Page 1 of Craving Sin

PROLOGUE

Rian

Nine Years Ago

“I can’t do this without you.” I take Moira’s hand and kiss it. She’s lying in the hospital bed we have set up at the house, the machine that delivers her pain meds making a soft sound beside her.

How am I ever supposed to survive without my wife? The love of my life. The person who is somehow my rock, my strength, and my heart.

I have loved her since I was sixteen years old—for twenty-three years—and now I’m supposed to live without her?

“Yes, you can,” she says, her voice soft and rough. She smiles, and even now, with how sick she looks, with the weight loss and the way cancer has ravaged her body, staring at her still makes my pulse speed up. She is still the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen.

I look down, gaze meeting our joined hands because I can’t handle meeting her eyes. She always had more faith in me than I deserved, always saw more in me than what is really here.

If you searched the word good in the dictionary, you’d see a photo of Moira there. She is the definition of love, of caring about others. I don’t know what she’s ever seen in me, but I’ve spent every moment since I met her trying to be worthy of her—despite all the terrible things I do—despite the drugs, guns, and murder.

And somehow, she has loved me regardless.

She has given me a son, who is more his mother than he is me, and I’ll never deserve him either.

How do I look her in the eyes when I know I’m going to ruin him? That, without her, I’m afraid of what I’ll turn into, afraid that I’ll kill the parts of him that are her.

“Rian,” Moira says, but I don’t reply. “Rian,” she says again. “Look at me.”

I do because I could never deny her anything. To some—like my brother, Sloan—my devotion to her makes me weak, but I never looked at it that way. Now though, I wonder if they were right, because I don’t know who I am without her.

“Do you remember the first day we met?” she asks.

“Of course.” We were in high school. She’d just moved to Boston, and the second I saw her, my heart had stuttered. I’d felt a tingling at my nape, and I’d known she was the one for me.

“You walked right up to me that first day of school and told me you were going to marry me.”

I smile at the memory. “And you hated me. You thought I was cocky…an asshole.” And she hadn’t been wrong.

“I did,” she says. “But I’ll tell you a secret…I thought you were cocky and an asshole, but I didn’t hate you—no matter how hard I pretended to, because I knew that first day too. One look and I knew, Rian, and it wasn’t because you were the most handsome man I’d ever seen.”

“But I was.” I wink, and she chuckles before coughing, the sound nearly ripping out my heart.

“You were…you still are, but I knew because I felt you right here.” She places her other hand over her heart. “Because I sensed how big your heart is for those you love, and I wanted to be that person for you so badly.”

My eyes flood with wetness, my vision blurring, and I quickly swipe at the tears, not wanting anything to keep me from seeing her—not even for one second. “You were. You always have been. You always will be. The only person I’ll ever love.”

The person who never deserved her. I can’t help thinking about that now, seeing her in this bed and knowing she’s dying…all the times I’ve hurt her come back to me, all of the things she’s given up in her life because she loves me, and now she will die without a second chance.

“No.” She shakes her head. “I was. I always have been. And yes, you’ll always love me, but I won’t be the only one for you. I refuse to believe that. You have too much love to give. I want more for you. I want more for Cillian. How will he learn to be happy, learn that it’s okay to love big in this dangerous world of ours if he doesn’t learn from you?”

I shake my head, unable to even fathom what she’s saying, how she thinks I could ever give myself to someone after having her. “He’ll learn because he’ll know his father loved his mother completely, eternally.”

“I want you to be happy.”

I won’t ruin her last days by telling her there is no happiness without her. “I know.”

“Can you make me a promise?” she asks, and I nod, even though I know that if she asks me to be open to falling in love with someone else, it will be the first promise between us I’ve ever broken.

“Trust yourself.”

“I do.”