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It was finally the end of the day, a full twenty-four hours since I hadn’t seen him since yesterday evening and the hunger was definitely gnawing its way through the lining of our stomachs.
He couldn’t keep his distance if he tried.
“Hey, baby,” he said, leaning over the table and capturing my face in his hands. Then his perfect lips were on mine, feeding the void that the hours had left behind.
Only when we were both breathless and panting did he pull away and smile.
I blinked at him, unable to get my bearings for a few long seconds.
“Hey,” I breathed.
His eyes twitched with amusement as he moved toward his seat across the table from me since Karen had taken the one beside me.
Which worked for me, because looking at Cassius was always a great thing.
Though being able to touch him…
“I see he’s here again,” Cassius growled.
I winced. “He’s never not here.”
Cassius fisted his hands on top of the table. “He really fuckin’ shouldn’t be.”
I agreed with that wholeheartedly.
Seeing him always made my nerves absolutely shot.
Then again, as long as Cassius arrived to soothe down my feathers before I got past a certain point, it didn’t affect me very much.
“Sunny not being able to do anything is a damn joke,” Karen started in, her eyes likely boring holes into Coran.
I knew that if I looked over, though, he’d be completely unaffected. He’d likely be staring right at me, as if his life wasn’t in imminent danger.
“Sunny’s doing the best he can with the system that’s in place for him to work with.” Cassius sighed. “The damn law, as well as judicial system, was a joke before I even went to prison. It’s not as if he’s not working an uphill battle. He is. I know it. He knows it. The whole town knows it. It’s just going to take some time to flush out the old and replace it with new. The old sheriff being gone is a start.”
Months and months ago, right around the time that Wake got released from prison, the old sheriff had started a campaign to rid the world of Wake again. The problem was, the old sheriff didn’t keep the skeletons in his closet from rattling around, and instead dug his own grave. In the end, the ex-sheriff was the one to go to prison for being a disgusting pedophile who preyed on young children, and Wake looked like the hero that he was.
Well, Wake and his wife, Dutch. Dutch was a therapist that specializes in traumatized children, which was how she’d found out about the sheriff’s proclivities in the first place.
“Are you even listening to me?”
I looked up at Cassius, noting the amusement on his face. “Not particularly. I was thinking about the old sheriff, and how I wanted to rip his head off for the stuff that he did to those little babies.”
They weren’t babies. Not really. They were children, though. And that was a baby in my heart.
Either way, the ex-sheriff deserved to rot for all that he’d done.
He winked at me, then repeated his earlier question. “Do you want me to ask Petey to kick him out?”
Petey owned the boat that we’d just ordered food from.
Our name was called, and when Karen got up to grab it, he waved her away. “I’ll get it and tell him I want Coran gone.”
Then Cassius was moving toward the food boat and Petey, who was manning the grill of said food boat.
“Still think he doesn’t love you?” she asked.
I smiled softly.
Him loving me wasn’t the problem, though.
It was him loving me so much that he never left me.
I didn’t want him to.
In fact, now that I had Cassius, I knew that I would never willingly let him go.
“I know he loves me,” I admitted.
“Who loves you?” Silvy asked, forcing his way between us.
Karen laughed and moved over, her eyes alight with excitement. Karen and her crush on my brother… I knew that one of these days, the crush would definitely be bursting into straight-up love.
Silvy was easy to love. And Karen was a beautiful woman that my brother had definitely noticed. Soon, they’d stop beating around the bush and go for it. I had a feeling that for now, though, they were playing it cool because of my thing.
“Cassius does,” Karen answered.
“I do what?” Cassius asked as he took the seat across from us.
“Love her.” Silvy looked at Cassius, and something between them was exchanged that I couldn’t quite decipher because I had the wrong set of chromosomes.
After that exchange, Cassius turned to look at me, his eyes intense with… something.
“I do.”
The breath nearly left my chest in a rush so fast that it sounded as if he’d literally hit me in the stomach with the words.
Thinking it, and having him confirm it, were two very different things.
