“I’m good. Tougher than I look. Don’t forget who raised me.”
“He’s a big softy. We both know that.” And his father loved her mother. More than words. Her mother and Max. Madison would love Vince forever for that. He was one of thosegoodmen, Vincent Acardi. And she suspected his son was, too. Even if the big caveman holding her would never admit to being just as much a softy as his father.
Dom settled on to the couch. He pulled her down next to him. Madison just let him.
She couldn’t forget what could have happened to him tonight. It was eerily similar to the other ambushes she’d worked. Like…when Miguel had been shot by Steve Wilson, over Heather.
Her biggest fear after that first one was that it would be him, or someone she knew and cared about. But mostly, she’d been afraid it would behimnext.
And it had been. Both of them.
They’d just gotten lucky to get away alive.
Just like she had with the choir shooting, with Wilson. Like Haldyn and Powell and Zoey and all the rest.
How much longer would their luck last?
Time would run out, luck would. Who would it cost?
The idea that it might be him—no. She just couldn’t take it any longer. What did they keep fighting everything between them? Madison was getting so tired of fighting everything. She just was.
Madison just looked at him. And waited.
“Dom…will you hold me tonight?”
It was the hardest question she had ever asked.
He was goingto be an idiot here. There was no way he could refuse that question. There just wasn’t. The woman was his damned kryptonite. More than that, she was his heart and soul.
“Hell, you destroy me.”
She started to pull away.
Dom stopped her. “No. You aren’t going anywhere.”
He just did it. Damned stupid of him, but a man could only take so much before he cracked. Her looking at him, so broken…when all she wanted was for him to hold her. Of course he would. He was damned putty where she was concerned. And he always would be.
Dom pulled her over his lap.
“You are going to hurt yourself more.”
That was her, always warning him of something he was going to do that he shouldn’t.
Dom just did it anyway. Until the woman who tormented him every minute of every day was straddling him. Until he could feel her through the unofficially borrowed sweatpants. Damn it, this was insane.
“W-what are you doing?” She wet her lips after she said it. She was nervous, being right where she was.
Good. The witch deserved it the way she kept tormenting him at times. She had to know what she did to him.
Hell, it was the biggest open secret at the TSP.
He’d accepted that long ago. “The first time I hold you, I am going to do it right.”
He cupped the back of her head with the hand that didn’t burn like hell—and pulled his ultimate temptation closer. This…this mattered. Holding hermattered.And it always would.
It just felt damned different when a man was holding the woman he loved.
“Dom, I…Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? I am so tired of playing it safe, and hiding from life. It seems like that is all I have been doing since the shooting. I just can’t take it any longer.”
