Savage Love (Savage Trilogy #3) - Lisa Renee Jones Page 0,32
he heard, but he’s not only sitting next to me, he’s close, that wonderful, earthy male scent of him teasing my nostrils. But he’s not touching me. I tilt my head in his direction, and he does the same to me. “You heard?”
“I heard,” he agrees softly, and there’s no anger in him, but the turbulence, the pain is right beneath his surface, and I get it. If I’d left and come back to him being engaged to another woman, I’d have been destroyed, even if I brought it on myself.
“The Grayson thing is all set-up,” I tell him.
“I got a text.”
I wet my lips. “Right. Thank you for making sure he leaves after the party.” I reach over and cover his hand with mine. “I love you. I never—”
He leans in and kisses me. “I know. And I love you, too. The ice cream is in the bedroom getting melty. Let’s watch the movie in there.”
“That’s it?”
“You did what you had to do, Candy. And after tomorrow night, you’re mine and this is behind us. And nothing, especially that pencil dick Honest Gabe, is going to stop that from happening.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Candace
The ice cream really is melty by the time we eat it because Rick is far more interested in me than the ice cream once we reach the bedroom. We end up pulling the extra pints from the freezer and start sampling while he talks to Adam and makes plans with the Walker team to come to my house tomorrow morning.
“Can’t we go to them?” I ask when he disconnects. “What if Gabriel decides to come back early?”
“We’ll know,” he promises. “We’re watching him. What we don’t want is for someone to visit here and you not be around to answer the door.”
I swallow hard. “Right. Of course.”
“Ice cream and me, baby. Let the rest go for right now.” He samples my ice cream and I sample his and for now, the rest of the world fades away.
We start rolling the Sonic the Hedgehog movie, sneaking glances at each other, as we eat and watch. I wonder now, living in this comfortable, wonderful moment in time with him, how I settled for anything less than what this feels like, what we feel like. I wonder how I convinced myself this had never been real. This is real. We are real. We laugh. We smile. And Rick commentates the movie with comments like “cute little blue beast” and when Sonic puts on a hat as a disguise to dance in a country bar he says, “no they are not acting like a hat makes him look human.” Of course, Jim Carey is the bad guy and Rick calls him the “Crazy Ace Ventura Motherfucker” but the most Rick Savage comment of all is his observation about the fancy van Jim Carey drives in the movie. He wiggles his eyebrows at me and says, “we could get pretty damn kinky in that van of his, baby.”
When the evening ends, and we settle into bed to sleep, and in what I hope is a sign of better days, the recent storms have passed, and the moonlight has turned the room from the inky black of late to a dim gray glow. Laying there in Rick’s arms, the thrum of his heartbeat beneath my hand, I have the realization that we leave tomorrow. This may be the last time we share this bed. “I don’t want to sell this house.”
“Of course not,” Rick says immediately. “It was your grandmother’s. It’s a connection to your mother. We can use it as our Texas getaway. And we’ll hire someone to maintain it.”
It’s a perfect answer. We’ll be back. Together. It’s also a statement that assumes that is possible because Gabriel will no longer be a problem. I don’t know if that means he ends up in jail or dead, and guilt stabs at me when the idea of him being dead comforts me. But the man used me and convinced me he didn’t. The level of deviousness is hard to ignore. He’s former CIA. He has deeply rooted resources. Will him being in jail be enough to keep us safe?
At least it’s a barrier between us and him though. He has to go to jail.
I drift into the haze of sleep and the past, not to a past with Gabriel but to a moment in time with my father and just a few weeks after my mother’s death.