“Are you angry?” I wondered aloud. “About what I did?”
Locke tucked my hair behind my ears and put some distance between us. “Angry? No.”
“Horrified, then? Maybe you don’t want me around Willow anymore?”
Locke laughed. “You think I wouldn’t want my kid around a woman like you? Fuckin’ hell, Orls.”
I took comfort in his casual use of Nash’s nickname for me. But the harder I tried to read him, the more inscrutable his expression became.
Giving him space, I backed up until I found a friendly beech to prop my shoulder on. If he wasn’t angry or disgusted, then what? Unless... “You don’t understand how I can love you enough to kill for you.”
Locke blinked. “What?”
“You heard.” Cold without him, I folded my arms around myself. “You don’t give a shit about what I did. It’swhythat’s bothering you. You don’t get why I cared enough to bother.”
“That’s not...” Locke pursed his lips, letting his thoughts catch up with his mouth and derail his denial. “That’s not it,” he tried again with even less conviction.
I waited him out. For a split second. But my patience wore thin so fast it was hard to imagine I’d ever had any. “It’s like this: I still look for my parents, especially my dad. I search for his face in the crowd everywhere I go, and the whole time you were gone, I made myself imagine that it was you I was looking for, and I couldn’t live with that. So if you can’t accept that I did this for you, accept that I did it for me.”
Locke held my gaze for a long moment, those sea-green eyes taking me apart as much as his big dick and massive warm heart ever had.
Then he shrugged. “All right.”
“All right?” I narrowed my eyes. “That’s it?”
“It’s the truth.” He cut the distance between us again. “I keep thinking I should be more bothered that you did this for me when it’s my literal job to protectyou, but I just don’t care. And if I really didn’t want shit like that around Willow, none of you would’ve ever met her. Hell, even Folk wouldn’t have met her.”
“She could still have Uncle Rubi. He’s clean.”
Locke snorted. “I’ve seen him do far worse to someone than kill them.”
“Stop with the logic. It interferes with my attempts to be reasonable.”
“I like it when you’reunreasonable.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.” Locke kissed me again, but it was different this time. Harder and edged with something we’d never entirely be free of.
I kissed him back, the bark of the tree digging into my flesh, the dirty words to ask him to do something unthinkable forming in my throat as we slid down the trunk of the beech to sit on the cold moss.
Locke covered me with his body, his weight pressing me into the ground. I arched into him, forgetting all about what had driven me into the shower before we’d come here. Forgetting everything except the crazed need to be as close to him as possible.
I want?—
His phone buzzed with an alert tone I didn’t recognise.
“Ranger.” Locke tugged his phone from his jacket pocket and read the message, his expression caught between a frown and a smile. “He wants me to check on his grandma.”
“Ranger has a grandma?”
“Nanna Jean. He loves that crazy old bird.”
So did Locke if the fondness warming his face was anything to go by, and I found myself yearning to know more about anything and everything that made this man smile like that.
“We should go,” he said suddenly, tugging me to my feet. “You’re cold.”
“I’m fine.”