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“Not enough. Not ever enough to be dismissed.” She takes my hand and leads me to her bedroom. “We should be in bed.”
“Why?”
She starts on her shirt, pulling it over her head and dropping it to the floor. She nods in encouragement. Not that I need it to get naked with her, but what the hell, I’ll go along with her plan.
“We’re not rushing into this just because we’re addressing real feelings.”
“I don’t have some elaborate plan to lure you into my bed, Harbor. I just want to be with you. Now take off your clothes and take me to bed.”
I reach over my shoulder and tug my shirt off from over my head, dropping it to the floor like she did. When she starts on her jeans, I start on mine. “You don’t have to ask me twice.”
She grins and then laughs, bringing my own laughter to the surface. Her light is giving me the reprieve I didn’t know I needed until we arrived here.
Like every other time we’ve spent together, this is right. This is us. The levity feels good, even if it comes in the darker hours of our lives.
I take a deep breath when only our underwear is left hiding our secrets. But soon, even that barrier is removed. First her bra and then her panties. Both left in a pile at the foot of her bed. She stands there, baring herself to me. It doesn’t feel erotic, though she’s incredibly sexy.
There’s more weight to this moment we’re sharing. I remove my boxer briefs and stand across from her. She doesn’t rush to me to hide herself, and I don’t close the gap to cover us in an embrace.
As the laughter fades, we just are right then, just us, and the light from the small lamp on the nightstand. Lark moves to the side of the bed and then climbs in. I climb in on the other side and move to the middle to be close to her again.
She rolls to her side and snuggles against me. Her breath drifts across my chest, warming me, and her heart beats against my ribs.
I wrap my arm around her, not knowing what I did to deserve this woman in my life, but I vow to always protect her. I’ve never felt this strongly for someone. I won’t lose her, and if that means putting my heart on the line, I’ll do it. “I love you.”
Those three words come so easily that I realize that a timeframe can’t dictate what the heart already knows.
“I love you, too,” she whispers.
Kissing the top of her head, I’m aware that it’s too soon to share those words. But if we’re doing what comes naturally, I couldn’t hold them in any longer.
She mindlessly doodles with her nails lightly across my skin. Tilting her head, she kisses the underside of my chin, and then asks, “Do you want to start at the beginning?”
18
Lark
I baredmy soul to him.
Lying beside me, now he bares his to me. “My aunt called Lucas the golden child of the family.” He glances at me as I lie beside him. “My mom isn’t the type to argue about such things, as she puts it, but it always stuck in her side.” He grins as if the memory invokes it. “She would tell us that she was gifted with four beautiful children, so she wasn’t looking to get into a fight over her sister-in-law’s only child.” He looks back at me again, the smile still on his face. “She loved Lucas like one of her own, so I think she just let it go.”
“Your mom is nicer than I would have been.”
He gives me a wink and then rolls to his side to face me. “Lucas was my age, so we were always directly compared to each other. It’s like what they do to twins. There’s always one deemed an angel and the other a devil. That was true for Lucas and me, too. But with his mom always campaigning for the top slot, she pegged me early on as the troublemaker.”
The lighthearted tone weaving through the story has disappeared, and I have a feeling this is where truth and lies get confused.
“The thing is,” he continues, “I wasn’t trying to be an angel. There’s not a bone in my body that struggles with confrontation. But sometimes, trouble knew how to find me. Nothing big. It was petty shit, like a pack of gum that was too tempting not to nick behind my dad’s back. Or trekking muddy shoes in the house and blaming my younger brother.” He shakes his head. “I always got busted. They matched the soles of our shoes to the footprints.” A light chuckle rocks his shoulders but then stops. “But Lucas, despite the angelic reputation his mother had built, he looked for trouble.”
“Maybe she knew, and that’s why she petitioned so hard for that perception.”
Reaching over, he finds my hand between us, and our fingers fold together. “I always had a similar thought, but it’s nothing I could prove.”
“What kind of trouble did he get into?”
“He was stealing liquor from his house at fourteen, smoking weed at fifteen. When he got a car on his sixteenth birthday, he drove us straight to Beacon . . .” Harbor stops, seeming to shuffle through notecards in his mind that will detail the memory.
“What did you do in Beacon on his birthday?”
