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“Savage is testing it now before we look inside.”
“Before we look?” I ask, worried about the secrets between our families, the possibility of murder in the air. “Didhelook?”
“He wanted to. I told him no.”
Heat rushes across my chest and up my neck. “He’s going to look.” I shove against him and slide under his arm, giving myself space, forcing myself to calm my breathing, but my heart is another story. It won’t stop racing. What if my father committed murder? What if my brother knew? What if there’s evidence inside that envelope that proves that? And what does that do to me and Jax?
We face each other, and I point to his phone where it’s resting on the counter. “Call him. I need to see what’s in that envelope. Me.Just me.”
His eyes light, the blue burning amber. “Just you? What happened to us being in this together?”
“Exactly,” I snap back. “Don’t tell me you didn’t plan to hide this from me. Jax, I haven’t known you long, I get that. But I know you well enough to read you now. You want to know what’s in the envelope before I know.”
His jaw tenses, he cuts his stare, and that says all I need to know. “What are we doing Jax?” I demand. “We’re poison to each other.” I turn away and charge toward the bedroom, and I don’t stop at the door. I already found my suitcase and took it to the bathroom. I had to brush my teeth because I imagined myself kissing Jax. I imagined all these wonderful things with him, but that can’t happen now. All I’m doing is setting my brother up for a fall. God, I need to get home to my brother.
I hurry through the room, and I’ve made it halfway to the bathroom, just past the bed, when Jax catches my arm. Heat rushes up my arm, and it’s not all about anger. It’s about this man touching me. It’s about this man and how much I want him, how much I even feel as if want has transformed to need. I whirl around, intent to confront him, but I fail. He drags me against him, all those hard muscles absorbing all the softer parts of me, and the words linger on my tongue, but never leave my mouth.
“What are we doing?” he demands, and he doesn’t give me time to reply. “This.” His mouth closes down on mine, and I try to fight, no, I tell myself to fight, to push back, to save myself before I go down and never find my way back up. But I don’t fight. I don’t even try to save myself.
His mouth closes down on mine, and the taste of him, all man and demand, undoes me. I sink into his big, powerful body, as my tongue meets his. I’m all in, kissing him like there is no tomorrow, and maybe there isn’t, maybe there can’t be, but right now, right now, I reject that idea. I drink him in the way he’s drinking me in until his mouth is gone, his breath a warm whisper, as he says, “That. Over and over again, with no end Iwant to imagine. We’re not bad for each other. We’re not poison. Say it. We’re not poison.”
But I can’t say it.
How can I say what I’m not sure I believe?
Chapter fifty-six
Emma
“Damn it, woman,” Jax says, when I don’t give him the answer he wants, his fingers twisting in my hair, a rough pull that is far more erotic than painful. “I don’t want anything the way I want you. I’m not walking away.”
He doesn’t want anything the way he wants me? That declaration, spoken low and guttural, undoes me. I’m an outsider, invisible, but for my family and name, except with him. And I want him to want me. So much so that it’s terrifying. “What if—”
“I’m not going to let you finish that sentence,” he says, and then he’s kissing me all over again. And I’m kissing him and nothing else matters. That’s what he does to me. That’s what he keeps doing to me, but I don’t even care right now. I don’t want to think about what comes next if it’s not him, if it’s not with him. I don’t want to think about never touching him or kissing him again, but I touch him and kiss him like this is it, like this is the last time there is a me and him.
I wrap myself around him in every way possible. My arms. One of my legs around his leg. I don’t even know how his shirtcomes over my head, but I’m suddenly on my back, and he’s on top of me. His pants are gone, and the thick ridge of his erection is between my legs. I’m wet. I’m arching into him, and when he parts our mouths, I’m panting.
“Stop kissing me like this is the last time we’ll do this,” he demands. “Because it isn’t. It will never be the last time.” He presses inside me, stretching me, filling me, and it’s like I can finally breathe when I couldn’t breathe moments before. Any objection to his words I might have found are gone, so very gone. He drives deep, and his mouth comes down on mine, and now, he’s kissing me like this is our last kiss. His hand slides underneath my backside, and he lifts me inside him, thrusting as he does, pressing deep. He’s not just kissing me like this is it for us. He’s fucking me like this is it for us.
The contradiction drives me crazy. It infuriates me. It cuts me. I tear my mouth from his. “Now who’s kissing who like this is the end, Jax?”
“Only you, baby, only you.” He doesn’t wait for my objection. His fingers flex on my backside, and he rolls slightly, entangling our legs, our tongues, molding every possible part of us closer, tighter. I can’t get close enough to him. We can’t get close enough to each other. We can’t kiss deep enough. We can’t fuck hard enough. No, it’s not fucking. It’s more, so much more. I want to crawl under this man’s skin. I want him like I didn’t know I could want. I moan. He lets out this low, rough sound, his teeth scraping my shoulder, his hand sliding over my breast, my body.
And I swear it feels too soon, but it happens. I shatter without warning, my sex clenching around him. Pleasure rips through me, emanating from deep inside me and blasting through my entire body. It’s hard and fast, and the minute I’m back in this world, Jax rolls me fully to my back again and drives into me, a low, guttural sound sliding from his mouth, the animalistic needon his face mesmerizing me. I did that to him, that’s all for me, and that’s a powerful, sexy feeling. He shudders, his head tilting back from the intensity of his release, before he all but collapses on top of me, catching his weight on his elbows. Even at this moment, sated, out of his head and in his body, he protected me, from well, himself.
For a full minute, we lay there, him on top of me, us breathing together, until his lips brush my ear, and he raises his head. “We aren’t going to keep doing this.”
As if I’ve been hit, I suck in air, a stab in my heart. “I know.”
“No,” he says. “You don’t know, because, right now, you think I mean us. I mean them, Emma. The next time someone who isn’t you or me or us together throws knives at us, we will not fuck our way out of goodbye. No goodbyes.”
Relief, too much relief to believe I’m not already in the deep, dark waters over my head with this man, washes over me. I swallow the cotton in my throat. “Jax—”
“Do you want to say goodbye to me? Answer now, no thinking. Say what comes to your mind.”
I’m confused. I’m so very confused. I need to protect my family. I need to protect himfrommy family. I need to protect myself from the moment he realizes I really am poison with a special kind of Knight flavoring. But I don’t want to say goodbye. I don’t know what to do. “You’re inside me right now, Jax. I can’t exactly be objective.”
His jaw flexes, and his eyes flash with something I can’t identify and then he’s gone, no longer inside me, leaving me cold and stunned. I push to my hands, and he’s sitting up on the edge of the bed, his shoulders tense. “Jax?”
