Page 184 of Pucked Around and Found Out

“Now the darkness is tamed.”

I tread carefully. “Because you accomplished what you needed to. For Emery. For Neave and Miles.”

I brace myself. I wait for the snap, the redirect, the shutting down that has always followed anyone getting too close to the names he carries like open wounds.

His hand comes up to cup my cheek.

I flinch before I can stop myself.

His features tighten. He knows it's warranted. He doesn't pull away.

“No.” His thumb moves against my cheekbone, tentative in a way his hands almost never are. “The monster was tamed by the sister of my enemy.” My heart skips entirely. “She pulled me out of the shadows without meaning to. She had a hold over me before I understood what was happening.” His gray eyes hold mine and the rawness in them is something I want to protect and never expose to anything that could diminish it. “I swore vengeance for Emery, Neave and Miles, and I never planned to stop. The killing was the only thing that gave me peace, brief and hollow and not really peace at all, but it was the closest thing I had.” I moisten my lips. He watches the motion. “You were never supposed to matter.”

The words land softly. Painfully. True.

“Do I?” I press quietly. “Matter?”

“More than you know, Tink.” He says it like it's a fact he has made his peace with. Like it stopped being a problem he was trying to solve and became simply a truth he was learning to carry. “I meant it when I said I wanted to rip your wings off so you could never fly away.”

“Why?”

“Because it meant you could never leave.” His thumb traces my cheekbone again. “You broke through the darkness without meaning to. I tried to hide from the pain, yet you saw through every wall I put up. I was suffocating, drowning in it, and I didn't even know it until you were there and suddenly I could breathe.” Something in his jaw shifts. “I'm no good for you. I know that. But I want—” He stops. The word seems to resist him. “I want to be. I'm hoping we can change that but I can't if you're not beside me. The past has kept me in chains for years. What happened that night still has me bound.” His eyes hold mine and there is something in them that is entirely undefended, entirely his, entirely the man underneath everything the world gets to see. “But you broke through the dark I thought nobody could reach. You saw me when no one else could.”

The tears that fall this time I don't try to stop.

“I'll always see you.” My voice comes out fierce, quiet and absolute. “Through all of it. Every dark corner, every shadow, everything you try to hide in.” I hold his gaze. “I'll break every chain you can't reach yourself and I'll stand there while you break the rest. You will never get over the loss. I won't lie to you and tell you it hurts less with time because that's not how grief works. But one day it becomes bearable. One day a sound or a sight will remind you of them and it won't be misery you feel.” I pause. “One day it'll just be love.”

His throat moves.

“How long?” He asks it in a tone I've never heard from him before, something stripped back and almost pleading and entirely human. “How much time?”

I press a soft kiss to his lips. “That depends on you. On when you stop hiding from it and let yourself face it properly. Grief needs to be moved through, not locked away.”

“Not tonight I don’t.” His voice has shifted back into something lower and more familiar, the tone that has always had the ability to make rational thought feel entirely unnecessary. He silences me with a kiss that makes the rest of the sentence irrelevant anyway.

He grips the hem of my sweater and tugs it off. The second it clears my head his mouth is back on mine before I can draw a breath and I let him. I want him to, I have wanted him to since the moment he walked through the coffee shop door this morning, and looked at me like the last three weeks of distance had been paid for in something he felt in every one of those fourteen hours of highway.

His hands work the clasp of my bra with a precision that used to bother me, all that practiced ease, but right now I don't care because he slides the straps down my arms slowly, taking his time, and that is what's different. He's not rushing. He's not taking.

His mouth finds my jaw. My throat. The pendant at my sternum as he presses a single kiss there, to the gold rose, to the heart he drove fourteen hours to give me, and I have to close my eyes against the feeling of it.

When his mouth latches onto my nipple, a cry of pure bliss tears out of me at the feeling of his wet mouth.

I fucking love it.

This is the side of Xaden that I long to see more of. This isn’t the side of him I fell in love with, the truth is I loved the monster first. He was the one who showed me the world in a new light, taught me to see things differently and never lied to me in order to spare my feelings.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

XADEN

The sounds coming from her have me growling my approval, but underneath that sound is something else, something I refuse to name. This fucking girl. I don't know what she is. I've spent weeks telling myself I don't care to know, but that's a lie I'm getting worse at telling.

She's mine. That's all I'll allow myself.

I switch sides and pay her other nipple the same amount of attention, she thrusts her chest forward and arches her back as she screams my name. Her fingers tangle in my hair and she tugs on the strands, pulling a hiss from me.

She’s a fucking freak in the sheets!