Chapter Nineteen
RHYS
Walking Bristol to the front door of the house she shares with another man feels like cruel and unusual punishment. Especially after the things I’ve witnessed tonight. She doesn’t belong here. She belongs anywhere but here.
She lives in a swanky neighborhood in Bloomfield, a home way too expensive for my taste and my pockets. We walk up her steps in silence, bathed in the darkness of the evening, the only light coming from the full moon above us. The tension stretches between us, pulling taut. My heart races behind my ribcage, a relentless ache, like my chest is trying to stretch itself around a feeling it was never meant to hold.
I’ve never wanted something or someone as much as I want her, and I don’t deserve her at all.
Everything in my body is telling me this is wrong, to haul her over my shoulder like a caveman and drive us back to theclubhouse, where I know she can be safe. If that’s how Blake talks to her in public, how does he talk to her behind closed doors?
I refuse to take away her choices, I refuse to make decisions for her when she’s perfectly capable of making them herself. Even if it’s slowly killing me.
Bristol unlocks her door slowly, like she’s just as reluctant to say our goodbyes. When she turns around, my knees nearly buckle at how she’s looking up at me. Big, beautiful hazel eyes, the caramel barely catching in the moonlight, are silently pleading.
I can’t make these decisions for her. She’s got to want them all on her own. I know she feels this between us, but that doesn’t take away from the messiness of her situation. I’d do anything to uncomplicate it for her. If I had it my way, it’d be by putting that fucker six feet underground. Preferably in a box. Alive.
“Rhys?” she says, biting that full bottom lip.
“Yeah, baby?”
“Stay?”
The breath that leaves my lungs is audible. A sigh of relief, of gratitude. “Anything for you, my love.”
I follow Bristol inside, her gown trailing behind her. She looks so fucking beautiful dressed up like this, but my favorite version of her is dressed in her work scrubs with her long hair pulled back. Natural face, happy. She glows when she’s happy.
Fuck, I love this woman.
Fuck everything standing in our way.
Not able to control myself a moment longer, my fingers lightly circle her wrist, tugging her backward. Bristol turns, and I take a single step in her direction, putting us chest to chest just inside the doorway, without actually touching. My thumb swipes back and forth across the pulse point at her wrist, feeling the rapid and steady thump of her heart rate picking up.
I love how she reacts to me.
Her eyes dart between my eyes, her chest rising and falling harder now, the swell of her breasts spilling from her ball gown as she waits for me to respond. To say anything.
God, she’s everything.
My endgame.
My future wife.
My old lady.
My queen.
I know I shouldn’t, I know it’s wrong, but fuck it. My head dips down, only a shred of space between us, our breaths mingling as I whisper my next words.
“Sin with me, Bristol.”
Her breath hitches, a quick intake of air as her eyes become more heavily lidded. “Rhys . . . I shouldn’t . . .”Shouldn’t. But not can’t. It wasn’t a no. My fingers thread slowly through her black hair, the strands slipping through my touch like soft-spun silk. I angle her head back, tilting it to the side as I close the space between us, gently running my nose against each side of hers, our breaths mingling, uneven and shallow.
“Shh, let me give you something good to remember when the days are hard,” I whisper, my voice low, but I know she can hear the desperation, the plea. My fingers rub gently against her scalp, her hands reaching up to grasp around my forearms. She doesn’t push me away, no, she grips me like she’s holding me in place, like she’s just as desperate, just as needy as I am.
My eyes trace over every inch of her beautiful face, memorizing this moment, memorizing her features, her expression, the feeling. I’m a man who prides himself on being in control, for thinking clearly and logically, but with Bristol? I’m reduced to a man who would burn the world down for his woman only because she said so. There are no lengths I wouldn’t go to see her smile, to hear her voice, her laugh, and know that she’s breathing and happy. Everything I’ve ever known is whisked away on the wind as I practically beg at her feet, here in the entryway of the house she shares with another man, desperate enough to cross the line I told myself time and time again I wouldn’t cross.
If it means I can have just a taste of her, fuck it all. I’ll reconcile my sins with the devil himself when he comes back for me.
