, unbalanced man. The one who would stare at her and dismiss her with a blink like she meant nothing.
Only she knew different and he’d grown into someone more open the more time they’d shared. Until she’d stupidly thought it was a good idea to know everything inside his head.
It was for his sake.
Don’t fucking lie to yourself. You wanted to know everything about him.
Her heart cried for him.
For the little boy he’d been. Alone and uncared for. Mistreated every single day of his young life. Making your own child sick to gain sympathy… what kind of monsters raised him?
Over the years gleaning only snippets about Hawk like an obsessive fangirl, feeling his cold animosity as well as his heated stare that gave her mixed signals. He’d felt something for her. She was young then, she grabbed his attention however she could. Even emotionally destructively, she’d derived a thrill from that negative attention from him and though in her profession she could claim it was dysfunctional to a point to rely on that kind of devotion to fuel her heart, she’d lived for those short moments with him. They’d been everything.
She loved a broken man.
Luck had been on her side, along with a lot of tenacious energy on her part and here they were now, on the cusp of something real.
She tasted his love. She didn’t need the words to know how he felt.
And her heart was torn into a million pieces for him. She was screaming inside to help him, to protect the small boy, he’d been and guide the man he was today.
“Hawk, come and sit down, baby.” She approached him the same way she would a skittish animal and when he let her take his cold palm to lead him into the living room her heart hiccupped with relief. Her man was in there somewhere behind his closely guarded cold armor.
His confession was spring boarding through her mind.
Hawk had pulled her into his gray world. There was no way she was leaving it now.
On the couch she tucked her legs under her, his hand still surrounded in hers, she stroked with her thumb. Khaleesi Stormborn, hated being left out, that little drama diva and she whined to climb up, too. Once Gia lifted her up she settled on Hawk’s lap.
“Do you know why I hate that guy from your office?” Hawk spoke suddenly. His free hand circling on the puppy’s belly as she shamelessly laid there with legs in the air for attention.
Leo. He’d taken an instantly disliking to him, much to Gia’s delight to witness his jealousy She was devoted to Hawk in every way that no other man could ever penetrate through.
“Why, baby?”
“He’s everything I’m not. I watched him smile at you and hated his fucking guts because in that second of him walking into your house, I could see you with someone like that. Having a normal life, with a happy guy who isn’t fucked up in his head.”
“No one is like you, Hawk.” She told him. “No one could be you. And I don’t want you to be anyone else.”
His blues looked on like he thought she was lying. Her poor sweet man, more broken then she’d suspected.
“You know you shouldn’t love me.”
“I do. Infinitely. Majestically. Forever.”
He snorted, and a cocky blond brow lifted towards his hairline. “Majestically?”