“Grace, baby, we have to stop.”
“Why?” she asked, her hands fisting in my hair, preventing me from letting her go. “I want you, King. I want you to make me forget.”
I grabbed her shoulders and pushed her back. “Grace, we can’t. Not yet. It’s only been a few days. You need to talk to someone. You still haven’t talked to Patch.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t want to talk about it at all. I just want to forget it ever happened.”
“It doesn’t work that way, baby. You have to be checked out. Make sure you’re okay. If you won’t talk to Patch, then how about Bane?” She shook her head again, and I offered, “Kytten? She’s an EMT—did you know that?” I grasped her chin between my thumb and index finger. “I need you to be okay, Grace. You haven’t talked about anything. You haven’t been looked at. They hurt you, baby. I need you to be okay.”
“I can’t. If I talk about it, then it happened.”
“It happened, Grace. We can’t change that, no matter how much I fucking wish that I could. I never should have left you that morning after the shower. I was so pissed at Jackson that I walked out of here without a word, and I will live with that guilt forever, baby. But that’s on me.”
“It’s on me,” she whispered. “Jackson will blame me. I can’t be a wedge between you and your brother. You just found him.”
“I will walk away from him for you, Grace.”
“No!” she gasped. “I don’t want that.”
“I don’t want you to run. You’re it, Grace. Without you, nothing else matters.”
“But if my father—”
“Fuck your father, Grace. I don’t care who it is. Not anymore.”
We stared at each other, and I smiled.
“Marry me.”
“What?” She tried to step off my lap, and I held her tight. I pulled her against me, my arms a band around her middle.
“Marry me. Today. We’ll go to the clerk’s office and get the license, and have Matlock marry us. Just you and me.”
“I can’t.” She looked sad. I could see the excuses building inside her.
“Give me one reason why. Just one. What’s the main reason? The one that matters the most.”
Her eyes dropped between us, her hands flat on my belly. She took a deep breath, and I asked, “What’s your biggest fear, Grace? Tell me what it is and we’ll deal with it together.”
For a minute, I didn’t think she’d open up. I took her hand and placed it over my heart. “Let me hold the pieces together, Grace.”
She looked up into my eyes. Hers swam with tears as she confessed, “They didn’t use anything.”
“Fuck, Grace.” I pulled her against me. Her biggest fear was that she’d pass something on to me. “I’ll talk to Kytten. She can do a physical. She’ll run some blood work.”
“It could take up to three months for anything to show up.”
“Then we do one now, and another one in three months. And another one in six months, and as many as you need to feel safe.”
“Okay,” she said quietly.
“Will you be my old lady, Grace? Will you be my wife?” I held my breath as I waited for her to answer.
“You really still want me?”
“I never stopped wanting you, baby. Not since the moment I saw you behind the bar.”
She chuckled. “The men parted like the Red Sea when you walked up.”
