When he pulled back, I grabbed for him again, but he caught my hands, pressing kisses to the middle of my palms.
“I walked willingly into this life, but I will never be able to walk out.”
“I don’t care,” I told him.
“Even when I disappear for months and come home exhausted and angry?” he asked.
“Even then.”
“And if one day work follows me home?”
“I’ll still be here after we send it packing.”
His forehead dropped to mine. “We?”
“Ride or die,” I whispered. “You walked into this life for Kieran. But I’m walking into it for you.”
The muscles in his jaw flexed, and his inhale caught in his chest. Grabbing my face, he cradled it like I was the most precious thing he’d ever touched. “No dying,” he whispered back.
I held my pinky between us. “Pinky promise.”
“Pinky promises are legal and binding,” he warned.
“Good.”
His pinky hooked around mine.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
Ghost
He cracked me open faster than an overfull piñata at a kid’s birthday party.
Everything just spilled right out. Shit I didn’t even know was there.
Just call me the emotional exorcist.
Except my demons were not excised. I lived with those permanently, but Rett knew about them now.
And apparently, he was okay with living with them too.
I shouldn’t allow it. But I was going to.
He was my ultimate weakness. My beautiful stain. And I would use every bit of the monster inside me to protect him.
“I need your phone,” he announced as if he didn’t even realize he was in the room with someone other men had nightmares about. I watched his ass bounce beneath the hoodie—knowing full well it was bare—with a pair of socks I didn’t even know I owned pulled up to his knees.
It was adorable to the max, and it made me want to pin him down and have my way with him all over again.
“Where do you think you’re going?” I called, following him out of the bathroom.
He was already gone from the bedroom, and I doubled my pace to keep up. Look at me, running after him like a woman in some dramatic airport scene.
I should be embarrassed.
I wasn’t.
