“It was two days after you got here. I am sorry I was not present enough to know.”
Viktor peeled my hand from his wrist, pried my fingers open, and dropped the bracelet into my palm. “Will you tell me what the stone means to you?”
I stared at the bracelet, the wrench in my heart I always felt around Viktor taking a trip down memory lane and making way for something else. “It was my dad’s. He was a rough as nuts Scouser, but superstitious as hell. Carried that rock around his whole fucking life, and now I do too.”
“For luck?”
“And energy. My nanna reckons it’s why I’m adaptable. Cos I grew up surrounded by it.” I uncoiled the bracelet. The fragment of stone was bound into leather the colour of my nanna’s old couch. For a moment, I was back in her council flat, chips in the pan, nuggets in the oven, fucking Billy Ocean blaring out of the kitchen. Only the scent of orange blossom kept my feet on the solid, sun-baked ground. “Thank you. Sorry I thought you were scarpering to get blitzed.”
Viktor swiped his thumbs under my damp eyes. “I am sorry too. For every moment I have made you chase after me.”
“It’s not that many.”
Vik hummed and took the bracelet from me. He tied it around my wrist and it stirred another memory.
I led him back up the hill and into the house. My much-abused bag was in the hallway, abandoned in the corner.Kneeling, I dug through it while he wandered off, rummaging past the broken sticks until I found a newspaper-wrapped gift right at the bottom.
I’d already opened it, but the fancy ribbon was still tied. I took it to Viktor’s room where he was making a half-hearted attempt to straighten the sheets while he texted on his phone.
He set the phone down.
I slipped between him and the mattress, grasping his arm, ending his brief run of trying to be tidy.
By now, I’d spent so much time with my hands on him that his wrist felt moulded to my grip. I turned it over and tied the woven bracelet I’d found in my bag around him. Black and amethyst thread woven into a plait more elaborate than the ones Ivy made with her dad. That little beast had given me the sticks. The bracelet was from Liliana, a note I couldn’t read tucked into the newsprint.
“A present from the Kings.” I knotted the thread at Viktor’s pulse point. “The kids make them if they like you, and I likeyou, so...”
“You like me, Ranger?”
I love you. “You’re all right. Can you read this for me?”
Viktor took the note and unfolded it. He frowned at the Spanish words and took a slow breath. “She saw what you did. She says thank you. And that her father will buy you some beer when he sees you. She also says happy birthday and that your hair looked better long.”
I narrowed my gaze. “It does not fucking say that.”
Viktor grinned, all traces of gangster and drug addict obliterated by the dickhead humour lighting his eyes. “Prove it.”
I flicked the paper from his grasp and tackled him to the bed. After days and days of fight club, putting hands to him like that was normal.
It wasn’t normal for him to concede so easily. For me to fall on top of him on his bed, but as I scrambled to move, he held me in place. “Stop protecting me from you. I do not need it.”
“I—”
“No.” Viktor wrapped his legs around me, pinning us together as he lost the shirt he’d put back on to go outside.
Skin on skin.I’d never get over it. How the hard lines of his body fit to mine. Every muscle, every bone as I braced myself above him, fist to the mattress. The stone at my wrist glittered, doing something to me that I couldn’t handle without claiming his mouth, letting him feelallof me, just for a fucking second.
But the trouble with a tiny taste of something perfect was that it always left you wanting more. Viktor knew that better than anyone, and as I eased back, frustration seeped from every pore of him.
“We have been naked together. Your cock in my mouth. I am not afraid of you.”
He punctuated the words with a vicious bite to my neck—something else he liked doing. Teeth and edging. Who knew?
I did. So fucking much, and despite the caution I couldn’t shake, my body reacted to the shock of pain, bearing down on him again, my hand flying of its own accord to the button of the combat shorts he wore.
Need him naked.
I fought it, but the rising heat between us became a tsunami of want. A chant in my head, loud and unrelenting, until every scrap of Viktor’s clothing lay scattered around us.
