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I got out of the car, and he pulled me straight into his arms. Our mouths met immediately, and Riven took me inside and fucked me hard and dirty, the way I loved.
We wrapped our naked bodies around each other, sweaty and sated. “You’re my dream,” Riven told me. “Having you, a life, a future. That’s my dream. Me and you and that little house on the East Coast we talked about. We’re gonna make that happen.”
I smiled into his neck. “Yeah, we are.”
EPILOGUE
Riven
Five years later
I sat on the screened-in porch, watching Parrish as he walked around the backyard, talking on the phone with Becca. She and her husband were expecting, the child due in a few months, and Parrish and I were going out to see them.
We liked Stephen a lot. They’d been together three years now. He loved Lainey and Soph like they were his own, and he was going to adopt them. Initially, Bec had been hesitant to get into a relationship again after everything she’d been through, but Stephen had been patient, and he’d been a huge help with the girls while Bec went to beauty school. He wasn’t the kind of guy I would have seen her with at all—a little nerdy, an accountant, for fuck’s sake. They hosted board-game nights with their friends once a month. But he was crazy about Becca, and she was crazy about him.
“Betsy is doing great,” he told her as he came up the porch stairs. She’d moved out East with us when we left Oregon four years ago. In the later parts of the investigation, as they’d gone through the recordings, they’d found some where Rex and Frank talked about Jerry’s murder…and the fact that it had been Rex who’d done it and not me. It had been enough to clear my name. I was no longer a felon who had been convicted of killing someone and it was the best damn feeling.
Now, we had a little house that was our own, with a mother-in-law suite or whatever they were called where Grandma lived. As badly as I’d wanted her out of Clayton, I’d understood how much the house there meant to her, but it had been Grandma who had decided it was just a house and that she wanted to move with us.
We didn’t live on the ocean or a lake, that shit was too expensive, but we lived in the mountains of North Carolina that had a lake in town, and for us, that was good enough. We kept a firepit in the backyard, and sat around it at night, like the campfire we’d had that first time. We lay under the stars beside it, and did yard work on our days off. We’d never wanted or needed much in life, just normalcy, some kind of peace and quiet. Clayton might not be as shitty of a place to live with Rex dead and Les, Bill, and Frank in prison, but it held too many bad memories for us.
“Yeah, we’re going out with our friends tonight,” Parrish told her, then looked at me. “Bec says hi.”
“Tell her hey.”
I still wasn’t a man of many words, and honestly, I was still getting used to the whole friends thing. If it wasn’t for Parrish, I wasn’t sure it was something I would worry about at all. Trust was and always would be an issue for me, but he was right, and it wasn’t healthy to keep to ourselves too much. And as much as I hated admitting it, I always had fun when we went out. We were on a bowling team, which was the craziest shit I could imagine. But I liked it, and we were good at it. That’s mostly what we did when we went out with friends.
“I miss you too, Bec. Tell Lainey and Soph their uncles love them,” Parrish said, then ended the call. “You ready to go kick some ass at bowling?”
“Yeah…then when we get home tonight, there are a whole lot of other things I want to do to your ass.”
He quirked a brow at me. “I mean, we don’t have to go to our bowling league tonight. We can fake sick and get going on the butt stuff now.”
I chuckled, knowing that as much as he loved my dick in his ass, he didn’t want to miss the games tonight. “First kicking ass, then kissing ass,” I said with a wink.
“I like the sound of that.”
We went to dinner with Ivan and Brody before heading to the bowling alley. Ivan was a contractor our construction company worked with sometimes—that’s how we met him and Brody. We didn’t make a lot of money, and we’d never be wealthy, but we’d accomplished Parrish’s dream, the one he’d loved me enough to share with me, and that was all that mattered.
