LITMIR.BIZ

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son. Fury at the world for what it had put him through. Uncompromising with a kind of deep intensity, a commitment that no one had ever offered to Kaylee.

      It was more than her poor ovaries could bear.

      Every little biological thing inside of her was screaming about the suitability of Bennett as a partner. A protector of offspring.

      It was ingrained on a hormonal level. She was powerless against it.

      That still didn’t make it less disconcerting.

      Somewhere in the back of her brain she felt a little itch.

      Michael.

      Michael was the itch. She had a date with him next week. She had a date with him next week and she was standing here getting hot and bothered over Bennett.

      But then, that was kind of the normal state of things. Exacerbated in the moment, but relatively normal nonetheless.

      And again, she was mired in her own stuff and she felt like a tool.

      Dallas shrugged, as if he was fully unaffected by the proclamation that Bennett had just made. But Kaylee knew otherwise. She just did. Because whether it hit him today or in five years, he was going to realize eventually what Bennett was saying to him. What Bennett was offering.

      It would matter then. When he needed it to matter, it would. Someday when a little bit of that anger had subsided, or when he was feeling particularly angry and his body needed a break from it.

      She was certain because sometimes having the friend that she’d had in Bennett, having the support she’d had in his family, had been the only thing keeping her grounded, rooted to the possibilities of the future, rather than those old, ugly feelings of inadequacy. Of not deserving.

      And that—she knew—was what all that bluff and bluster was.

      Feeling undeserving. Unwanted.

      “I’m really scoring points all over the place,” Bennett said, when the bedroom door slammed shut.

      “You are, actually,” Kaylee said softly. “You just might be saving them up for later. Want to go back outside?”

      “Yes,” Bennett said.

      They wandered out to the front porch, and Bennett leaned over the railing, lifting the beer bottle to his lips. “He’s real,” Bennett said. “You saw that too.”

      “Yeah,” she said. “Sorry I can’t tell you it’s some kind of hallucination.”

      “I was actually almost afraid it might be,” Bennett said, his voice rough. “That I was going to take you in there and he was going to be gone.”

      She didn’t say anything. She had the feeling that he didn’t want her to.

      “I didn’t want him to be,” Bennett said. “As little sense as that makes... Now that he’s here...”

      “It makes as much sense as any of this does,” Kaylee said. “If you felt like you wanted him gone in the next five minutes, that would be okay too, because nothing about this is normal. There’s not exactly a guidebook for what to do when the son you didn’t know you had shows up out of nowhere.”

      “I guess not,” he said.

      “I just can’t believe it,” Kaylee said, shaking her head. “I mean, now that I’ve seen him I can. He looks just like you, Bennett. And I mean in an uncanny way. It’s like looking at you when we were in high school.”

      “He doesn’t look that much like me,” Bennett said, kicking against the edge of the porch rail with the toe of his cowboy boot.

      “He does,” Kaylee said. “And it’s everything. The way that he stands, the set of his shoulders. He’s just...you through and through, and he’d never even met you before today.” She sighed. “He’s not as happy as you were.”

      “Of course not,” Bennett said. “Because he’s had an awful life, and I’m partly to blame for that.”

      “You couldn’t force her to tell you. She lied to you, and you had no reason to think that she would do that.”

      “My whole...everything since then...this is why I plan like I do. Why I make sure I have everything mapped out in my head, because I know what happens when you don’t do that. When you just...think of the moment and not the future.”

      “I thought... I thought it was because of your mom.” She reached out and touched his arm.

      “Partly,” he said. “You know things were hard after she died. We missed her, and Dad didn’t do a great job organizing. Not that I blame him. I had to keep my part of the world organized or it would all fall apart.”

      Her heart twisted. “I know. I get that.”

      “I know you do,” he said. “And then Marnie got pregnant. I knew that I had let us both down. I just wanted... I didn’t ever want anything like that again. I was young, and sex was new, and I didn’t think. I didn’t think, and I put her through loss and pain. I blamed myself for everything that went wrong in her life. And maybe I still own part of that blame. Because I was dumb. Because I didn’t keep control. I thought of my own physical pleasure over anything else.”

      Kaylee didn’t like the way this conversation was going. Didn’t like the way it made her feel like there was heat crackling beneath her skin. Didn’t like how off-kilter she felt. Didn’t like imagining Bennett, her steady, staid Bennett, losing control with a woman.

      It made her feel hot all over, imagining Bennett making love with intensity.

      Hell, she was about to have a hot flash.

      “I’ve never felt anything like that,” she said, the words sticking in her throat on the way out.

      Bennett whipped his head sharply to the side, his beer bottle frozen midway between the porch rail and his lips. “You... Never...”

      “I’ve never felt out of control. In that...situation. That’s all I’m saying.”

      Something caught between them in that moment, and it was electric, intense enough that it was undeniable. It rolled over her like a wave, an ultrasonic wave, sharp and shocky and quite unlike anything she had ever felt coming from him before. Yes, there had been some small moments. Little pops of awareness, of both of them suddenly remembering that they were male and female, and not simply two genderless people sharing a friendship.

      But not like this. Nothing like this.

      “Well,” he said, clearing his throat.

      “Nothing good comes of it, apparently,” she said, her throat feeling scratchy.

      “No,” Bennett said. “And I’ve made sure it never happened to me again.”

      “Does that mean...” She shouldn’t be continuing this conversation. She really shouldn’t. “You didn’t feel that way about Olivia?”

      “I never slept with Olivia,” he said, his tone rough.

      Kaylee felt like she’d been slapped. This was a lot of weird revelations for one night. “You never...you never slept with her?”

      “No,” Bennett responded. “I never did. She wanted to wait until we were engaged. And we never got engaged.”

      “I thought that you...” She had spent so much time imagining dark-haired, petite Olivia wrapped around Bennett, had made herself sick thinking about it. And he hadn’t done it. “She’s so...beautiful,” she finished lamely.

      Olivia was everything Kaylee wasn’t. Petite. Feminine.

      “She was safe,” Bennett said. He took another drink of beer. “I wanted safe. I wanted something that I could plan. I wanted to be able to plan my life. And she seemed like a pretty great thing to plan it around. She felt the same way about me. It was never... We were never in love, we were

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