Page 183 of Pucked Around and Found Out

“You're not your father,” I whisper against his face, my thumbs moving softly against his jaw. He releases a breath that shudders at the edges, the smallest fracture in the control, barely perceptible, devastating. “This baby will be loved.” I say it without a single shred of uncertainty because I have never been more certain of anything. “We'll get things wrong. We'll make mistakes. But what matters is that we learn from them together.”

His eyes search mine.

The vulnerability I find in them, in those gray eyes that have looked at me like a threat and a variable and an inconvenience and an obsession flays something open in my chest. He looks young at the moment. Not in any way that diminishes him, but in the way that grief makes people young, strips back everything acquired and leaves only the original wound.

“I don't know how to do any of this, Tink.” The words come out quietly, and I understand what it costs him to say them out loud. To admit, in plain language, to another living person, that there is something he cannot simply force into submission.

I feel the smile before I can stop it. “I don't either.” His eyes narrow slightly. “I've never had a boyfriend⁠—”

The growl that comes from deep in his chest sends butterflies scattering through me.

“Calm down.” I bite back the smile. “If it helps, I had fully planned to raise this baby alongside ten cats because you put me off to the male species entirely.”

The arms around me tighten. He shifts forward until his lips ghost over mine, barely touching, just the suggestion of it and the heat of it moves through me like something lit.

“Good.” His voice is low. Dark in the way that has always bypassed every rational thought I possess and gone straight somewhere else. “I'll ruin you for anyone else. You'll never be anyone else's anything.” A pause. “I don't share. Never have.” Another pause… shorter, harder, rougher at the edges. “Sharing you with this baby is going to be a challenge.”

I swallow audibly.

“Just—” He stops. Something shifts in his jaw. The words that come next are quiet and stripped of everything he usually wraps around the things that matter. “Don't walk away. Don't break what I gave you.” His eyes find mine and hold them. “Don't let me destroy us.”

Words fail me completely.

So I press my lips to his instead and I put everything I have into it. Every promise I can't say, every vow I'm not ready to make out loud but mean in every cell of my body. This kiss is my answer to everything he just said. I will fight for him. I will go to war for him, against him, beside him. He says I'm his—and he's right, I am—but Xaden Devlin needs to come to terms with the fact that the ownership runs both ways.

He is mine.

He grips the back of my head, fingers tangling in my hair, and deepens the kiss with a thoroughness that makes thinking feel optional. His tongue moves against mine and I surrender control without a fight outside this room. I will argue with him until one of us runs out of breath and I will never follow an order without questioning it first. In here I give him everything willingly. Happily. Because this is the one place where giving him control has never once felt like losing it.

He tastes like something I've been craving for three weeks and didn't let myself name.

He manages to stand without breaking the kiss, arms still around me, completely unbothered by the logistical challenge of this and moves toward the bedroom with the certainty of a man who knows exactly where he's going.

Inside I expect the familiar, him tossing me onto the bed with the efficiency of someone who has decided what happens next and is moving toward it. Instead he sits on the edge of the mattress with me still in his lap. Unhurried. Still.

My hands find the hem of his hoodie and pull it over his head. He lets me.

“Lose the shirt, Devlin.” My voice comes out lower than I intend.

Something ghosts at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile, never quite a smile, but the shadow of one that is more valuable for its rarity. He reaches back and pulls the shirt off in one motion and I am once again confronted with the fact that the universe was profoundly unfair when it made him.

I reach out and trace the koi fish in the center of his chest.

His hand closes around mine immediately, stopping the motion, holding my hand flat against his skin. I look up.

The anguish in his eyes hits me like a physical thing.

I go still.

I wait. Whatever lives in his expression right now is large and resistant and I won't rush it because this, the sharing of the thing underneath, is the part that matters most. The part that will determine whether what we're building has a foundation or just the appearance of it.

When he opens his mouth, the words come out layered with something close to a plea.

“They used to represent the fight inside me.” His voice is low and careful, like someone carrying something fragile across unstable ground. “The darkness won. It snuffed out the light and let me become what I needed to become.” He looks down at the ink. “It gave me the strength to be the Don. To be the ruthless son of a bitch the role required.”

“And now?” I whisper.

He exhales slowly, his shoulders dropping slightly. Like something he's been holding up for a very long time is getting heavier.