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“Well.” She licks her bottom lip, and I wonder what her kiss would taste like. Her eyes tell me the soul inside this girl is as sweet as she appears. “I feel like everything has been crashing down around me, but right now you’re sort of my life raft. Emily always said you were something special. An American hero. I mean, in the thirty seconds I’ve known you, you seem nice. Is it all right to hug you?” Her words spill out in one long, breathless trail, and I’ll follow that trail anywhere it may lead.
The previously forced laugh turns to a soft, authentic giggle. She’s vulnerable right now, afraid of what the world holds for her. She’s not asking for a hug, she’s begging, because she needs a lifeline and that lifeline is me.
My very real doubts about my ability to navigate this new charge come over me in a deluge.
You can’t do this. You don’t have what it takes.
I know it’s probably just the emotion of the moment, but I feel like I’ve known her forever. She’s waiting for my reply, and the slight glimmer I noted in her eyes is turning to embarrassment, like maybe she’s gone too far, and I want to spend every day telling her that she doesn’t ever have to fear me or hold back. “Yes,” I manage to say, “I’d like a hug very much.”
With that, we step into each other as she throws her arms around my neck, a soft sigh escaping her as she melts against me. As her soft body connects with mine, my cock jerks upward, full and ready. Something about her touch tells me she feels safe even though I’m practically a stranger to her. That somehow, I’ve arrived to save her from something, and the possessive fire inside me is lit.
I will save you. From anything. Anyone. Everything.
I won’t fail you. I won’t ever hurt you.
The words pound in my head. The face of the girl from the street that day in Kabul blending into Brinna’s, and I squeeze my eyes shut, forcing it away.
I fight the urge, but my arms lock around her waist, and I never want to let her go. She belongs right here, and the direction of my thoughts shocks me. I feel like I just won the fucking lottery.
The promise I made to myself just moments ago to never touch her may just be what kills me...
Chapter One
Ace
PRESENT DAY
“It’s our anniversary. And your birthday, you big grouch. That’s why.” She presses her tiny fist into a womanly hip and narrows those golden eyes in my direction. The platinum hedgehog ring I had made for her for last Christmas catches the light. She wears it on her middle finger, and I remember when I gave it to her thinking I’ve never seen a bigger smile on her face than when she opened that package.
She’s fuller now in the years that have passed, but her girlish innocence never wavers. Her hair is longer, nearly to the center of her back and her neck still is graced by that cross I learned was actually Emily’s. It had been in Emily’s family for a hundred years, passed down to her by her own grandmother at a time in her life when she was lost as well. Not knowing her own father when she was a young girl left her with a soft spot in her heart for Brinna.
Emily gifted it to her the day she arrived here at the tender age of seven after her own mother, Anna, left to go out one night with one of her many man friends and never returned. Brinna managed to get herself to school for a week before she fainted in class from lack of food. The state finally tracked down Brinna’s grandmother who was unaware she had a granddaughter at all. No father was even listed on Brinna’s birth certificate and the one thing for which I am thankful is her mother kept her safe from so many of the possible horrors that could have befallen her in those years with her mother.
Brinna’s mother ran away from home when she was just fourteen with a boyfriend who had so kindly introduced her to meth. Miriam, Brinna’s grandmother, did what she could over the years to find her daughter, but after a few futile attempts to bring her daughter home and get her help, Anna disappeared for good and Miriam did her best to move on with her life.
Now, our life is so very different, and here we are in the kitchen, where we are having this all-too-familiar battle, and it is fit for a master chef. An expanse of stainless steel forms the professional range and oven. There’s a large, glass-fronted refrigerator and freezer, along with everything else a trained epicurean would need. The enormous space is filled with the scent of chicken soup and everything my dreams are made of.
The house is pushing on a century in age, stone outside and the feel of an English country estate all around. Emily kept things classic yet updated here. When I moved Brinna into a room closer to mine from the small apartment on the third floor where she and her Grandmother had lived before the accident, I insisted on her redecorating her space the way she wanted it.
In the end, she succumbed to my insistence, allowing me to have the walls painted in her signature favorite colors of lavender and green with tulip bedding and hedgehog stuffed animals and accents. But other than her room, we’ve not changed much in the house over the years.
The warm hickory cabinets in the kitchen sit in contrast to the cool, black granite that covers the flat surfaces. Clean white paint hugs the walls and the soaring ceiling. In such an opulent space it feels cozy.
Like a home should.
She’s pouting, but I know exactly what day it is. I pretend every year I have no idea the significance of April 28th.
“You’re making a mess.” I grouse, and my surly demeanor is a pathetic defense mechanism.
And those defenses are in full force, because every year, every day, it becomes more and more impossible to fight off the urges that tear at me.
“You love my messes.” She twirls on a bare-footed toe, stirring the chicken and dumplings she’s made in a giant steel pot, and I swallow hard, trying to tell my hard-on to behave. “Oh.” She turns her pout into that perfect smile. “And thank you for my present.”
“I’m predictable,” I grunt, watching the swell of her ass shift back and forth and thinking about how my hands would fit there so perfectly.
“You know I love it. Today, four years ago, is the day I won the lottery.” Brinna leaves the spoon in the pot and reaches over to where she’s set aside the stack of the fifty scratch-off tickets I left on her nightstand, wrapped in a lavender ribbon before she woke. “Maybe the lucky one is in here.”
“Could be, Little Lamb,” I agree, stabbing glances at parts of her that an honorable man shouldn’t.
