“’Kay,” I muttered back.
He pulled his face out of my neck.“You’re dinner shifttonight, yeah?”
I nodded.“Be home around eleven.”
“You still on to go look at that property with me tomorrow?”
I grinned up at him, excited to be in on the ground floor ofone of his investments.“Definitely.”
“Good,” he replied, dipped in, gave me a gentle but thoroughkiss, then he rolled off of me.
I shifted to my side and watched him walk naked to thebathroom.
He had his Chaos emblem tat on his back and the Chaos scaleswith its reaper drifting up from one plate of the scales, the blood drippingfrom the other that I knew all the men had wherever they wanted to put them,his was along his ribs on his right side.
And down his left side, ribs to waist, in a simple, small,no-nonsense font, he had Henley’sInvictusinscribed.
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under thebludgeoningsofchance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
I hadn’t known what it was (Snap had to tell me).
Even so, the minute I’d read it, the morning after our firstnight together, I’d touched my lips to it.
I’d had no questions about it.It said it all and what itsaid defined Snapper.
I knew Snap had not lived in night with demons plaguing him.He had not suffered evils.He had not endured untold tortures.He had fought nobloody battles.And God willing, he never would.
He had a good family who loved him, found another one whodid the same, then won the heart of a woman who, day by day, became more tiedto him.
