Every Part of You: Takes Me (#5) by Megan Hart Read Free Book Online Page B

addiction problem. She lived in squalor, Simone. I grew up with roaches crawling on me in the night and rats in the pantry.” He looked up at her, his expression grim. “We didn’t have to live that way. She had a trust fund, of all things. A fucking trust fund, and we lived in filth. When I was seventeen, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I wanted to go to college. I wanted to make something of myself. I showed up at Molly’s door, and she took me in.”
    “That was good of her.”
    Elliott managed a small, tight smile. “She took me in and stood up for me against my dad, who said he didn’t want to be bothered with being responsible for me, not when I’d be eighteen in a year. They fought about it. He punched her in the face and threw her down the stairs. She was in a coma for three days.”
    “Was he drunk?”
    “Does it matter?”
    She stroked his cheek. “No, honey. It doesn’t.”
    But it explained a lot.
    “He went to prison for vehicular manslaughter a few years after that. She divorced him. She’s had a lot of health problems since then, and now she’s got a late-stage degenerative brain disorder. Dementia. She’s dying. I bought her house from her so she could afford to stay there, but now she’s in an inpatient facility.”
    “You take care of her,” Simone said, understanding.
    “She took care of me,” Elliott answered. He cleared his throat again and leveled his gaze with hers. “Last night, he showed up at my house. We got into a fight. I spent the night in jail, and you know what I thought about the entire time I was in there?”
    “How bad it smelled?” She tugged his earlobe to get him to smile.
    He did, just a little. “That, too. But mostly, Simone, I thought about you. And how much I missed you. How good you were to me, when I was nothing but an asshole to you, all the time. How much you gave me, and I never gave you anything.”
    “You gave me…” she began, and trailed away because to continue would be to end up sobbing.
    Elliott pushed up on his knees to kiss her. Softly. The taste of tears between them. He held her close, and this was not like the night in the parking garage, when anger had sparked their passion. She clung to him, opening her mouth. Giving him herself once more even though she knew it was probably going to hurt her in the end.
    “I thought about how much I missed you,” he whispered against her mouth. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you, and how the other night I’d been going to call you, except my father called me instead. And I thought about all the times I’d let the things my father had done stop me from doing what I wanted to do. All the times in my life when I tried so hard to fight against him or what he was that I didn’t give myself a chance to figure out who I was.”
    Simone wept for him, then. “Oh, honey. I’m so sorry. So, so sorry.”
    “My father liked to hurt people,” Elliott said. “I didn’t want to be my father.”
    She took his face in her hands and looked into his eyes. “You know that what we did, what we both liked … that is not the same as what your father did. Don’t you?”
    “I do.” He nodded and turned his face to kiss her palm. “I couldn’t face it before. I didn’t want to be that man, Simone, the one who hurt the person he was supposed to love. The one who loved him. And I did anyway, didn’t I? And not the way you liked.”
    “No.” She gave a soggy laugh. “Not in the way I like.”
    “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I was an asshole because it was all I knew how to be.”
    She stroked the hair back from his forehead. “Shhh. We all have our faults and our flaws and our quirks. But don’t you know, honey, I’ll take every part of you?”
    “I don’t deserve it, but can you forgive me? Can we try again?”
    His words would also not have made the list of things Simone would’ve ever expected from Elliott Anderson. Another laughing sob burst out of her, and she kissed him. Over and over,