Page 27 of Ruin

But I was deliciously sore and sated, and as I backed up into him, fitting my body against his larger one and pulling his arm around me, his fingers curling through mine as if he never wanted to let me go, I didn’t care if it was right or wrong.

I only cared that he would still be there when I woke up, and that we’d be facing whatever came next together, rather than separately.

IT WAS STILL DARK WHEN we woke up, though I didn’t want to reach for my phone to figure out what time it was. I didn’t feel like we’d slept long, but I also knew that when I was as tired as I had been, I was able to sleep for hours and wake up feeling like I’d only slept for minutes. I hoped we’d been asleep for several hours, because we both needed the rest. And now that I was thinking about the timeline, I was thinking we must have gone to sleep around two in the morning, which meant we might have slept for three hours before waking up.

It might only be five.

I stared hard at the window, trying to figure out where the horizon was and whether I could see any signs of the sun coming over it. It was pitch black out there, though, and though I tried to remember whether Brock had blackout curtains on these windows, I hadn’t been looking at the windows when we were in there before.

I’d been looking for Brock’s dead body on the floor.

I jerked as the memory of everything that had happened came flooding back into my head. Devil. The threat, and the demand. Tinker missing. Mandy’s plan. Gemini and me attacked at the clubhouse, and the men I’d stabbed.

The men Gemini shot, but who I might have killed first.

Tinker, dead.

Most of the gang arrested and in jail for an unknown period.

Gemini lying by the road, beaten nearly to death and telling me that I had to leave him there and go find help. The weight of the world on my shoulders as I did just that—and the fear pumping through me as I realized Devil’s men were following me several minutes later. The crash landing in Brock’s driveway.

Knight’s face on the front porch of the house.

Us, in Brock’s home with Remy and a few other men in the other rooms, Brock in his room trying to process Tinker’s death and what it might mean to him and the gang itself.

The shower and Knight’s hands all over me. Our mutual desperation and need, and our ultimate release.

His fingers tickling over my stomach as we fell asleep.

I forced myself to breathe out at the last thought and pushed back against him again, trying to regain the sense of warmth and safety I’d had before I remembered everything that had happened leading up to our shower. I wanted to go back to sleep again so I could forget. I wanted Knight to hold me down and drive the thoughts out of my brain with his cock.

I wanted anything that would make me feel better.

“You awake?” Knight whispered against my neck.

“How could you tell?”

“You were warm and comfortable and very soft, and then you suddenly got hard. I figure you woke up and remembered where we were, and why.”

I turned in his arms and touched his face gently, knowing that the memory of what had happened was probably five thousand times worse for him than it had been for me. “That about sums it up. How are you feeling? How’s the leg?”

“Sore,” he admitted. “I wish...”

“None of it had happened,” I supplied for him. “But I don’t think we can just put our heads in the sand and pretend it didn’t.”

He leaned his forehead into mine, breathing in and out for several moments like he was trying to find the strength to move forward. “Has anyone ever told you how smart you are?”

It was such an odd statement that I paused for a long moment, trying to wrap my head around it. Then I saw it for what it was—a compliment—and tried to get my brain to accept it. So instead of arguing that he didn’t know me well enough to think that, or didn’t know me well enough to know whether it was true or not, I shrugged.

“Honestly, I hear it so often that it’s sort of lost its magic.”

His laugh was loud and sudden, echoing through the darkness so brightly that I thought that if anyone else had been asleep, they were definitely awake now. He rolled me onto my back and came with me, his body still shaking with laughter, and planted a sweet, chaste kiss on my lips.

“Well, I’ve never said it to you before, so I guess you’ll have to see the magic in that. Come on. Everyone else is already up, and there’s planning to be done. Let’s get dressed.”

He rolled out of bed and to his feet, hitting the light on his way to the bathroom, but returned a moment later with a frown. “My jeans are torn.”

“And my jeans are probably soaking wet still. Plus you sort of destroyed my T-shirt last night,” I pointed out.