I shouldn’t have been surprised that Bram knew so much about small businesses — the Butchers were the silent hand behind everything in Blackwell Falls — but somehow I was. They continued to surprise me in every way.
I wrapped up the remaining half of my cookie and took another drink of the hot chocolate. “Thank you for introducing us. It…” I thought about the last time I’d seen Bram in the coffee shop with Cassie, the way he’d walked right past me, had pretended not to see me. “It means a lot to me.”
“I should have done it a long time ago.” He took my hand and looked into my eyes. “I should have done it the second I knew I was in love with you.”
31
MAEVE
My heartpractically stuttered to a stop. “You’re… what?”
Of all the things I might have expected him to say, that was at the bottom of the list.
He nodded, his gaze burning into mine. “I love you, Maeve. I’ve never said those words to anyone who wasn’t family before, but I know now thatyou’remy family. Remy and Poe and Cassie… and yes, you. I didn’t realize how incomplete my life — how incompleteIwas — until I met you.”
I looked down at our joined hands. “I just… I don’t want you to feel like you have to say it.”
“Look at me, Maeve.” I met his gaze. “I think I’ve loved you since the minute I laid eyes on you before that first fucking Hunt.” He laughed a little. “Since the minute Titus told me you’d tried to bring in a gun.”
“I was just trying to protect myself.”
“Of course you were, and that’s why I love you, but only one of a million reasons. I love you because you spend hours making nice food for the people you love even when that food disappears in 2.3 seconds and I love you because you feed every stray animal that darkens our door, even that fucking demon catwho hates me. I love the way you look when you sleep and the way you make our beds smell like strawberries. I love the way you call me on my shit and give me shit right back.” He shook his head. “For so long, I was afraid to love, afraid to feel anything, to want anything. But you love so fucking hard, Maeve. That’s why you’re working so hard for June. I never even knew it was possible to love that hard, but you do, and you prove that loving that hard doesn’t kill you, it’s what makes life worth living.”
“Bram…” My throat was clogged with emotion, tears stinging my eyes, because of all the ways this giant, scarred man had surprised me, this one was the biggest of all.
“For a long time I didn’t know why I’d survived the crash with my parents,” he continued. “…Why it had been them instead of me who’d died when Cassie still needed them so damn much. But now I know. I survived to find you. I survived to love you.”
“Maybe I survived for the same reason,” I said. “Maybe all those months when I felt like I was dying after June’s murder, all those months when it seemed like life was pointless, because if someone like June could be taken away so quickly, so fuckingmercilessly, what was the point? Maybe I survived just to sit here right now and tell you that I love you too.”
He shook his head. “I don’t deserve your love.”
“I’m starting to think we get that wrong about love. It’s not a trophy we earn. It’s not something we have to deserve. When it’s right, when it’s true, it justis, like the air we breathe.”
“That’s what you are to me, Maeve. You’re the air I breathe, the fucking blood in my veins.”
The moment sat heavy between us, but it wasn’t the heaviness of tension or dread. It was the heaviness of meaning, like the earth had shifted under both of our feet in the moments we’d been sitting on the concrete platform.
And maybe it had.
He laid his hand against my face, our gazes locked. But when he leaned in to kiss me, it wasn’t with the raw hunger I was used to, the hurricane that knocked me off my feet.
It was with an unfamiliar tenderness.
His lips lingered on mine in the moment before his tongue teased the seam of my lips. I opened for him and his tongue stroked mine, tangling in a sensuous dance. Waves of heat swept through my body, swells of warmth that slowly built as he stroked my cheek with his thumb.
But the simmering of our passion couldn’t last. Not between Bram and me.
The strokes of his tongue became more urgent as the heat built between us, the hot coals at my center erupting into a fire that couldn’t be denied.
His tongue dove deeper into my mouth, and he pushed his thumb roughly between our lips, like he couldn’t get enough, like he wanted to touch me and kiss me at the same time.
I tasted the salt of his skin and took his thumb all the way into my mouth. He broke our kiss, pulling back to watch me suck, my pussy throbbing with desire.
His eyes were dark pools of hunger, and he withdrew his thumb, wet with my saliva, and rubbed it along my lower lip. Then he leaned in to kiss me again and this time there was no restraint, no slow and lazy sweeps of his tongue. This time his tongue was an invasion, and I met every stroke of it with fevered strokes of my own.
My cunt was on fire, and a moan escaped my lips as his tongue dove deep into my mouth.
I slid my hand down his chest and pressed against the bulge in his jeans, my body screaming for him.
