AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“It’s about time you showed up. If you were a no-show by Monday, I was coming to find you. Welcome home, Bax.”
I jerked my head up from her chest to meet her eyes. I think she had tears in them, but it was hard to tell with the water and the steam separating us.
“What? Titus and Race both told me you were over it.”
She lifted her hands over her head and ran them along her long fall of hair. Some of the blood thundering in my head raced below my belt.
“They were just trying to get you to pull your head out of your ass. I was mad you wouldn’t see me, and I felt awful you were sitting in jail for something you didn’t do, but I understood it. I understand you, Bax. Eventually you’re going to have to accept that.”
I took a few steps closer to the shower. There was water leaking out onto the floor and my boots squeaked across the tile as I got close enough to touch her. I didn’t, not yet, but I made sure she could see what I was feeling in my eyes.
“I would never want this for you. Me, this life, the messed-up shit that comes with it, but I missed you. I care about you and can never repay you for what you did for me. You set me free. I would die for you . . .”
My voice trailed off and I got a little choked up. I reached out a finger, I should’ve been embarrassed it was shaking, that I was shaking, and I touched the very center of her scar where it dipped in the crevice of her naked br**sts. Her chest rose and fell in a heavy breath, but her eyes were steady on mine. In fact, she seemed a hundred times steadier than me.
“I know you would die for me, Bax.” Her voice was just above a whisper and all I wanted to do was pull her to me and never let her go again. “What I need to know is if you are willing to live for me? I know you’re always going to be this guy who lives a dangerous life, who takes risks and pushes limits left and right. I can deal with all of that—hell, it’s part of what makes you so irresistible. What I can’t handle, what breaks my heart, is that you live every day like it’s your last, like it doesn’t matter if you don’t make it to the next one. It does matter. It matters to me, it matters to your brother, it matters to Race—but it has to matter to you, Bax. You have to understand that you matter.”
I let out the breath I was holding and took another step closer to her. The water was splashing on the sleeve of my shirt as I reached up to grab both of her cheeks in my palms.
“Are you scared of me?” It was the start of the questions I had asked her what felt like a lifetime ago. Her answer didn’t change, but this time when she answered, she was holding back a smile that made my heart hurt.
“Terrified, but I kind of like it now.”
“Do you trust me?” My voice broke. I had never really trusted anyone but Race and now there was her and my brother and just all kinds of new things making my life so much more complicated and undeniably fuller.
“With my life. I trust all the parts of you, Bax. You need to know that.”
“You going to go to bed with me?”
That made her outright laugh and she reached up to curl her hands around my wrists.
“As often as I can and anyplace in between when the mood strikes.” The rest of the blood racing around my system went solidly south.
I dropped my forehead so it was resting on hers and the water from the showerhead was cascading down around us. I was making a mess, but I didn’t care because I had her, and she was my home.
“Do you love me?”
The words sounded so foreign, but so right, when I was saying them to her. She brushed her full lips across mine and the last three months without her faded away.
“Do you want me to lie to you or tell you the truth?”
I smiled against her mouth and kissed her back twice as hard as she had kissed me.
“Lie to me.”
She reached up and put her arms around my neck and took a step back, dragging me all the way into the shower stall with her. The water was lukewarm at best, and it made me shiver. So did the fact that she started to impatiently pull the tail of my shirt up over my head. A task made increasingly difficult considering I was now soaked head to toe and the material was clinging to me.
“Of course not. You’re the last person in the world I could love.”
Even though she was just playing my own game, it still stung and made me scowl down at her. She lifted an eyebrow at me and put her hands on the sodden leather of my belt.
“Want the truth?”
I nodded and grunted a little when she finally managed to get the front of my heavy pants open. The water was going to ruin my boots but I didn’t care because she gave a little hop and I had her in my arms and was pressing against her and the back of the shower wall. She was slippery and warm. I didn’t even need her to tell me the truth; I could see it shining out of the forest that colored her eyes.
“I didn’t want to love you. You’re not the kind of guy who is ever going to be easy on my heart. You take things to the extreme and I don’t love how easily you slip between Bax and Shane.”
I ran a hand down her side and curled it around her hip. She locked her ankles around my back and arched into the light touch. All I had to do was lean forward just a little and I would slide inside her, but then there would be no more talking and I needed her to finish what she was saying. Needed it more than I needed to push my way home.
“But you also make me feel safe and cherished and you make me feel like the entire world has to get through you to get to me. There is just something about that that makes all the other stuff incidental. I believe from the bottom of my heart that we can make each other happy. I’m never going to ask you to be a good guy, Bax, because I fell in love with you just the way you are. Bad.”
I blinked at her and bent down to seal my mouth over hers. She tasted like toothpaste and redemption. She tasted like mine. I rubbed my tongue across hers, sank my teeth into her bottom lip, and pulled her hips just close enough that I could use the angle I was holding her at to sink all the way inside of her. She gasped into my mouth and I groaned into hers. I felt my fingers tighten on to her skin and she burned all along the exposed length of my cock.
The fact that I was inside her, that we were together with nothing—both literally and figuratively—between us anymore seemed to hit both of us at the same time. Her eyes got huge in her face and I felt everything under my skin start to buzz. I pulled back and dropped a kiss on the end of her nose. Her fingernails dug into the back of my neck and her freckles stood out in stark relief across her milky-white skin.
