Page 95 of Kylo
“Me?” Kylo asked, fingers tightening on my back until he forced his hands to relax. “I’m sorry, Rue. That wasn’t his place. He should have left you alone.”
“No. No, I’m glad he came,” I admitted. Even if I hadn’t gotten a chance to make up my mind about what he’d said.
“Rue…” he started, then stopped, the words failing him. Then, after a breath so deep it must have burned, “Rue, I’m so fucking sorry.”
My heart squeezed.
“I hated lying to you. I should have just… told Huck to go fuck himself. I never should have screwed you over like that.”
“It was a job.”
“Darlin’, you were not a job. Yes, it was a job to meet you, but nothing that happened between us was a job. That was all real.”
“You followed me,” I said, not willing to let him off the hook just yet. “For days. You wrote down everything I did and relayed it to your boss.”
“Not everything,” he said, arms squeezing me quickly, like he was willing me to believe him. “There were things that weren’t his business and I didn’t tell him.”
“None of it was his business.”
“No,” he agreed. “No, it wasn’t. But I thought you’d feel less… exposed if it was me instead of one of the other guys. I knew you’d feel more betrayed, but maybe not as horrified by someone else knowing… everything.”
It was the same point Teddy made. It wasn’t wrong.
“The hotel…” I said.
Kylo inhaled hard, his head falling forward a bit.
“I know,” he said, voice small, rough. “I know. I told myself over and over that you never would have made the choices you did if you knew the whole picture. I knew it was wrong. But then… no. No, there’s no excuse. It was wrong. I knew better. You should have been given a choice with all the information included. I didn’t give you that. And I’m sorry. I don’t have anything else to say about it other than I’m really fucking sorry.”
His head pressed to the side of mine so when he spoke again, his breath was warm on my ear. “But I also don’t regret it,” he admitted. “Being with you… I could never regret it. That was… I don’t know. It was everything,” he told me, making my heart swoop. “I’m just sorry it can’t feel that way for you, now that you know the truth.”
But it could, couldn’t it?
If I let it.
If I released the betrayal, if I trusted in the truth of his words.
It could just be a rough bump in the road leading to somewhere amazing.
All I had to do was believe him.
All I had to do was put my faith to rest in the fact that it hadn’t been fake for him, even if he hadn’t been completely truthful with me.
“Did you lie to me about anything else?” I asked. “Other than why you came to the shop? And that you were following me?”
“No. No, anything I said when we were alone and getting to know each other, that was all real. Except I danced around my job and why I lived partially at the clubhouse. Everything else was real.”
“Did you tell the club everything I told you?”
“Absolutely not.” I’d barely finished speaking before he was talking over me, his voice fierce. “They only knew things that were pertinent to your involvement with Marco. They didn’t even know about the spa or the pool or any of that. And I would never tell them about… about anything else that happened between us. That would never be their business.”
I let what he said sink in, working to filter it, organize it, and try to wrap my head around what I was thinking and feeling about everything.
“Oh, in the interest of full transparency, I might have been a little rude to your grandmother.”
“My grandma?” I asked, pulling back, eyes wide. Of all the things Kylo had been, he’d never shown a hint of rudeness.
“She blocked the driveway on the day I was trying to peel out of there after Velle confronted me about rotting in my bed for days. She wanted me to reach out and apologize. I told her you didn’t want to speak to me and just… pulled off without saying much else.”
