Cora: I know it’s been years and I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but I want you to know that I understand now how badly I hurt you. It’s hard to ignore when the exact same thing happened to me. Everyone in the shop knew Ashley and Drake were hooking up behind my back while she had my ring on her finger and no one said a word. I just wanted to try and make it right. You were a great girlfriend and I should have treated you so much better. Your aunt said you moved to Denver and I figured you would have hooked up with Phil. The shop looks nice. If you are open to it, give me a call. I would really like to make amends. I’ve missed you.

He left an e-mail address and a phone number, but I hit delete and just stared at the monitor. Well, wasn’t that all kinds of a mind f**k?

“Now what? You look like you’ve seen a ghost?”

I spun the chair around and met Nash’s curious gaze.

“Have you ever had your heart broken, Nashville?”

He growled at me, which made his client laugh.

“Don’t ever call me that again.” He never used his full name and got touchy whenever someone else did. “And yeah, my heart was broken by the girl every boy loves first. My mom. The second she picked that dipshit over me, she broke my heart.”

“What did she have to say about Phil? Did she agree to talk to him?”

“She was all weird about it. She said Phil is a grown man, and if he doesn’t want to talk about whatever is going on, I should be mature enough to respect it. I still can’t run him down and it’s all starting to piss me off.”

Phil had been scarce around the shop lately, and when I did catch him on the phone, he still sounded terrible. I didn’t like it at all, and the fact that he was still dodging Nash just didn’t bode well.

“I just had a bit of my past bite me in the ass but it’s fine. Nothing to get all twisted up over.”

“You sure?”

That was the question I was struggling with myself, but luckily I had a girl coming in to get the same piercing I had done and I needed to get ready, so I moved to the piercing room to set up and made sure all the instruments were ready to go. I needed to keep busy or the past was going to drag me under, and that was the absolute last thing I wanted or needed.

Rome knew something was off. I met him at the bar because he had to stay later than normal because of a band or something. He fed me and poked and prodded at me, which I tried to evade because I just wasn’t sure what to tell him. He had nothing to worry about. I didn’t want anything to do with Jimmy. He was history and his apology was beyond a lifetime too late, but a part of me couldn’t deny that I was curious about what he thought he could say to me after all this time to make any kind of difference. I was avoiding handing my heart over to Rome, because I was still scarred from the damage Jimmy had done when he drop-kicked it back to me and I wondered if there were any words that existed that could make that fear obsolete.

Dinner was a little bit tense but he let it slide because he was awesome like that even though I could feel those eyes trying to vet me. I was mad he didn’t tell me what happened to the truck and that Asa spilled the beans. I was worried that someone seemed to have it out for him or the bar and that he didn’t seem to be taking the threat very seriously. He said something about Brite having an in with the Sons of Sorrow and that didn’t make me feel any better about the situation, but since I was twitchy and off anyway, I just let it go.

I was mentally exhausted when I got home. I chatted with Ayden for a minute since she was in the living room with her homework spread out all around her. I told her that I was probably moving out and getting a place with Rome before the end of summer, so she and Jet would have the place to themselves. She was happy for me but bummed because Jet was on the road so much. I think really she missed Asa and just didn’t know how to mend that bridge. That was something the gorgeous siblings were just going to have to figure out on their own because I was simply spread too thin at the moment.

I took a shower and crawled into bed. It was weird to be alone, but Rome said he would be home as soon as he could. I slept more on him than on the mattress, which led to my hands being in some very interesting and naughty places in the morning since he typically slept naked. He was just so warm and so solid, he made me feel like anything bad in the world would have to go through him if it wanted to get to me.

I put on a T-shirt and some panties and was out by the time my still-wet head hit the pillow. I vaguely heard my guy come in well after midnight and heard him rustling around in the bathroom, but I was too out of it to rouse. Even when he pulled me up and settled me back on top of him with a hard kiss on my sleepy mouth, all I could muster was a pat on his chest before getting sucked back into dreamland. I felt his arms curl around me, and for the first time since that call from my dad, I felt like I had settled back into my reality. This was now, my then was not something that was going to mess with this. I refused to let it.

I was jolted awake sometime near dawn. I had to blink to try to adjust my eyes to the hazy light coming in through the blinds, but before I could even adjust to it, Rome had rolled me over and was looming over me with a scary look on his face. His eyes were wild, his mouth was tense, and the vein that ran along his neck was throbbing in a rapid beat that I could see even in the low light.

“Rome?” I asked it as a question because this was the same way he looked the last time he disappeared into the night. I didn’t want to spook him, but I wasn’t sure he was even seeing me right now. His hands were harder than normal and shaking just a little when they pulled my shirt up over my head and he didn’t even bother to slide my underwear off; they just disintegrated under the twist and pull of impatient fingers. He jerked his head up and the light blazing out of those blue eyes was tortured and foreign, but there was enough of my guy still caught in there that I told myself just to calm down and ride out the storm. I knew to the bottom of my soul he would never purposely hurt me. He just needed to get away from whatever was hounding him and this was the only way he could do it without taking off on me again. I had asked for honesty and this was as raw and honest as I could get from him.

He positioned me where he wanted me and then his head and shoulders disappeared between my legs. I was still half asleep and nowhere near ready for this kind of assault, so I just threaded my fingers through his hair, which was now long enough to curl and loop around my fingers, and held on. I arched up against his thrusting tongue and tightened my thighs around his head.

“Rome …” This time it was a gasp not a question. He wasn’t much of a talker during sex at the best of times and I had had the silent, totally intense sex with him in the past. But this was something on an entirely different level. He was typically a very generous and thorough lover. He went out of his way to make sure I was satisfied and ready to take anything he wanted to throw at me. That wasn’t the case this morning. He clearly had a goal in mind and it was to get me off as quickly and as violently as possibly. A goal he was quickly reaching with his oral attack. I couldn’t really complain about it since it felt so good and I knew he needed it for some reason, but if he thought he was just going to f**k me senseless and then not talk to me about it, he had another thing coming.

I couldn’t hold out long, not with his tongue and his teeth doing all kinds of really wonderful things down there, but before the first spasm of my cl**ax started, he jerked up, rolled me over onto my front, and pulled me up so that I was in front of him on my hands and knees. His broad palm stroked over the curve of my ass and he whispered my name.

“Cora …”

I felt him ready himself behind me, and even though I was all mellow and malleable from the pleasure and intensity he had just forced on me, there was no denying I felt a little like I was splitting in half when he pushed all the way into me from behind. I swore a little under my breath, not because it hurt but because it was just a sudden, overwhelming flood of sensation. He was always so careful with me, aware of the difference in our size, but this morning it was like some different part of him had been unleashed. This wasn’t one of my favorite positions in bed, but with him like this, I thought maybe I could learn to love it. He was just all over me.

I felt him along my back. His hands were between us and curved around my br**sts. My ni**les were already extra-sensitive due to the pregnancy, but with him tugging on them and rolling them between his thumb and index finger, I was pretty sure I could come just from that alone. I groaned and peeked over my shoulder at him. He was a sight I would never forget.

He was all straining muscles, sweat-slicked skin, contracting abs, flaming blue eyes … he was a picture of pure male intensity and there was no way I would complain about being the focus of all of it. I liked how he was all hard lines and planes where I was all soft and round, now more so than ever before. I also liked the way his hands looked against the parts of my skin that were stained with color. It was a beautiful contrast, one he seemed fascinated by as well. It would also be hard to erase the image of him driving, thrusting, pounding into me like he was chasing down his release or else he was going to suffer some kind of unexplainable loss. That was a whole lot of Rome Archer to take in; lucky for me I was up to the task. Even if my head wasn’t a hundred percent sure I could take all he was forcing on me at one time, my body was more than up to the challenge. My inner muscles were squeezing him in time to his thrusts, my ni**les were puckering and begging for his touch, and there was no denying the flood of moisture where we were joined that was easing his way. I tilted my head back to the side and braced for the inevitable explosion and collapse; only that wasn’t what I got. Once he ruthlessly shoved me back into mindless oblivion, he seemed to come back from whatever brink he was on. I was practically in tears, worn out from pleasure and the wealth of sensation he’d foisted on me, but he flipped me back over on my back, kissed me hard on the mouth, and sank back into me.

He was slow, the drag and pull of that erection a rough torture on over-sensitized skin. He kissed my eyelids, the corners of my mouth, the edge of my collarbone. He whispered my name over and over again, and when he finally shuddered and growled his release into my throat, I felt like there had never been a time in my life where I knew what it meant to be so fully and completely needed by another person. I just wrapped my arms around his thick neck and let him cuddle into me while he caught his breath and settled back down.

I thought I was going to have to poke and prod at him in order to get him to divulge what had set him off, but after five long minutes of silence where all we did was hold on to each other, he finally started to lay it all out for me. The accident. How he thought he was going to die. How he lived every day with the guilt of being the only one to survive. How he was mad that the accident was one of the main causes of not only his physical limitations but had been the precursor to a lot of the mental ones as well. It sounded like he put a lot of the blame on the accident for ending his military career. It was sad. My heart broke for him a hundred times, but when he was done telling me about it, he turned his face to mine and kissed me so sweetly on the cheek I thought I might cry.

He went to pull out of me, to roll over, but I wouldn’t let him. I locked my arms and legs around him and held him in place. If he was going to bare his soul to me, not because he wanted to but because I asked him to let me in, I had to do the same. He deserved nothing less. If he was going to give me his all, I had to stop being scared and be willing to do the same. Baby steps.

I licked the shell of his ear and whispered, “I got an e-mail from my ex today. It totally threw me off my game. That’s why I was acting so weird earlier tonight.”

That big body went stiff all over mine, and he pushed himself up so that he was scowling down at me. We were still joined intimately together, so I thought it should be impossible for him to be annoyed with me, but I was wrong. His eyes narrowed and flared with something that wasn’t very pretty, and the scar that decorated his forehead started to throb an angry tempo.