Page 68 of Last Chance Cowboy
And as much as all of this hurt, the fact that Zane Barton had given her a chance to know him felt like a revelation.
So she would cling to that instead of the nightmares, and hope it was enough to keep them at bay.
Chapter Twelve
When Zane woke up the next morning, he had Cara in his arms.
She was nestled right up against him, her round, perfect ass pressed against his morning wood. And who was he kidding? It really had nothing to do with the fact that it was morning and everything to do with the fact that it was her.
She was soft. So soft. So much more than he’d dreamed of, so much more than he’d fantasized about. It was what terrified him about her. She was the kind of soft that hands like his were never meant to touch. He’d been made rough by life. By working the land, by loss, by war. Hands like his couldn’t soothe, they couldn’t touch her how she needed, couldn’t hold her how she should be held.
Even telling her about his family had hurt her. He was a liability just by existing. The things that lived in his head could poison her.
He let out a slow breath and unwrapped his arm from around her waist, crawling out of the shelter and looking at the smoldering ashes from the fire.
He stoked it back to life, and then wentdown to the river to try to catch some more fish for breakfast. He was successful in his efforts, and by the time Cara emerged from the shelter, they were almost all the way cooked.
“Morning,” she said, looking at him, and not looking at what he was doing at all.
Which meant she had woken up thinking about the terrible things that he had told her.
“About last night…”
“It’s okay. We don’t have to talk about it.”
He didn’t realize he had been holding his breath. But it released in a gust after she said that.
“All right. Because I meant what I said. Other than psychologists, I’ve never talked to anybody about that.”
“You’ve talked to a psychologist?”
“Yeah. I… I went to live with my grandparents afterward. They made sure that I got help.”
“Oh. That’s… That’s good.”
He nodded. He didn’t tell her that they had both passed away by the time he was eighteen. Leaving him completely by himself, leaving him with the military as his only opportunity to have a family. And he had discovered that that was a violent, volatile family to get into.
Though the military also provided a lot of psychological services. Especially when you went into it with the backstory like his.
“Yeah. It was all right.”
Except it wasn’t, and neither was he. They both knew that now. Because she knew exactly why he acted the way that he did, she knew exactly why he held people at a distance. It was a lot more fun to be mysterious. Or maybe even have people think that you were an asshole. It was better than tearing your chest open and letting people see your insides. Letting them see all the ways in which you were actually fucked up, and just plain traumatized by life.
“Thank you. For sharing all of that with me.”
“Thank you?” That was something he hadn’t expected. He pulled the fish off the fire and divided breakfast up the same way that he had done dinner. “That’s not the reaction I expected.”
“I just… You trusted me with that. And you can. I’m not going to tell anybody.”
“Thank you.” He genuinely hadn’t been worried about that. Not even for one moment. The only thing that was worrying him, or rather, making him uncomfortable now, was the fact that she knew the truth, the fact that they were sitting there with nothing between them, just the broad light of day, and she could see all of his secrets.
All of his pain.
That felt a little bit like a problem. But he wasn’t going to say that either.
“You’re welcome.”
They ate their breakfast in silence, and then they began to break camp. “I try as best I can to leave no sign of myself in the wild.”
