“Why are we up so early?” He was scrubbing my hair and obviously a thousand miles away in his own head.

“I need to talk to Rome about work stuff. We’re having an issue with Brite’s daughter.”

I sighed as his fingers massaged my scalp. “Rome really looks up to Brite. That’s got to be tough.”

He moved behind me and I sucked in a breath as our slick skins rubbed together. He sounded frustrated when he replied, “Yeah. I don’t get why she’s such a brat. I mean, I was a nightmare, but I didn’t have two parents that obviously cared about me or anyone trying to give me a helping hand up from the bottom. She has this loser boyfriend that is obviously strung out and I’m positive he’s used his hands on her more than once. She has lifelines trying to pull her out of shitty situations and she just keeps turning a blind eye to them.”

His big hands worked around the front of me as the soap cascaded out of my hair and down my shoulders. He wasn’t so much cleaning my chest as he was playing with my boobs and making me pant.

“Do you think you would’ve taken the hand if one was offered to you when you were younger?”

One of his hands flattened on my stomach and I felt his lips land softly on the back of my neck. He reached past me to turn off the water.

“No. I was destined to be a screw-up from the start.” He shoved his hands through his wet hair, stepped out of the shower stall, and found a towel that he handed over to me. “My dad was in jail before I was born, my mom had a ninth-grade education and no desire to live beyond the trailer park. I was always the poor kid, the white-trash kid, and instead of being ashamed of it, I used people’s pity, their sympathy, to get what I wanted.”

I watched him carefully as he wrapped a towel around his waist and leaned back against the tiny vanity. He watched me just as closely as I rubbed the excess water out of my long hair. He crossed his arms over his broad chest and went on.

“When I started school and I realized all the other kids brought lunch or had meal plans and I didn’t, at first it made me sad.” He shook his head and his mouth pulled tight. “Then it made me mad that all those kids had something I didn’t, that I had a mom that couldn’t get her act together enough to feed me. I found a girl in my class. She was quiet, didn’t really have any friends because she was shy and kind of weird, and I spent all my time convincing her we were the best of friends.” His eyes flashed from gold to bronze and I could literally see him falling into the decades-old memory. It obviously didn’t sit right with him now if the way his shoulders tightened was an indication. “She was a sweet kid, a little slow, but she had a huge heart and came from a lot of money. She brought me lunch every single day until fifth grade.”

I wrapped the towel turban style around my head and went to move past him. But his fingers locked onto my wrist and he pulled me to a stop in front of him. He wanted me to hear this, he was always trying to pull the curtain back and show me the darkness that swirled inside of him. It didn’t seem to matter to him that I already knew he was made up of black marks and misdeeds and I just didn’t care about them.

“In fifth grade I started to understand that the other girls in class besides her thought I was cute, that if I gave more than one girl attention I could get more than just lunch. I told one she was the prettiest girl in class so she would do my homework, told another I would be her boyfriend so she would buy me clothes, let another sneak kisses so that she would take me out to eat at restaurants, not even fancy ones because there aren’t any in Woodward, Kentucky. Then was another girl, she was awful. Stuck up, mean and horrible to anyone that crossed her path but because her family had a pool and she would invite me over to swim I decided to start walking her home from school. I loathed her but I did it every day because she had something I wanted. I did all of that after coldly and callously ditching the first girl that had been so nice to me and so sweet to me for years. I just unceremoniously ditched her and didn’t care when other kids teased her or made fun of her even after she made sure I never went hungry. I wasn’t even a teenager yet and I was already that kind of guy.”

I shook his hold off and went into the living area so I could put on the clothes I had stuffed in my purse. I wiggled into a pair of skinny jeans and pulled on a cute, off-the-shoulder sweater over a tank top. I took the towel off and shook out my tangled hair as I dug around for my brush. Asa came out of the bathroom scowling at me, so I lifted an eyebrow in his direction and worked on making my hair manageable.

“What?” I made sure to keep my voice light because I could see he was just waiting for me to unleash a torrent of disgust and judgment at him and was unsure what to do with my indifference.