“I’m sorry, man.”
“Don’t say it,” he warned.
My eyebrows pinched together. “What?”
“Don’t tell me you told me so. I did what I thought was right for Olivia. She shouldn’t have had to go through that alone . . . and now I know I did the right thing for Tate. He needs two parents.”
“I wasn’t going to. I said what I had to say before you married her, and when she wouldn’t let you see your son. But I’m not going to sit here and tell you what I think of your decisions every time we talk. You did what you had to. End of story.”
“Yeah,” he said softly, and then cursed. “Tate’s up. I gotta go.”
“All right, man. I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Sounds good. And Steele? Just because Reagan gives you some relief, doesn’t mean you have to suffer the rest of the time. You can’t live like this. You need to talk to someone, please think about it. You have—you have to start moving on.”
“Start moving on? Are you shitting me?”
“No, I—”
“You saw what I’d been in for those hours before you rescued me. You only saw the aftermath, you didn’t watch it happen to them. You weren’t forced to watch every f**king second of it. You didn’t feel like a worthless piece of shit who did nothing—”
“You couldn’t, Steele,” he said, cutting me off. “When will you realize that? You couldn’t do anything. Just like the others weren’t able to do anything when the rest were killed. It could have just as easily been you. I’m sorry you were forced to watch that. Steele . . . I’m so goddamn sorry we didn’t get there earlier. But I couldn’t spend my life being tortured by what happened, knowing that my team was too late to save the rest of yours. So don’t let your life slip by while you’re being tortured by something you had no control over. Get some help.”
I let the phone fall onto the couch beside me when he ended the call, and leaned forward to hold my head in my hands. If only it were that easy.
Reagan—September 17, 2010
“HEY THERE, STRANGER,” I called out as I shut the door behind me to Coen’s studio and ran into his waiting arms.
“Good morning, Duchess. How’d you sleep?”
I pressed my lips to his chest and pulled away, but kept my hand firmly in his. “Not nearly as good as I do when you’re there, but pretty well. You?”
Coen’s eyes flashed to one of the couches, and his face fell for a second before he laughed awkwardly. “Uh, I’m pretty sure I got about twenty minutes in there somewhere.”
I stared at his dark eyes for a long time, looking for any signs that he hadn’t slept . . . but he could go without sleep for days, and I’d probably never know. He hid things that well. But with Keegan’s odd question about Coen sleeping, and then the first night Coen had spent the night and had seemed to be in awe over the fact that he’d slept . . . I wouldn’t put it past Coen to be telling me the truth.
Deciding not to breach that subject right now, I looked at his laptop and my eyes widened. “Oh my God. Coen, is this one of your shoots?”
“Uh, yeah . . . I guess we haven’t really talked about this yet.”
I shot him a confused look before stepping closer to the laptop. “Can I look through them?”
His dark eyes widened and he shrugged before reaching for a coffee cup. “If you want. I just finished editing those before you got here.”
Sitting down at the desk, I clicked through a shoot of a tattooed girl on a couch in nothing but a lacy pair of underwear. Her arms had been perfectly positioned to cover her bare br**sts in the different positions. It was beautiful and seductive, and I’d frowned by the time I got to the last one.
“Are there more shoots?”
Coen was staring at me like he was waiting for something.
“Do you not want me to look at these?”
He kept looking at me before flashing his eyes at the screen. “I’m waiting for you to get mad.”
“Why would I get mad?”
Nodding in the direction of the laptop, he kept his eyes pinned on mine. “She was topless. She only had underwear on. This was a week and a half ago. I’m just waiting for you to react like a normal girlfriend.”
My lips twitched. “And how would a normal girlfriend react?”
He put the hand holding the coffee cup out in front of him and raised his shoulders up. “I don’t know. Yell. Say you don’t want me doing those kinds of shoots. Be jealous, I don’t know.”
I widened my eyes and acted like I was really considering doing just that. “Well, we both know how much I love to argue with you. But that”—I gestured toward the screen—“is amazing. Besides, Keegan already told me you did those kinds of photos sometimes. It’s not like it was a secret.”
“Of course it wasn’t a secret, Reagan. But it’s one thing to know about it, its another to see it.”
I smiled softly at him. “Does it bother me? I would be lying if I said it didn’t. Do I think what you did with that shoot was beautiful? Absolutely. Do I wish I had her body? Hell yes.” Coen made a face, but I kept going. “Would I ever ask you to stop doing those shoots? No.”
“Where did you come from?” he muttered.
“The way I see it, you were doing these long before we started seeing each other. So I know that if there was something to be worried about with these shoots, then it would have been going on even back then, and we would have never started dating.”