“Deacon?” I ask. “You think he works for Deacon?”
The instant the name leaves my mouth, Ever changes. Everything in him shutters tight. His face goes blank. His eyes colder.
“I don’t know.”
“That’s bullshit.”
He grips my upper arm to steer me, and for one bad second every part of me remembers the attacker’s hold. I jerk, and he feels it immediately. His fingers loosen at once, the pressure changing from control to contact.
“Reva,” he says, lower now. Careful. “Look at me.”
I do.
His eyes are dark enough to drown in. Mine probably look wild.
My chest rises hard against his. I hadn’t realized we were this close. At some point in the shouting and the shaking and him checking for injuries, he moved in until there’s barely any room left between us.
“You’re shaking,” he says.
“I know.”
“Come back down. This is shock and anxiety. Come back to me, Reva.”
The words should calm me. Instead they drag heat through me so sudden it makes me angry all over again.
I’m alive because of him, and that makes me furious. I want him so badly it feels like another kind of injury.
The cut under my ribs throbs in time with my heartbeat—easy to ignore until I breathe too deep. Then it flares, sharp as a reminder.
His hand slides from my arm to the side of my neck, thumb brushing once under my jaw. Testing. Comforting.Calming. I can’t tell which and maybe he can’t either.
I should step back, but I don’t.
His mouth hits mine like a detonation.
Hot. Hard. Claiming.
I make a sound I don’t mean to make and grab his shirt in both fists. He kisses me like he’s still full of the fight, like the violence has nowhere to go now except into me. Teeth scrape. Tongues clash. It’s messy and hungry and exactly the wrong thing to want with my throat throbbing and my ribs cut and dirt on my knees.
I want it anyway.
He backs me into the tree I’d braced against a minute ago, bark pressing rough through my shirt, and the sting only makes everything sharper. His hand splays over my ribs, then my waist, then higher, palming my breast through cotton hard enough to drag a broken sound from me.
His palm brushes the spot under my ribs and a quick, hot sting cracks through me. I flinch so small I pray he doesn’t notice.
“Ever—”
He groans into my mouth, the sound low and wrecked, and bites my lower lip before soothing it with his tongue. The kiss turns rougher, needier, his control fraying in little flashes I feelmore than see.
Good. I want that. I want him off-balance the way I am.
My nails bite through his shirt and he hisses, hips jerking forward on instinct. The hard line of him presses against me, hot and unmistakable, and my whole body answers before my brain can catch up.
A shudder runs through me.
His mouth leaves mine long enough to drag across my jaw, my throat—careful where the bruising will bloom, then not careful at all when he gets lower and sucks at the skin above my collarbone. Heat punches low in my belly. My knees go weak.
“You don’t run off on me,” he says against my neck, voice gone dark and ragged.
