“Carry me? What for?” I tried to push past him and get out of the car myself, but his hands were at my waist immediately, then around my back to aid me in walking like I was a porcelain doll. “Dante, I’ve been resting for a week. It was a minor brain trauma.”
“It wasn’t minor. You were in a coma.”
“From the pressure against my skull, and it’s completely subsided. It’s not … I’m fine.” I chuckled at how ridiculous he was being.
He took a step and pivoted in front of me, never letting go of my body. My chest was to his, my stomach against his abs, and other things touching other things. Of course my body reacted immediately, but what I didn’t expect was for the look of anguish in his eyes to affect me most.
His hand trailed up my back to my neck where he wove his fingers through my hair. His forehead fell to mine.
“One.” He breathed in, and my body immediately relaxed into him. “Two.” He sighed, and I closed my eyes.
He counted the rest of the way to seven. And then his eyes opened with a sparkle of unshed tears beneath a furrowed brow as his thumb rubbed a sensitive spot just below my jaw. “I almost lost you. And it’s my fault for letting you run around on that island in the first place. It was reckless, and I’ll have to live with that the rest of my life.”
I pulled back from him, stepped out of his reach even though my body longed to stay in his arms, and shook my head. “Not true. I made the decision to stay there myself.”
His lips thinned into a disapproving line before he slid his hands into the pockets of his slacks and began walking on the dirt path toward the barn. It was a sight to see, a man so beautiful in business attire, dirtying his loafers to walk to a stable. “You can say that, Lilah, but I should have forced you to come home rather than letting you run wild over there.”
“Wild?” I trotted up to him to poke him in the arm. “I had a job. I was a responsible adult. And you know I didn’t go there to get wild.”
He hummed. “Can you admit why you went?” Dante peered over at me before he opened the barn door. It was one of two large wooden doors, the handles black metal with a large drop bar latch across them. He paused, like he was waiting for me to admit and accept everything in my life.
Maybe I needed to. Maybe we both needed to hear I was healing.
But I wasn't healed yet. “I went there to be free of myself.”
“Free of yourself?” he whispered like he couldn’t believe I’d said it.
“Yes, from this stupid idea that I’m perfect here, when really I’d lost a baby, when really I’m struggling with depression, with expectations, with who I am.”
“You’ll never be free of those things, Lamb,” he murmured.
“Yes, I can be. I was getting there.”
His hand flexed on the handle of the door. “No, you were forgetting and suppressing, but that doesn’t work. You can’t be free of it because it lives with you … forever.”
“That isn’t freedom. This isn’t a life if I have to live with that, Dante.” Why did I feel like I was pleading with him, with the world, in that moment?
“That’s all life is, Lilah. You know that. It’s work and pain and suffering for the beauty of living. You think I tortured all those men and killed some in hopes I would forget? No, I took the ugly, and it chained me down, but the beauty of you and this world set me free. It’s not a complete freedom. It’s fractured and broken and wrecked.”
He opened the door to the barn stalls. I’d been there before, years ago, but they’d since redone everything with sleek treated oak. They had ten individual horse stalls, five on each side of the barn. In the middle was a lunging ring, an open area where they ran horses round and round. There was a high-end fan above us that cooled everything down without displacing even a straw of hay.
I didn’t respond to his viewpoint on life because my jaw had dropped at all the renovations. I walked over to one of the stalls. The beautiful wood was stained and treated so it was smooth to the touch. I ran my hand over it and gripped the gate where the wood ended and the iron began. It took me getting on my tiptoes to peer between the iron bars and to see into the horse stall.
“When did this happen?” I asked.
“We redid some things a few years ago so that animals in distress could feel more comfortable. My mom and the workers will bring them in here if they’re pregnant, suffering from some ailment, or if it gets too hot out.”