Grinning, he drags his feet from the water and pushes up to stand, then he changes the grip of our hands and pulls me up with him. “Yes. Right now.” He drapes his arm over my shoulders and turns me, not toward the house, but toward the garden. Across spongy grass and around guards who pretend they’re one with nature. He leads me away from our onlookers and under weeping branches, and a few minutes after we began, we come upon the rushing sound of falling water and, in the dirt, a single set of tire tracks.
We put those there.
“The waterfalls.” I release a shaky breath and step out from under his arm, tiptoeing toward the edge of the world and watching my step, physically and emotionally. Because if I’m not careful, I might stumble back into the grief I’ve carried all week long. “I wondered if I would ever see this place again.” I turn back and startle, beguiled by his bare chest, muscular and rippling as he peels his shirt up and drops it on the ground. But my fascination turns to agony as my brain processes the dark purple bruise that spreads from his clavicle to his lowest rib. “Oh, Archer…”
“It’s so weird you forgot thetill death do we partportion of our wedding vows.” He unsnaps his jeans and shucks the denim down to reveal black boxer shorts. “I was coming back for you, Minnnka. And if I got myself killed in the process, then I was gonna haunt you in the afterlife.” He drags his jeans over already bare feet and shoots a heated, unrelenting stare toward my legs. “Take them off, Chief. We’re toxic and dysfunctional as fuck, remember?”
I watch him straighten out, powerful and magnetic, his cock rock hard and the tip pointing directly at me.
“When I’m stressed, I search for solace buried in you.”
I fold my arms and stare at his hips, the delicious V of his abdominal muscles diving into his shorts.
“This week, I needed you the most.” He stalks forward, trapping me between the edge of the world and… him. “But I didn’t have you. I couldn’t come to you.” He slips his hands beneath my shirt—his shirt—and drags his calloused palms over my hips. His touch sends my heart into a fluttering cacophony and my core into a tingling mess, especially as he leans in and nibbles on my bottom lip, but it’s the goosebumps sprinting all the way to my toes that leave me almost faint-headed. “I haven’t slept right since Monday,” he rasps. “So I’m gonna need you to rejoin me in this unhealthy, symbiotic, maladjusted marriage, and since we saidI dotwice, I figure you wouldn’t mind my weakness.”
“Y-your weakness?”
“You.” He drags my shirt clear over my head, revealing nothing beneath—no bra, no tank—just me and my skin. Scooping me up with fast hands, he chuckles at my nervous squeal.
I frantically wrap my legs around his hips, my arms around his shoulders. “Don’t drop me.” I crush our chests together, my cheek to his cheek. “Please don’t drop me, Archer.”
“Close your eyes if you wanna.” He digs his hands into my shorts, cupping my ass with his palms, skin to skin. “We’re gonna jump.”
“Oh God.” I squeeze my eyes shut. “Oh God, Archer. Did you forget I’m afraid of heights?”
“I enjoyed slitting Mihalis’ throat last night.”
Stunned, my eyes spring open again.
“He was bragging about this chick he apparently had on the hook. Delicious piece of ass, he said. Cute dimples in her cheeks, and a smile to die for.” He flashes a devious, verging on deranged, smile of his own, then he steps to the very ledge and holds my weight over the abyss. “And so he died.”
Oh God.
“Now we’re in Jamaica.”
He plops a kiss on my cheek and throws us into the void.
ARCHER
“Ilook like a drowned rat.” Minka snuggles into my shirt, her shorts dripping wet and her hair lying flat against her scalp. As we make our way back to the house, hours after we left, she curls intomemost important of all, her arm lashed across my back and her hand anchored to my hip. For the first time in almost a full week, her heart pounds against my side and makes it possible for our breaths to sync. “They’ll know we?—”
“Went swimming?” I drag her impossibly close and rest my lips against her temple. I havedaysof this to catch up on. Four nights where I didn’t get to sleep by her side. “We’re married, Minnnka. We’re husband and wife. No one inside that house will bat an eye when they realize we went to the waterfalls together.”
“You know it’s not the swimming I’m talking about.”
I drag her to a stop just fifteen feet from the back door, pulling her around and tugging her in until our bellies touchand her neck folds back, allowing me to see into her beautiful chocolate gaze.
Her nerves grow with every step we take closer to civilization. Warmth fills her cheeks, and insecurity beats in her eyes.
We hurt each other this week, andherhurt digs deeper than anyone else’s.
The woman who appears to feel nothing, feels everything.
I cup her face, stroking the heated flesh with the pads of my thumbs. “They lost sleep worrying about you this week.” Leaning closer, I pepper a gentle kiss against her lips. “They hurt for us. For you most of all.” I drop a second kiss, aiming for the very corner of her lips, only to be rewarded by her sharp exhalation of air. “They deserve to see you exactly like this.”
“Messy?”
“Whole.” Another kiss. “Still raw,” I rasp, “and still coming around to the things I’m saying. But they deserve to see you right here with me, because fuck, Minka,with meis where you belong.”
