Note: This chapter includes strong language and a discussion of violent acts, which may be disturbing to some readers.

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After a minute Steele cleared his throat, extracted his hand from Laura's, and stood up. "It's nothing in particular," he said. "I simply don't like seeing you get hurt." He took a step toward the window and stood there, looking out.

She got up and turned on the bedside lamp before reaching to the wall switches by the bed to flick off the overhead lights. The bedroom area was bathed in a pool of warm light, while the rest of the loft was dark. Grabbing the few remaining items of clean laundry from the bed, she dumped them back into the laundry basket on the floor. She sat back down on the bed and pulled the hair band from her ponytail, slipping it onto her wrist. Running her hands absently through her hair, she studied his back for a long moment. "I don't think so."

He turned to face her. "What do you mean, you don't think so?"

"I don't think that's it."

Crossing his arms, he said, with a touch of belligerence, "Oh, so you think I like seeing you get hurt?"

"No, but I think you are especially upset by the fact that you played a part in it this time," she replied calmly. "There's something more, something you thought about telling me just now, but you stopped."

He didn't answer, and she stood up and took his hand, then pulled him back to join her on the bed. "You asked me earlier tonight why I thought you didn't want all of me," she said carefully. "Well, I can ask you the same thing."

"God, Laura, why do you have to delve into all of this? Why can't there be some things that just stay buried?"

She stroked the back of his hand with her thumb. "Because it's all connected. Your past, your fears, your dreams. Your willingness to be with me completely, physically and otherwise. I want to be the one person who gets to see you as you really are."

Dropping his eyes to the floor, he shook his head. "You don't ask for much, do you? Just my very soul."

"Not your soul. Just yourself."

"I'm not sure I even know who that is any more."

"I do. You're the man who was faithful to me without being asked. You're the man who stays loyal to his friends, no matter what their current station in life. You're the man who can, in five minutes up against my front door, make me feel things I haven't felt in...well, ever."

He propped his elbows on his knees and rested his forehead in his palms. After a moment she moved her hand to the back of his neck. Leaning in close to him, she breathed into his ear, "You don't have to protect me from the dark things. I'm not afraid of you. I've never been afraid of you. I've only been afraid of the absence of you."

He slid his hand up her arm to her hand and brought it to his lips, took a shuddering breath, and finally said quietly, "For a year or two, when I was maybe ten or eleven, I had a neighbor, a girl of sixteen or so, who looked out for me. We were both in rather awful situations in terms of our home-lives...I was staying with some distant cousins who treated me pretty badly, and her father was a violent drunk. Then she got a boyfriend, an absolute arsehole, and I could always tell when she'd been with him, because she'd have these bruises...on her arms, her face...I'm sure other places. She always tried to laugh it off, saying her lover just liked it rough, but, Laura, it made me sick. She was so kind, and so pretty, and the thought of him using her and leaving her marked like that...well, I didn't know much about sex, but I knew that it shouldn't be like that. She was just an object to be fucked, and to hell with the consequences."

Laura squeezed his fingers, but didn't interrupt. He cleared his throat and went on. "By the time her father got sober long enough to figure out where the bruises were coming from, she was pregnant. So he beat her senseless. Broke her nose, blackened her eyes. I don't know what else he did, but she wasn't pregnant any longer. The boyfriend didn't even wait for her face to heal before he went back to having his way with her. I got sent on to some other place soon after, so I never knew what happened to her. But I suspect she married that bloke, or some other one just like her da."

He didn't look up, and his voice was low as he continued, "Whatever sins I've committed my life, I've always been careful not to leave a girl hurt or in trouble. Last night was the first time I'd ever had sex without a condom. And tonight was the first time I've ever left a mark on a woman."

After a minute, she lay back on the bed, pulling him with her. She settled his head against her stomach and began stroking his hair. After hesitating for a moment, he wrapped his arm around her hips.

"Thank you for telling me that," she said softly. "It can't have been easy to talk about. But it helps to know...it helps me to understand what's going on with you."

He buried his face in her stomach for a moment, and then said, "Tonight, I let myself lose control. You're different, Laura. When you called my name, when you said those things in my ear...I forgot to be careful."

She looked thoughtfully up at the ceiling. "Oh, where do I start." She sighed, and settled his head more comfortably against her stomach, and then went back to stroking. "I've spent four years watching you. You're not a violent person. I've seen how you treat people, especially women. I've seen how you treat me. The number of times I felt you hard as a rock against my hip and got up and went home...you never lost your temper, never put out a hand to stop me. The way you touched me, and kissed me, so many times...even before last night I could have told you: You're not capable of hurting a woman, especially not one you're sleeping with. Last night confirmed it. You were every bit as gentle and skilled as I could have hoped, and then some."

He didn't say anything, and she said, "The things I was whispering in your ear...I don't quite remember them, but I'm fairly certain that I never said, 'Stop, that hurts,' correct?"

"Laura, of course not."

"Well, then. I trust you to stop if I ever say it, and you need to trust me to say it if I ever want you to stop. I'm not into pain, and I'm not into submission, and I'm definitely not into suffering in silence."

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "I suppose...I'm worried...it took us so long.... I pushed you since practically the moment we met. I know it was hard for you to trust me with your body. I don't want there to be anything that might erode that trust, any ugliness that might make you question this."

She propped herself up on her elbows and looked down at him intently for a second, and then shook her head. "Wow, you still don't get it, do you?"

He sat up. "What do you mean?"

"I mean...my unwillingness to sleep with you...it was never about the physical part of it. You have to know that I wanted you ever since those first few days with the Royal Lavulite. I knew the sex would be good. What scared me was the possibility that once I'd been intimate with you physically you'd use that vulnerability against me in other ways."

He wrinkled his brow. "What ways?"

She sat up the rest of the way and wrapped her arms loosely around her knees. "By lying, by leaving, by manipulating me...who knows? I just knew that you had too much power over me already, and that you used it to your advantage more than once. It was always the 'morning after' scenario that gave me pause, never the 'night of.'

"I'm so sorry about what you saw as a child," she went on, her voice gentle. "But, really, I would prefer it if you took some of your concern about ever again leaving a bruise on me and put it into making sure you don't cause the kind of damage that doesn't go away in a few days."

He ran a hand over his face. "Oh, hell. The other thing's a lot more straightforward, you know." He sighed and said softly, "I really hurt you yesterday, didn't I?"

"Yes. And I don't want to bring it up over and over again. I don't want it to be something I throw in your face whenever we have a fight. But it means that it's going to take me a little longer to trust you completely."

Speaking slowly, she continued, "I think I understand your reasons for it now...but it scares me how little you understood what it would do to me. You couldn't have come up with a more efficient way to cause damage if you'd tried. 'Let's take the woman with trust issues and see how she deals with having the man she loves secretly marry someone else.' You might as well lock a claustrophobic in a closet, or feed candy to a diabetic."

He didn't meet her eye. "So...why did you give in last night?"

"Okay, first of all, I didn't 'give in.' I made a choice. And if I recall the events correctly, I jumped you."

He looked like he might argue, but then said, "Fair enough. So why did you...as you so eloquently put it...jump me?"

"You talked to me in a way you never had before. You told me how you felt. It...changed my perception of things, and I suppose I started to see, just a little bit, why you did what you did. By being the way I was, I made you turn to someone else when you needed help. And I wanted to change that."

"Laura, don't try to blame yourself for that mess."

"I'm not blaming myself. But I think I've spent so much of our relationship caught up in my own insecurities, I never bothered to consider that you might have some of your own. That it might be difficult for you to come to me and ask for help, particularly with something so personal."

Placing a hand on his knee, she said gently, "I know what it did to you when you went looking for your name, your family, and came up empty. Having the INS tell you that you're a man without a country, without a home...and then having to bare your soul to me just for the chance to be able to stay here...I can see how that would be hard. I would have helped you, would have done anything necessary for you to stay, but what had I ever done to let you know that?"

He looked at her, mystified, "You're extraordinary. After everything I've put you through, you still find a way to let me off the hook."

"Oh, you're not off the hook. Like I said, it still bothers me that you didn't think of the consequences of your actions. But I can acknowledge that if I had been...I don't know...less prickly about our relationship, maybe you would have come to me first."

She bit her lip before continuing. "I mean, I'm not sure...but I think I may be the person who knows the most about what you went through in England last year. We haven't talked about it much, but I saw how disappointed and hurt you were. It's a part of yourself that you keep very well hidden most of the time, so it's easy to miss, but I saw it. You let me see it. And I think I have a certain responsibility to you because of that. I'm supposed to protect you from losing any more homes, any more names." She looked up at him. "Any more people."

He reached out to stroke her face with his fingertips, then slowly leaned in to kiss her temple. He rested his forehead on her shoulder and said, "What can I do to repay you for all this?"

"You don't have to repay me. You just have to make me believe that this was the right thing to do."

"And how do I do that?"

"I'm not sure. Give me time, I guess. Keep talking to me. Keep loving me."

He pulled back to look at her and smiled. "I can do that."

Together they stretched out on the bed and lay on their sides, just inches apart. She took his hand and let her fingers dance around his, weaving in and out as her face grew thoughtful again. "It must have been very hard for you, seeing your friend get hurt like that."

"I got over it. It just made me a bit, well, over-sensitive, about becoming that sort of man. God, I hated that bugger. And I was too small to do anything useful. So I just did everything I could to never be like him."

She kissed his fingers. "You're nothing like him."

He shifted next to her. "That bruise still bothers me."

"I know. But...," she hesitated.

"What?"

She smiled a little. "You're not the Incredible Hulk, you know."

"The what, now?"

"The Incredible Hulk. It's a TV show based on a comic book. How can you not know about the Incredible Hulk?"

"Yes, I must be grossly uneducated to lack familiarity with such an important cultural touchstone. Comic books made into TV shows are clearly a significant force in world literature."

"Mock if you must, but I'm going to have to expand your horizons on that front." She adjusted the pillow under her head. "Now, the Incredible Hulk was no Atomic Man, but he had a certain charm. Given the number of hours I've spent watching movies, you can devote an afternoon to acquainting yourself with Bruce Banner."

"Oh, goody."

"That's the spirit," she said, ignoring his sarcasm. "What I mean is...you're bigger and stronger than I am, but I seriously doubt that you can do that much damage without meaning to. For one thing, you're ticklish."

"I most certainly am not."

She raised her eyebrows.

He blew out a puff of air in frustration as he rolled onto his back to stare up at the ceiling. "Lord, woman. You make it very difficult to maintain any sort of suave persona."

"Mmm. I prefer the real thing to the persona."

Looking at her again, he said, "You do, don't you? And after all the trouble I've gone to to be a man of mystery."

She moved closer so that their lips were almost touching. "I love the thought of you dropping that carefully crafted, icy-calm façade. Allowing me to see you at your most open and carnal. You have no idea," she whispered, "what it does to me to know that I made you lose control tonight."

Placing an arm around his waist, she moved even closer so that her pelvis was pressing against his hip. "I don't believe that even in your deepest subconscious you would ever enjoy causing a woman pain. I got that bruise because I wasn't paying attention, because my mind and my body were completely wrapped up in what we were doing. The only thing you're responsible for is making me feel pleasure to the extent that I couldn't feel pain. Do you really want to apologize for that?"

His eyes were dark and he swallowed hard. "No...I suppose not," he said hoarsely. "Just so you understand that I would never hurt you intentionally."

"Duly noted. So let's not let a little collateral damage change things between us. We have four years of lust built up. We might break some knick-knacks, pull down a shower curtain or two. Maybe get a few scratches." She grinned. "I'm pretty sure I pulled your hair a little too hard this morning, but I didn't hear any complaints."

He closed his eyes and moaned deep in his chest at the memory. "Oh, no, you pulled my hair exactly the right amount."

Her hand moved to his hip, with her forearm resting across his crotch. She buried her face in his neck and took a deep breath as she inhaled his warm, familiar scent. He began stroking her back, making small circles with his fingers, as his other hand moved the strap of her top so that he could kiss her bare shoulder.

"Mr. Steele?"

"Yes, Miss Holt?"

"You mentioned some fantasies regarding my loft...would you care to tell me about them?"

Grinning, he brushed her hair back from her face and tucked a strand behind her ear. "Oh, love, I'd much rather show you."

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Note: I think there's a least one more chapter to come, probably set in Ireland. Feedback appreciated.