A name.
My fake name.
My previous fake name.
Whatever.
“Summer?”
Chapter 47
Summer
Hearing his voice brings heat to my body, but seeing him sets every nerve alight, like a storm of fireworks detonating inside me.
“Atlas!” I choke on tears of joy. They taste sweet now.
He’s the one I hit.
Oh, fuck! I hit him.
At least I didn’t knee him in the balls.
“What are you doing, honey?”
My gaze drifts to the passed-out creep I’m still holding by the hair, whose upper body is slumped over the roof of his car. Well, Atlas has seen me in a worse light, and he’s still here, so I brace myself for a perfectly logical explanation.
“I-I’m...borrowinga car to escape... you. I mean, not you,obviously. I didn’t know it was you.”
An animalistic sound rumbles from deep inside his chest, like a mating call my body recognizes and answers without hesitation.
I stride for my handsome Chocolate Bar Thief almost as fast as he moves toward me. I barely make it a few steps before he meets me in front of the car, swooping me into his arms, my legs wrapping around his waist.
He kisses me like he’s been starving for me for far too long, and I offer the same fervor in return. Half a month without him might as well have been an eternity of torture. His hands leave rough, hungry imprints everywhere they land, and he devours my mouth like a man dying of thirst. The heat of his skin is burning even through the hoodie. I’m his, and every part of me bathes in his touch, taste, scent.
“Don’t ever leave me again,” he says against my lips, letting my butt land on the cold metal of the car’s hood, though I swear it feels hot as if it’s been frying under the midsummer sun.
Only now, I notice the stubble on his face, the dark circles under his eyes, and the paleness of his usually lightly tanned skin. But he’s still my beautiful Atlas—the only man my eyes would ever want to see.
“I couldn’t sleep without you.” He stills, forehead pressed against mine, body nestled between my legs. “I started hallucinating after day three, and it got so bad I began calling Carterhoney. Connor drugged me so I would finally pass out. Can you fathom what you’re doing to me? I can’t function without you.”
“Then why didn’t you come to me sooner?”
He huffs a sigh.
“I would’ve come right after I dealt with Mason—”
“You...” I interrupt, opening my mouth to ask a question I’m not sure I should.
His palms cup my cheeks.
“There was never a scenario where someone would hurt you and live.”
I gulp, blinking away the tears.
Mason sought his vengeance. I sought mine. And in the end, all I hoped for was that I could tell my mother and brother in my dreams that revenge was served, and maybe those terrors that plague my nights would eventually stop. I thought it would be like a huge burden coming off my shoulders hearing that monster is no longer breathing, but instead, there’s a heaviness in my chest. Not the badkind. The kind that tells me my heart is overflowing with love for the man who so tentatively holds me in his arms.
“My father... I didn’t know,” I choke out.
