Page 96 of A Shot at Love
He wasn’t wrong. The mistakes with boys in her teenage years and then college, proved she drifted toward men who would hurt her, much as her father had.
The impenetrable wall she’d built around her heart over the past few years, coupled with always needing to be the dominant one in any relationship, the one in control, had turned Gemma into the workaholic, relationship-avoiding woman she’d once accused her sister of being.
Now, at a time in her life when her career was where she wanted it to be, Gemma was beginning to realize how much she wanted to share her successes with someone who would revel in them with her. Someone who would support her, her decisions, her desires. Someone she should be able to trust.
“If he had stayed,” she said, “and the fighting and the cheating ended, I’d like to think I would still be successful work-wise, but…”
“But?” Ky remained where was.
“Maybe…maybe I wouldn’t be so hard and tough on people. So demanding of perfection of myself and everyone around me. Maybe I’d be able to trust people a little more and not always feel like I needed to be in charge and in control.”
He continued to lean against the counter, but Gemma sensed something shift in his posture.
“I went to a lecture in college once,” she continued, while she poured more soda into a glass, “about how your parents influence the kind of person you turn into when you age. If they love you unconditionally, or if they’re cold and distant, you turn out one way. If they’re supportive and accepting of your decisions, or disdainful and ridiculing, you turn out another. A lot of the talk was about how feelings of being abandoned as a child can lead to problems with trust and acceptance in adulthood.”
Ky nodded. “I’ve read studies as part of my profiling training at the bureau like that. They all state the same thing. How a parent reacts and responds to a child when they’re young influences the person they’ll become in adulthood.”
“So you know, then. You understand what I mean.”
He pushed off the counter and crossed the small expanse of the kitchen. His fingers wound around her upper arms, drifted downward, and took her hands in his. The warmth spreading from them into her was soothing, calming, and arousing all at the same time.
“I do. What you’re trying to say is you have trouble trusting people, men particularly, because the one man you should have been able to trust with everything, including your love, betrayed that trust by leaving you.”
Gemma’s shoulders relaxed when she let out the breath she’d been holding in. “Exactly.”
“I can understand that, Gemma, I really can.”
“That’s the beginning of a but sentence if I’ve ever heard one.”
His grin set of an explosion of firecrackers in her stomach. “But, despite that betrayal and how it should, theoretically, have affected you, you’re a brilliant photographer, a savvy business woman, you can kick ass like no body’s business”—she grinned at that—“and you’re the sexiest woman I’ve ever known.”
The blush she felt spring up her face at his words was unpreventable.
He tugged her into his arms, wound his hands around her waist, settling his body comfortably against hers.
“You’re all those things and more, Gemma. And I think you would have wound up the same way, in the exact same place you are now, with your father’s presence in your life or not. This is who you are, what you are, the person you were meant to be. And from where I’m standing,” he wedged one knee between her legs and leaned in closer, “you’re a pretty remarkable woman.”
She cupped his cheek and rubbed her thumb along his lips.
Words failed her. In that moment, without a doubt, she knew she was starting to have real feelings for Ky; feelings she’d blocked herself from having for so long.
And feelings she didn’t know how to deal with. Or more accurately, she told herself, couldn’t deal with.
“Trust is hard for most people,” he told her. “But getting hurt sucks, whether it’s emotionally or physically, and whether you’re betrayed or abandoned, or your heart is stomped on, it makes it harder to trust the next time.”
