House of Payne: Steele (26 page)

She was so stunned she could barely find her voice. “You went upstairs… and talked him into leaving?”

“I can be persuasive. That’s not the point I’m trying to make here.”

“Did you talk to Thor with your mouth, or with your fists?’

He huffed impatiently. “Over the years I’ve discovered that when you’re dealing with professional-grade assholes like that, the combination of the two can be highly effective.”

“Wow.” She shook her head, dazed and more than a little impressed. “I always wanted to lay the lumber to that jerk, but… holy crap, you actually did it.”

“Don’t tell me life hasn’t been one hell of a lot more enjoyable since he went away.”

“Are you kidding? It’s been heaven.” She smiled and pressed a hand to her heart, so touched he’d done that for her that it was hard to find the words. “Thank you, Steele.”

“That alone should show you that I’m nothing like him. I
do
care, and I’m
not
selfish.”

She blinked, then struggled with the first stirrings of anger. “Are we back to that? I never implied you were anything like Thor, so I don’t know why you think I did. If anything, you’re the exact opposite. You’re sweet and loving and thoughtful, and I—” She broke off when he jerked away to look out the window, leaning a fisted hand high up on its window frame. “What? Damn it, Steele, the way you’re acting is starting to freak me out. What the hell is the matter with you?”

“We should’ve had this conversation a while back,” came the cryptic response, freezing her in place. It wasn’t the hint of the South in his tone that brought her to a watchful standstill. It was the darkness that dragged through it that she didn’t like. At all. “I don’t know if it would’ve made a damn bit of difference, but I guess now is as good a time as any.”

“What conversation? Steele, you haven’t made sense since you walked in here. Tell me what’s going on with you.”

“Before I do, I just want you to remember that I’m still me, and you’re still you. Nothing has to change between us. You understand?”

“No.” It was faint, but it was all she could manage. The buildup of dread was like a poisonous gas; it was suffocating the life out of her. “I don’t.”

He took a deep breath and turned to face her fully, as if he felt he needed to tackle whatever this was head-on. “I told you that I was taken in a by a kind couple after my father went to prison. What I didn’t tell you was that this couple, the Toussards, had a daughter. Her name was Apolline. From the moment I saw her, I loved her. I was only twelve years old, but it didn’t matter. I’d found the love of my life.”

The floor tilted under Essie’s feet.  Or maybe it just felt that way because his words impacted her so brutally they rocked her back like she’d been punched. “Okay.” She had to clear her throat to make it work. “Why are you telling me this now? That was a lifetime ago.”

“I’m telling you this because you need to know what you’re dealing with when it comes to me. I care too much about you, respect you too much, to ever mislead you.”

Essie stared at him while her pulse pounded in her throat so hard she almost choked. Care. Respect. Those were good things. Wonderful things.

But…

They weren’t love.

“Apolline and I did everything together,” he went on, when all she wanted was for him to shut up and not change her world, her
everything
. God, why wouldn’t he shut up? “She was my playmate, my best friend, my partner in crime. As we grew older, she became my girlfriend. She was my first dance. My first kiss. My first lover. My wife.”

A ragged gasp ripped her throat raw, but she barely noticed it. The light was vanishing from her world, and with it every ounce of hope she had. “You…Oh my God, you’re
married
?” This was a nightmare. This
had
to be a nightmare…

“No, Essie. I’m not married anymore. Apolline filed for divorce after I got wounded.”

She nearly collapsed in a relief that was so huge it took her a few seconds to process what he said. “Wait. She divorced you
after
you were wounded? That almost sounds like she divorced you
because
you got wounded.”

“It’s more complicated than that, so don’t judge what you don’t understand,” he warned, and the hard edge in his tone made her freeze in place. “The life I had before I was welcomed into the Toussard home was hell on earth. There are no words to describe how awful it was. They saved me from it. I’d heard the words ‘perfect’ and ‘heaven’ and ‘happiness’ before, and from an academic standpoint I understood what they meant. But I never knew what those words truly were until I lived with the Toussards. I found happiness and heaven there, because I’d found my idea of perfection in Apolline.”

That horrible tilting beneath her feet started again, so much so it made her sick to her stomach. “Nobody’s perfect, Steele.”

“She was,” came the simply reply. To Essie’s ears, it sounded as final as a door slamming irrevocably closed. “She lived in the kind of world that I’d only seen in storybooks—loving parents, laughter at every meal, hugs and kind words. She even lived on a little farm that had a duck pond surrounded by flowers, a tire swing of a huge oak tree… hell, she even had her own fucking pony. She was the idyllic princess, with her silky blonde hair and a smile like sunshine. She never swore. She never had a show of temper. Never drank or smoked, and always had a kind word to say about everyone she met. Ugliness never touched her life, until I came back with half my face blown off and she couldn’t bear to look at me.”

God,
God
, that selfish bitch. “Don’t tell me she
abandoned
you?”

His chin jerked up, an abrupt move that wasn’t quite a nod. “Don’t get me wrong—I’ll never forgive that Apolline didn’t stick by me when I needed her the most. But I also know that it broke her, seeing me like that. It broke her.”

“I don’t care what it did to
her
.
You
were the injured one, Steele. You were the one who nearly died, then had to go through the endless trauma of losing a part of your identity—your
face
—and having it pieced back together bit by bit, year after year. Don’t make this about
her.
I don’t want to hear about what
she
went through. You were the one who needed a support system to help you find a way to live after everything in your world shattered.”

“Didn’t you hear me when I described her life? It was idyllic, a happy dream that somehow existed in the real world. She’d never known ugliness until I brought it into her life.”

Ugh
. “There’s a saying my aunt would tell me whenever I was having a bad day, and believe me, I had one hell of a lot of bad days. She would tell me that the strongest of swords are created in the hottest of fires. She meant that whatever adversity I forced myself to survive made me a stronger person. A
better
person. The same philosophy can be applied to someone who’s too weak to tolerate the pressure and the heat. A person like that isn’t
perfect
. Far from it.”

“You don’t know what she went through, so you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t tell me I don’t know anything about this subject, or that I shouldn’t judge, because there isn’t a woman on this earth who knows this subject like I do.”

“Essie—”

“I know what it’s like to have your face destroyed, Steele, just as I know how important it is to have the people you love and trust to fucking
be
there for you. They’re the ones who help you hold onto a life that you don’t want to live anymore.” Then she sucked in a shaking breath when she realized she’d dropped an F-bomb. No doubt the
perfect
Apolline would never have done that. “But what I know about that subject isn’t the point. The bottom line of this is simple—I never would have abandoned you. I would have been incapable of that. I love you, and when you love someone, you take care to never hurt them. What they need supersedes everything, and what you might want or feel… none of that matters. All that matters is the person you love.”

“So you did say it.” His voice was so low she almost didn’t hear him, his eyes surprisingly dark as he stared at her. In that moment she hated those beautiful eyes, because they didn’t give her the reassurance she needed. “I thought maybe I hadn’t heard you right or that it was just the heat of the moment.”

“No.” It took all of her courage to stand by her words, and her heart nearly beat her to death because of it. But this was important, the most important thing in her life, and she wasn’t going to back down now. “I do love you, Steele. Considering everything we’ve been through, that can’t come as a surprise to you.”

“Should’ve had this conversation earlier,” he said again, and because that wasn’t the response that anyone would hope for after declaring their love, it was like a knife in the heart. “Four years ago I was stretched out on a hospital bed, scared out of my mind not knowing what my future would be like with half of my face fucked up. I was in so much pain the drugs they gave me could barely even touch it. I was counting on the one source of comfort left to me to tell me that my life hadn’t turned into complete shit—Apolline. Instead, all she did was explain she had to leave because I was too hideous for her to look at. A day later she sent her parents in to tell me that as much as it hurt her to do it, she was filing for divorce. And while they claimed to care about me, they said it’d be best not to contact their daughter ever again.”

“That
bitch
.” She couldn’t stop the words, because she’d been there. She’d lived that exact same moment, terrified no one would be able to love her when she’d been so broken and helpless. “God, that selfish bitch.”

“She didn’t just gut me, Essie. She tore my heart out and crushed it into nothing. It’s
gone
. I’ve been through the same intensive recovery therapy you’ve been through over the years, but it can’t fix what she killed in me. Whether the shrinks label it PTSD or whatever, I felt a part of me die that day. I fucking
felt
it, do you understand? In that moment—the worst moment of my life—I felt it die, and I died with it. It’s gone.”

It’s gone
.

The words echoed through her mind without sticking, and she stared at him uncomprehendingly. “What’s gone?”

“My heart. Maybe my soul, I don’t know. I loved her so completely, in a way that I’ll never know again. I’ll never love like that again. There’s no point in me even trying.”

No point
?

There was no point in trying to love again?

Or there was no point in trying to love
her
?

“That part of me that could love…it’s gone, do you understand? It’s been gone for years and there’s point in trying to get it back.”

Her blood iced over. She actually felt it happen, and the pain of it was staggering.

I’ll never love like that again.

I’ll never love.

Never love.

Never.

This had to be a nightmare.

Oh God, please wake me up. Please, please, please…

“But that doesn’t mean anything changes between us. In fact, nothing
has
changed. I told you that I’m still me, and you’re still you. What we’ve got is good, the best damn thing I’ve had in my life in nearly half a decade. We mesh together so well. There’s no reason why we can’t just keep going on the way we have been, and everything will be fine.”

“Fine?” The word whispered out of her as the tilting world beneath her feet crumbled away entirely. She was left with nothing, not even the promise of hope, because that was what love was. In one fell swoop, he’d taken everything. “My God. I know you told me when we first met that you weren’t nice, but I had no idea you could be so cruel.”

He flinched. “Cruel? What the hell, Essie, I would
never
—”

“Never what? Hurt me? What did you think was going to happen? Think of all the times you’ve told me I could trust you, Steele. Think of all the times you swore that it was okay for me to let my guard down with you and let you in. You promised you’d keep me safe. You promised you’d never do anything to hurt me. You went out of your way to make me vulnerable, but you always knew deep down that you never had any intention of taking care of me. That’s cruel, and that’s what you did.”

His hands knotted into fists at his sides. “What I did was pull you out of a cocoon that some cocksucker put you in when he tried to fucking
kill
you. You were dealt a shitty hand in life, and I couldn’t stand to see such an amazing woman suffer because of it. I don’t deny that I did everything I could to reach you—hell, I’m proud of it. Proud of everything I’ve done to make your path smoother once I met you, from getting that drumming asshole upstairs to vanish, to making sure the fucker who tried to kill you got what he deserved.”

Her heart paused in its faithful beating. “What? You… are you saying you killed Zane Hildebrandt?”

“I didn’t gut him, I wasn’t anywhere near the prison when it happened, and I didn’t spend a dime for that cocksucker to die. I wasn’t the only one who wanted him off the face of the earth, so I just pushed a bit to get that particular ball rolling. Next thing I knew, it was done. I don’t know who did it and I sure as hell don’t
care
who did it. Even more than that, I don’t have one fucking regret.”