Her lips are parted. She’s almost at the summit, ready to tip over her rapturous cliff, but she fights it to clarify. “About this life … I want you to adopt Remy.”
My entire body freezes, my chest splitting open, heart plummeting to my stomach. “You what?”
I’m buried to the hilt inside her, my magic cross piercing nestled in tight, water pellets plinking off us and shooting erratically. But I can’t move. Can’t process that sentence. I’mterrified to grip that notion without her embellishing it because it’s everything I’ve wanted, and she’s offering it at the very moment I feared I was going to lose it all. It doesn’t seem real.
“When I mentioned my father, I was trying to say that none of this was your fault.” She steadies her breathing, her perky tits smashing into my pecs as she collects herself to explain further, her face so vulnerable and genuine. “I knew you’d be blaming yourself. I don’t. The only reason I’m here is because you never fail me. Because you’ve loved me so well from the beginning. You’ve kept me safe. I want that for Remy.”
I heard every word, but my eyes sting, and my nose burns, and I need her to fucking repeat it. “You don’t want to leave me? You want me to adopt Remy?”
“Yeah,” she rasps. “All I wanted today was to get back to both of you. I love you, Ryker. And Remy loves you. No matter how hard things get, you’re always my hope too. I want us to be a family.”
This fucking woman.
Still, I probe to be sure. “What if there are more challenges ahead? I’ll be everything you both need, but this life won’t be easy.”
“Every road leads to you,” she says, repeating my words from our champagne baptism.
I capture her mouth in a sloppy rejoicing of one of the worst and best days of my life, my tongue conveying all the appreciation I didn’t verbally bestow, before I nuzzle my face into her sopping strands. Her cherry scent soothes me as I resume my fervid pace.
Decades of should-haves and regrets and terror over being too late morph into precisely what she said. Fucking hope. It floods us both, right along with the torrent of steaming hot water, as I thrust with all I am, flattening her to the tiles,burying myself deeper, melding every rigid part of me to her soft warmth.
“You’re a fantasy, Merce. Tell me you’re mine again.”
“Forever yours,” she promises as we both detonate.
Ashes and lies and white oak and screams, swallowed by champagne and glorious delusions.
RYKER
“We found them,” Ty announces as soon as I answer the phone. “He didn’t take her far. They’re in a beach house off the coast of Georgia. Considering the skill and reach this guy has, being a pilot, he didn’t make it difficult to find him, so …”
After I saunter through the hallway and sneak into my office, I fill in his dangling sentence. “He wanted to be found.”
“That’s our guess.” He sounds wary, like there’s something he’s not saying. “I’m sure we’ll find out why soon enough.”
What the hell am I sending my brother-in-law into?
My gut knots as I click my door shut. “You guys are okay?”
The soft murmur of the plane’s engine drones, a background melody for his response.
“We’re good. This is what we’re trained for.”
Their crew is the best, whether it be erasing identities, finding a missing person, or trudging into battle. I know this. People pay them obscene amounts of money for jobs like this. Because there’s no one better. But he’s also family, my sister’s entire world, and soon to be the father of my niece or nephew.And something stirs inside me, like a blaring warning siren. I’m so damn unsettled.
I drop my dice on my desk, rolling three and six.Goddammit.“Keep me with you. I want to watch through a body cam.”
“Uh.” He stalls with a sigh. “I don’t know if that’s the best idea, Ryker.”
“Ty”—I rub the overgrown scruff on my jaw—“I’d have insisted on coming with you if I wasn’t so paranoid about letting Mercy and Remy out of my sight or worried that I’d hold you guys back, but I want to see everything this motherfucker is doing. And I need to know I didn’t send you guys into some fucking—”
“Okay, yeah.” He clears his throat. “We can do that. Gage and I should be there soon. Give us about an hour. I’ll send you an encrypted link.”
Mercy cracks the door open, poking her breathtaking bedhead inside, two cups of coffee in her hands. “Hey.”
“Morning, beautiful.” I take her in for a minute. Her disheveled state is as sexy as ever, but my throat still feels raw with worry.
Her petite frame is drowning inside one of my T-shirts, her tiny shorts barely visible. Yesterday was a lot, but we both know it isn’t over yet. Some story about the bailiff chasing down a guy who’d tried to assault the courthouse broke out on the eleven o’clock news last night. And we haven’t heard anything else regarding it. Hopefully, it will stick.
