“I’ll spend the rest of my life putting you back together.”
And he didn’t speak after that. Didn’t need to. Because in the dark, tangled in a mess of sweat and salt and trembling hands, where love and hate bled into one another until neither made sense—he kissed me again.
And this time, I knew it wasn’t goodbye. It was the beginning of everything we’d been too afraid to survive.
CHAPTER 24
SIN
“What does this mean?” The words tore from my throat like a wound. My voice was raw, gasping, lips still slick with him—like I couldn’t breathe unless I tasted him.
Theo sat before me, fire and thunder, his dark green eyes ablaze, no longer cloaked in the shadows I’d grown used to navigating. He wasn’t hiding anymore. His walls were gone, stripped down to his bleeding center, and I was staring straight into it.
“I chose you,” he said, and it wasn’t a declaration. It was a detonation.
My heart convulsed in my chest, struggling to catch up to a moment that felt like it was rewriting everything I thought I understood. “As simple as that?” I whispered, the ground beneath me suddenly felt unsteady.
He didn’t flinch. “Yes.”
Yes. As if it could ever be that easy. As if my body hadn’t been shaped around the ache of wanting him and the fear of losing him for so long that I couldn’t separate one from the other anymore.
I stared at him, trying to make sense of the man in front of me. Theo, with firelight flickering in his eyes and war still carved into his bones. Theo, who had built a life on silence and secrets and walls ten feet high—suddenly offered me everything. Himself. Raw and reckless.
“What about your job?” I rasped. “The trust? Everything you’ve spent your whole damn life protecting?”
His laughter broke the night open. Hollow. Cracked. Shattered. “It all means nothing without you.” He moved closer. Our bodies pressed together. “I want you, Sinclair. I’ve always wanted you. Even when I shouldn’t have. Even when it nearly destroyed us. And no matter what you decide, I’ll always want you.”
I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe. His words cut straight through my armor and sank deep into a part of me I thought I’d sealed off for good.
This was too much.
And yet—not enough.
I was falling apart and falling into him all at once. Everything in me screamed for time, space, air—but none of that mattered when he looked at me like that. Like I was gravity. Like I was home.
My lips brushed his again, because I couldn’t help myself. He was the storm, and I was the one stupid enough to walk out into it.
“I can’t think when you’re this close,” I whispered against his mouth, but I didn’t pull away.
“Then don’t think,” he breathed. “Just feel.”
And I did.
The eighteenth green spread out around us, quiet, dew-damp, sacred in its silence—and we defiled it. Reverently. Desperately. Our bodies came together like they’d been waiting for this moment since the beginning of time. Like we werealways meant to find each other here—at the edge of everything we were and everything we could be.
He tackled me to the ground so fast the breath whooshed out of my lungs—his weight hitting me with a thud that reverberated through my bones.
Then his mouth crashed into mine. It wasn’t a kiss. It was a claim. A war cry. A goddamn resurrection.
His tongue pushed past my lips, desperate and bruising, tasting, taking, owning. Like I was something he’d lost and thought he’d never find again.
His hands cupped my cheeks, thumbs dragging reverently across the stubble he knew like memory. Gentle. Burning. It made me ache in a way that felt like breaking. My cock thickened as he settled his weight between my spread legs. His hips pressed into mine, rolling down, and I groaned—sharp and unfiltered.
“I need you,” he rasped against my mouth like it physically hurt to hold the words in.
He left fire along my jaw, kisses burning like embers, teeth grazing the shell of my ear. I shuddered. His breath was ragged, panting, brushing over skin already too sensitive. My cock pulsed beneath him, thick and aching as he rocked into me like he couldn’t help it.
Buttons popped free under his frantic fingers, my shirt yanked open to bare my skin to the night.
