Against All Odds

Chapter 15

STELLA

The week after my mother died, I had frantically been left to handle the pertinent details pertaining to her estate and the funeral. It was a task that no one should be left alone to complete, let alone a freshly graduated twenty-two-year-old who was still figuring out just how the world worked.

But dad was incapacitated, so mired in his grief at the sudden and brutal passing of his wife he was a mere shell of a man incapable of making the simple decision of a shower, and my brother had been hospitalised after the accident, healing from a traumatic head injury.

And that left me... I had functioned on autopilot mostly, internalising my grief until I was allowed a moment in private. A time I should have been allotted to come to terms with the reality of a world that my mother didn't exist in was spent in a whirlwind of preparations and tasks. The only time I was allowed to process my emotions truthfully was when I numbly returned to our tiny little studio apartment late each night and climbed into a shower that was turned way too hot.

Then, behind a closed door and curtained in steam, I found the painful torrent of grief.

Killian was the only witness to these moments. He kept his distance the first night, allowing me to while an hour under the barrage of the water as it seared my skin red, the sounds of my sobs echoing through the apartment. But the second, third, fourth and so on... countless evenings... he followed me inside, stripped his clothes, and joined me in that tiny stall that barely contained enough room for one of us.

Here, he would just hold me... large hands turned me into his chest, arms pressing me against his body while I sobbed, choked, gasped against his flesh.

And all the while the steam and the water swirled around us, water so hot it pricked and scoured our skin, yet he made no move to change it, no move to turn it off... as if he simply knew it was what I needed.

What provoked this memory while I headed up the stairs, I wasn't sure. Perhaps being reminded of Killian's generosity had brought it to the surface, even though I tended to avoid thinking about that painful week of my past.

For a tumultuous, aching moment, I believed that Killian wouldn't join me after I had made the bold and compulsive offer to him. Embarrassment filled me, heated my cheeks, accompanied with a deep ache of longing because truthfully- I wanted him to join me so fervently I could have begged him to had I stayed with him in the lounge a moment longer.

I was entering my room when I heard fast, heavy steps bounding up behind me and when I turned back to the staircase, my heart almost stopped beating altogether when I witnessed him prowling towards me.

Killian followed me inside my room, closing the door behind me, and I turned to him, my pulse hitching into a heated frenzy as I made to reach for the hem of my dress and pull the flowy material over and off my body.

He stood against the closed door, his eyes dark and hooded as he considered me. There wasn't a soft part on his body as he took me in, the tendons of his neck straining against his skin, the unrelenting angle of his jaw flexing. The last few days with Killian had made me aware of the persistent attraction I would always hold for him, and I had homed my focus on that- our compatibility in bed, the sexual boxes he so effortlessly checked.

It was the man underneath all that I had been trying, in vain, to ignore. The generous, devoted, passionate and selfless Killian.

The person I had fallen in love with all those years ago.

My gut hollowed out at the thought of him looking out for me... He hadn't allowed me to be alone during the week leading up to my mother's funeral. He hadn't allowed me to break the bank at my best friend's wedding, either. He had no reason or incentive to look out for me, but he had.