He wasn’t supposed to look at me like that.

Not with those tired blue eyes, glassy like stormy seas right before the waves break. Not with the kind of gaze that says, “Please don’t leave.” But Rafe Cameron was never really asking. Not out loud. He never did. He just looked… and hoped.

Everyone saw the money, the arrogance, the name: Cameron. But I saw the cracks. I saw how his hands trembled after every fight, how his laugh was just loud enough to mask the silence he came home to. No one saw what I did—how broken he really was behind that smirk.

He hated that I did.

“You don’t get it,” he whispered once, voice low, a cigarette burning between his fingers. “You think I’m worth something.”

I remember touching his face, brushing my thumb over a bruise nobody else bothered to ask about. “Because you are.”

And for a second, he looked like a boy again—not the golden son, not the angry shadow of his father’s name. Just Rafe. Hurt, scared, trying. My pretty sad boy.

I didn’t come to fix him. He wasn’t some broken toy for me to glue back together. I wanted to hold him through it. I wanted to give him the kind of softness no one ever offered him. And God, he needed it more than anyone.

So when he finally let go—when he touched me like I was the only real thing in his world—it wasn’t wild. It wasn’t rough. It was slow. Careful. Full of questions. He needed to know I wasn’t going anywhere. And I didn’t.

Because I had always had a thing for broke boys.

And he was the most beautiful one I’d ever known.