frantically. “If this is a joke, it’s gone on too long, bro. We won’t get mad if you come out.”
He checked under the slide, and under piles of leaves, and in the bushes, and even in the nasty abandoned house. He lingered longer in the house, ripping apart the dilapidated doors, checking the closets, even wading into the black basement. All of it stunk of soil and damp and sheer panic.
Max was small. He was the smallest of them all. Maybe he had found a crevice he could slip his bony little self into.
Maybe…
“Conor!” Dominic called from the top. “He isn’t down there. You know he’s scared of the dark.”
Conor thought he knew what fear was. He’d felt it every time his dad had come home drunk and ready to start a fight. But this was a different beast altogether. It was the first time Conor felt the fear seep into his bones, rattling him to the core. He felt the fear in his lungs when he breathed.
He ran up the staircase, past Dom and Jem and stepped out into the open yard, into the quiet little corner of town that lay abandoned and empty. It was a wasteland after the flour mill nearby shut down and people lost their jobs; it’d been the boys’ little adventure map.
Now it was a turning into a nightmare.
Where was this kid? Did he fall? Did he get lost? How could he have vanished?
Conor didn’t feel so strong. He didn’t feel like the leader amongst the four of them. He felt small and helpless.
He felt… like a little boy.
Standing there, tears springing to his eyes, Conor’s scream came from the deepest depths of his soul.
“MAX!!!!!!!!!”
Chapter Nine
Thames
She wasn’t safe and he’d come inside her, flooding her pussy with his seed. He wasn’t even concerned. He wanted his cum inside her, all over her. He wanted to mark her until her scent and his were one and the same. It was purely visceral, this possessive need to recapture her forever, to keep her.
Thames spent way too many nights envisioning another man in this bed. It destroyed him. He wasn’t going to lose her again, not this time, not ever.
As he lay there, her draped over his chest, he wanted to know all the years he’d missed. He wanted to get to the bottom of Locke and his interference in her life. He needed to know who was behind the fire, and why it felt like Jem was more there for her than anyone else.
What about his mother, and Ember? Where did they fit in all this?
Where was Dave, and what did Locke mean when he said Reid had Blackwater under his thumb?
And how was he going to get the Raven crew off his back? Holden would be wondering where he was.
Daunted, he shut his eyes and tried to work through the mind-fuckery. Being free didn’t feel so freeing. He held Charlotte to him tight, afraid to let go, afraid of feeling the emptiness again.
“What are you thinking?” she asked him then, rousing him back to the present.
“I have so many questions, Char,” he answered quietly.
“Anything you want me to answer?”
He looked down and met her gaze. She was so much older than he remembered. She was all woman. Unable to help himself, he murmured, “You’re so fucking beautiful, Charlotte. All woman, curves everywhere.”
Her cheeks flushed. “I worried you wouldn’t like what you saw.”
He groaned in dismay. “That is crazy talk.”
“My body’s changed –”
He cut her off by moving back over her. His hands roamed every inch of her body he could grab. He silenced her with a long kiss, brewing with passion and need. She responded straightaway, letting out these breathless sounds he used to daydream about during the lonely nights.
“You are my everything,” he told her when they came up for air. She needed to see the solemn look in his eye as he delivered the truth to her. She went still, her chest slowing as she devoured his expression with a heavy look of her own. “You were always in my heart. I carried you inside me every single day. You pulled me out of my madness and you healed me in my pain. You didn’t have to belong to me to be there for me, dove.”
She stroked his cheek, her own flushing as he tenderly kissed her.
“Fuck, how I longed for this,” he murmured, shutting his eyes tightly.
The next kiss was longer, more languid, filled with tongue and taste. He sensed her urgency