He backed off immediately. “What’s wrong? Do what again?”
She caught the words on his lips, and she knew she had confused him. Maybe she’d given him the wrong signals when she’d let herself be swept away at the skating rink. She didn’t regret it, but she knew it couldn’t happen again.
Releasing her wrists, he quickly sat up and pulled her into his lap.
She turned her head and didn’t look at him until he forced her chin up with his fingers. “Tell me.”
Maybe he deserved an explanation, but she wasn’t sure what to say. She ended up blurting out exactly how she felt. “After I broke up with Rick, and my parents died, I went into a horrible depression. I’d lost my hearing, and that had taken away the man I loved. My career was gone, so I was just floating in limbo, everything I cared about gone. I’d completely changed to be the woman Rick wanted, and then I . . . wasn’t. My parents were gone, and I was all alone.” She stopped briefly to gather her turbulent thoughts, realizing she wasn’t making any sense. “He’s the only man I ever wanted, but he didn’t want me anymore, even though I did everything in my power to please him. In the end, it didn’t matter. He dumped me anyway when I wasn’t the perfect doll he’d turned me into, going to parties I didn’t care about, dressing the way he wanted, acting the way he wanted. None of that mattered anymore because I wasn’t the woman he wanted.”
“He wasn’t the man for you,” Micah interjected while Tessa took a steadying breath.
“No. He wasn’t. But I didn’t know that back then. I was young, and I let him become my whole world. He reinvented me because I was young, stupid, and I hadn’t completely found myself. Skating was my life. There was nothing else for me until I met Rick. I was too naive not to be programmed to make him happy. And it was nearly my downfall.”
She took a deep breath before moving her eyes to his and told him honestly, “I was so depressed that I tried to kill myself. I didn’t care whether I lived or died at that point in my life. That’s probably what your brother is facing now, except I wasn’t drinking or doing drugs every day.”
She waited with a heavy heart, knowing he’d look at her differently now, and she knew that rejection from Micah was going to hurt.
It took Micah a few moments to process exactly what Tessa had confessed. Once, she’d been so alone and so desperately lost that she’d wanted to take her life?
He knew he should immediately discard the thought that she would have followed through. She loved her brother, and, deep down inside, the will to survive would never have let her take her own life. Still, the thought of the world with no Tessa scared the shit out of him.
His rage at all of the tragedy that this one small woman had lived through pounded at him relentlessly, making him incapable of saying much of anything.
Finally, he asked, “Have you ever thought about it again?”
She shook her head. “No. I went to counseling. It took me a while to resolve my issues, to really grieve for everything I’d lost. That was a turning point for me. Everything happened so fast that I never really had a chance to mourn. I guess everything stayed bottled up until I finally cracked.”
Micah stood, unable to find the words to say, unable to comfort her. He was too busy being angry at the world, pissed off that Tessa had needed to endure so damn much that it nearly broke her.
Nearly. But it hadn’t.
He stood and held out his hand to her, then pulled her to her feet. “Everything better now?”
It was a dumb, awkward, almost polite question, but he had to ask.
She nodded. “Better,” she agreed. “I’m still working on awesome.”
Micah didn’t talk much as they made their way back through the woods, lost in his own thoughts. He wished he knew how to comfort Tessa, but he wasn’t sure how.
One thing he knew for sure, he damn well was going to get her to “awesome” as soon as he possibly could. She’d had enough shit in her life. It was beyond time for her to become “breathtakingly amazing.”
CHAPTER 7
The last thing Kristin Moore wanted to see today was Julian Sinclair walking into Shamrock’s Pub. It had already been a shitty day, and seeing Julian come through the door made it an explosive-diarrhea kind of afternoon.
Her parents’ bar and grill was between the lunch and dinner rush, and even though it was a Saturday, there was only one couple at the far table having a drink. The tourist season was over, and there wasn’t much happening before seven or eight o’clock these days once the lunch crowd had departed.
Of course, Julian swaggered straight to the bar where she was wiping down counters, and plopped his tight, gorgeous ass down on a barstool. “How are you, Red?”
His tone was taunting, like he was already ready for a fight. “Fine, until you got here,” she retorted, her teeth set on edge.
What was it about Julian Sinclair that put her immediately on the defensive? In addition to the fact that he was one of the most perfectly gorgeous men she’d ever met, he was a superstar and a billionaire. His platinum-blond hair and deep-blue eyes would turn any woman’s head. His perfectly toned body, complete with bulging biceps, would make them do a double take and keep right on staring. He looked the part of a Hollywood A-lister.
He was an amazingly generous tipper, something she’d found out the night of Hope Sinclair’s winter ball, when he’d left her a wad of hundred-dollar bills that had helped her make her rent and pay some bills that month.
Unfortunately, he still irritated the hell out her.