like a fucking pervert some days when I’m fantasizing about fucking your ass—”
My fingers moved to cover his mouth, to stop his words. I gulped. His words were like kerosene on the flames of my desire.
“You want that from me?”
I hadn’t been sure if I’d been what he wanted. I’d seen his past girlfriends, had hated them on sight. I’d even watched him with the few clubwhores he interacted with. They weren’t like me. They were all skinny and big-breasted. They wore barely any clothes too.
I, on the other hand, wore nothing but jeans shorts that didn’t spend its time up my ass crack and actually covered a decent amount of my upper thighs. I guess I wore tank tops, but not the strappy ones that looked like they’d snap if you needed to take off at a run. These were like the female version of wifebeaters—that name sucked now I knew a literal beater of his wife.
Who the hell had come up with that name? I asked myself, then I realized I was going off on a tangent when all my hopes and fucking dreams were close to being realized.
Stupid brain.
His hand cupped my wrist, and I shivered again as his callused fingertips drew shapes on the sensitive flesh. It was tender anyway, but mine was more so than most. I had scars there. Scars that I’d been teased over all my life because stupid people thought I’d tried to kill myself. Yeah, because when you slit your wrists, you went all the way around to the back of your hand, right?
I’d know, because I’d contemplated it a time or two when I was sixteen and the combination of no sleep and nightmares had gotten me so depressed, I didn’t know how to make it through the next day, never mind another night.
It was weird to research ‘how to slit your wrists,’ but a shit ton of stuff had come up. You sliced down, not across, but it had never reached that point for me. Mostly because I’d known the move would be selfish.
I was loved.
So, so loved. Not just by my family, but by my friends—Saint and Keys. Heck, their parents loved me too. And then there was Ink.
My warrior.
He’d been a soldier before he’d been a brother. I knew he had to have seen and endured worse things than what had happened to me, and yet, he stayed standing. He didn’t take the easy way out.
That was when I’d crept into his bed that first night. It was too easy. After my kidnapping, the security on the compound had become crazy, but only around the perimeter. More brothers were set on shifts of protecting the gates and any weak points on the compound. Extra alarms, dogs, barbed wire and broken glass on the walls, you name it, we had it.
The tree that Aaron had climbed to get into my bedroom had long since been cut down. My momma had set fire to the pieces and I’d watched, feeling safer for seeing the destruction, but I hadn’t needed to go to such lengths.
At sixteen, it wasn’t like my parents checked in on me at night before I slept. Sometimes, they went to bed before I did to do things no sixteen-year-old wanted to think of. I’d just stayed outside on the verandah, and when darkness had fallen? I hadn’t needed to climb down a tree. I’d simply crossed over to the compound, slipped past the party that was going down, and headed into Ink’s room.
I knew I’d been lucky to find him alone.
And every other night I’d spent there since, knew he had to have made a conscious decision to sleep alone just in case I showed up on a bad night…
Was that him wanting me all along?
Was that proof of that?
My stomach churned as these crazy thoughts flashed through my brain, and all the while, he stared at me as I waited for him to answer. Waited on him to tell me how he felt for me, if he wanted those naughty, dirty, dark things from me.
When he kissed my fingers, I almost fainted. Honest to God. I licked my lips as I lowered my hand and watched his mouth move as he answered, “I want everything from you.”
My throat worked as I processed that. “You know I love them too, don’t you?” I had to get that out there. Couldn’t hide the truth from him, even when I was so close to getting him… because without