“I need you to hold me.”
My heart stops.
I’m about to hesitate when I hear the ragged draw of her breath. I can’t take any more. I pull her tightly into me.
Something breaks loose in both of us.
Her hot tears wet the front of my shirt. And something inside my chest breaks open permanently.
My head dips, breathing her in. My hands fumble with how to hold her. Too big, too rough. It’s been way too long.
Yet this touch, this closeness, is like a lifeline. Like something that could pull me back from the place I’ve been trapped too long if I let it.
My body gives while my stomach knots tighter. Because if I let this keep going… if I don’t stop it now, she’ll become my everything. The thing I can’t live without. And that scares the hell out of me.
“We should stop,” I murmur against her hair.
“We should.” It comes out desperate, dragged on a breath of air.
But neither of us does.
We stand there in thatshould, and we don’t listen. Don’t pull back. And that’s another kind of thing I don’t know how to handle.
The cloudy sky disappears. So does the ever-present threat of storm. The fire. The cabin. Everything except her.
There’s only Sloane and me, and a decision too big for either of us to make.
Not alone.
“We should stop,” she repeats, staring up at me. “But I don’t want to.”
That puts a crack in everything I’ve worked so hard to build. The kind nothing can fix. Because I don’t want it fixed.
Her hands come up, fists on my chest, hitting me lightly once with each, stuck mid-sob like there’s too much pain to come out.
Then she screams.
Not at me. Through me. Through the whole damn world. A keening kind of sound, pure grief.
It aches through me as if my body needed to hear it. Like it’s communicating something I don’t know how.
I pull her into me harder, arms wrapping protectively around her as if I could shield her from this.
“He did this. He left us, and I still don’t know why.”
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, head tipping down to her, lips brushing her hair.
She shakes her head against me, voice rough. “It wasn’t your fault. You did what you had to, to bring your men home.”
Even if it was just in pieces.
“Don’t know if I ever came home,” I whisper into her hair, burying my nose and breathing her in. Soft and alive against all the ruin inside me. Because some things can’t be taken back, no matter the regret you save up.
She wraps her arms around me. Heat blossoms in my chest. Her head tilts up, eyes searching my face.
“I need you, Rhys Ward,” she says, voice trembling. “Whether it’s wrong or right, I need you more than air right now.”
My eyes blur, mouth dropping to meet hers. Everything we’ve tried not to feel detonates between us. My tongue sweeps into her, my voice humming low against her mouth.
