I grunted, knowing that Jesse wasn’t kidding about the scary way I was looking tonight. I knew that I was a scary looking man, with a voice that made most little kids cry. Which was why I’d been so surprised to have the twins want to approach me let alone want me to hold and talk to them. Of course, they looked kind of fearless. Meaning they had bigger balls than the men that worked on my farm back in Tennessee. These days even my foreman ran the other way when he saw me coming. I’d been moody, and a moody me was not something that people enjoyed.

The only person who had ever been able to handle me in a bad mood had washed her hands of me almost fourteen months ago.

And she was now standing less than a hundred feet from me, talking with Layla Thornton, Emmie, and some short-haired brunette who looked familiar but I didn’t care enough to try and place. My next breath didn’t come. It was trapped in my chest as I took in the sight of Marissa for the first time in what felt like a millennium.

Her long, glorious hair still hung past her waist, but it was styled in glossy waves. She was wearing more makeup than I’d ever seen on that beautiful face that haunted my dreams. A tiny diamond glinted from her nose and I clenched my jaw when I realized that she had gotten it pierced. It was a cute piercing on a chick, but on Marissa it pissed me off. I didn’t want her pierced or tatted up. Not my Marissa. She was too damn pure to defile her body with holes and ink.

Someone must have said something funny, because Marissa’s head suddenly was tossed back and she was laughing. It wasn’t the laugh I was used to, the one that was full of joy and life, but it was enough to make my chest burn and my dick twitch in response to that musical sound. Fuck, but I’d missed her so much. My heart and my head had been fighting a losing battle for the last year and I was still no closer to figuring out how to deal with the conflict inside of me.

I loved Marissa Bryant. Have loved her every day of her life. In the beginning it had been a brother-like love for the six-year-old little girl who had come to live with me and my parents after the death of Brock Bryant. She had been so lonely, so lost since the only parent she had ever known was gone. When she had attached herself to my seventeen-year-old self, I’d let her. When the farm had nearly gone under because my father hadn’t been able to keep up with the mortgage payments, I had joined the marines for the sign-on bonus just so I could help my parents keep a roof over Marissa’s head.

I’d spent four years in the marines, three of which were in Afghanistan, for her. When I’d gotten home and joined OtherWorld I hadn’t ever thought that the band would become what it was today. When Rich Branson had told us we had a shot at the big times, I hadn’t wanted to be a part of it. Marissa had been twelve and I’d wanted to stay close, to protect her, but thankfully I’d followed my friends into the lime light and OtherWorld really had become as huge as Rich had predicted. It was the money OtherWorld produced that had allowed Liam and me to pay for the expensive medical treatment that Marissa had needed when we found out she had had leukemia when she was fourteen. Our fame had gotten her the treatment and eventually found the bone marrow donor that had saved her life.

That girl had been my best friend and I’d been terrified that I was going to lose her as I’d watched her fade away into nothing after the intense chemo treatments that had killed off everything bad inside of her before the doctors had done the bone marrow transplant. She might have only been sixteen, but she had gotten me like no one else ever had. Not even my mother had touched my soul like Marissa had then. She still did.

It wasn’t until she was nineteen that my feelings had changed. One day I looked at Marissa and saw the same girl I’d always seen. The beautiful chick that could make me laugh when no one else could, with her kind blue eyes and slightly plump body. The next day? I’d seen the same chick, but just the sight of her had made me ache in a way I’d never ached before. I’d looked into her blue eyes, twinkling with merriment over something she was teasing me about, and had had a pain sharp and burning shoot through my chest, leaving me gasping for a breath that I still couldn’t fully take in.

Ever since that day I’d had an inner struggle. My heart constantly screaming at me that Marissa was mine; that she needed to be beside me, in my arms. It was my head that I’d been listening to, however. My head that screamed and yelled and demanded I listen every second of every day. Marissa was innocent, her soul pure and beautiful. But I wasn’t anywhere close to good enough for that girl. I’d done things in my life that would taint that pureness. I would infect her with my dirtiness, the evil that I’d seen and done while I was in the marines.

It was my heart that had overrode my head more than a year ago when I’d finally given in and kissed Marissa. A kiss wasn’t anything major, not when you considered the things I’ve done with other women. But when a kiss burns through you to your heart and makes something inside of you come alive for the first time in your existence, then a kiss is everything. Everything. One kiss had led to another, and kissing had turned into all kinds of hot and crazy. How I’d been able to contain myself and not take something I wasn’t good enough to have, I’ll never be able to figure out.

I’d been struggling more and more with my feelings for Marissa ever since Liam’s accident. As much as I babied and protected Marissa, she was pretty self-reliant and had never fallen apart over anything. Even when she was so sick, so close to death herself, she had been the strong one out of everyone. She’d stood strong while Liam had turned to harder and harder drugs to numb his pain. My mother had suffered a heart attack during those weeks that we couldn’t see Marissa, something my father had died from just before Marissa had gotten so sick. And me? I’d been a basket case. A scary, moody basket case because Marissa was perhaps the only real friend who I’ve ever known and I’d felt like I was losing her every time I’d gone to that stupid window and looked at her sleeping form.

When Liam had the car wreck and we all thought that he might not make it, Marissa had practically collapsed. I’d never seen her so distraught in my life, and it woke up all my protective instincts. I didn’t leave her side for days. When Liam finally woke up, and we went back to Liam’s apartment to crash, Marissa had climbed into bed with me and fallen asleep in my arms. If I hadn’t been so exhausted myself I would have stayed awake and savored the feeling of her in my arms, but after only a few hours of real sleep in over a week, I’d been unable to keep my eyes open when I was so at peace and the next thing I’d known it was morning.