This Fearless Girl (St. Clary's University #2) - E. M. Moore Page 0,38
trekked up into the mountains day after day to find your father. It was nothing but pure resolve. Pure determination. Coming back down, hopelessness like I’d never seen before.” He slams his fist down onto the steering wheel again. “You’ve always called to me, to those empty, lonely parts inside myself, and I knew right when Lionel was calling off the search that there was no way that was the last time I was going to see Dakota Wilder. I wouldn’t let it. I couldn’t let it.”
The anguish on his face makes my heart tear into jagged pieces. A bitter hate turned into a disastrous kind of need. “What changed your mind today?”
“Nothing changed my mind,” Stone growls.
“You asked her to marry you. I saw it myself.”
Stone turns toward me and picks up my hand, then brushes a kiss over my knuckles. “I’ll fix it, but I couldn’t do anything then.” Shadows obscure his gray-blue eyes. “He has her, Dakota. My dad has my mom. He told me if I didn’t ask Marissa, I’d never find her.”
“He what?” I explode.
His fingers dig into me to the point of pain, but I let him use me as an outlet. “He’s had her this whole time.”
“When you say have her?”
“I don’t know!” He runs his hands through his hair, messing up his perfectly coiffed look that always suits him so well. The button-up type is becoming undone in front of me—all of the unknowns wearing him thin. “My dad went fucking psychotic when Mom went to Clark.” He pauses. “Jesus. Don’t fucking hate me. It was her idea. She said she’d lure your father in, learn your family’s secrets. Dad was hesitant at first, but more than anything in the world, he wanted to find the treasure. He let her go, and I wonder...” he swallows, “I wonder if she did it all on purpose? To escape him. After she left, she didn’t fucking talk to him. She never fed him information. She never did anything.”
I close my eyes and rub my temples. Hearing that his mom came into our lives to take our information makes me want to rage. Not that my father would’ve ever given it to her. I know that for sure. But he did care for her.
I turn my chin toward him. “Your family is sick, Stone Jacobs. Positively vile.” I can barely wrap my head around what he’s just told me.
My dad.
His mom.
His fucking mom is God knows where.
The air hangs heavy in the car while I think things through. “Is he going to tell you where she is?”
“He said he would.”
“If you agreed to marry, Marissa?”
“If I got engaged,” Stone clarifies, voice hardening around that last word. “The only person I’m marrying is you.”
My stomach tumbles over itself. I shake my head. “You can’t say that.”
“Why? Because it’s not true? Because you don’t want it? I’ve known I was going to marry you since I was seven.”
“You didn’t even know me.”
“My heart did. It recognized you. It could pluck you out of a sea of people. It could anchor around you and pull you to me time and time again. You’re mine, Dakota Wilder. You always have been. I’m going to keep proving it to you.”
“Getting engaged to someone else is not a good way to go about showing me.”
“When we were in my bedroom, I told you you’d never be my side piece. You’re every piece, Dakota.”
“Wait. Your bedroom?”
“The pool house. I moved out of the main house when I was thirteen. I couldn’t fucking take it.”
“Stone, this is crazy. You’re crazy.”
“Every day without you makes me crazier and crazier. I can feel it digging its claws into me. When they came up with the scheme for my mom to marry your dad, I knew they were doing something else, too. They were trying to keep you from me. I can’t be with my stepsister, can I?” He pushes the release button on my seatbelt. “I can’t think about burying my cock so deep inside her pussy that I see heaven.”
He crawls over me, surprisingly agile in the tight space. He presses the buttons by my right side until my seat moves back, giving him plenty of room to kneel before me. “I can’t dream about what she tastes like. But I did all of that anyway, Dakota. My cock already belongs to you, and you don’t even know it. I’ve hissed your name as cum drips warm down my greedy hands. I’ve praised your