“Well?” he asked, watching my face.
“That was...” I couldn’t find the words. “That was incredible.”
His grin was smug. “Told you.”
“Don’t be cocky.”
“Too late.” He pulled me close, his hands settling on my hips. “You gonna ride with me again?”
“Maybe.”
“That’s a yes.”
“That’s a maybe.”
He kissed me then, deep and thorough, and I melted against him. When he pulled back, his eyes were dark with heat.
“Inside,” he growled. “Now.”
We barely made it through the door before his hands were on me, pulling at my clothes with desperate urgency. We stumbled to the couch, and he pulled me down to straddle his lap, his mouth hot against my neck.
“Fucking beautiful,” he muttered against my skin. “Watching you let go like that... Christ, Trudy.”
I rode him there on the couch, my hands braced on his shoulders, his fingers digging into my hips as he guided my movements. It was raw and desperate and perfect, and when I came, he followed right behind me, his face buried against my chest.
Afterward, we lay tangled together, breathing hard, and I felt something settle in my chest. Something warm and right and terrifying.
I was in love with him.
Completely, irrevocably in love with this gruff, possessive biker who’d walked into my life and refused to leave.
But even as I lay there in his arms, feeling more content than I had in years, I knew something was still unfinished. Something important that we’d both been tiptoeing around, pretending we could ignore.
The journal.
He’d barely touched it all week. Had been avoiding it, I realized. Avoiding whatever truths were still waiting in those pages, lurking like shadows in the corners of his consciousness.
And I understood why. God, I understood. He’d already learned so many terrible, heartbreaking things about the woman he’d loved, the mother of his daughter. Things that had shaken him to his core and fundamentally changed how he saw his past and everything he’d thought he knew about Christina.
But he couldn’t move forward until he faced all of it.
Until he knew the whole truth, no matter how painful it might be.
“Stephen,” I said softly, running my fingers through his hair, feeling the silky strands slip through my hands.
“Hmm?” His voice was drowsy, satisfied, the rumble of it vibrating through his chest and into mine.
“You need to finish reading the journal.”
His body tensed beneath me immediately, every muscle going rigid. The comfortable warmth between us shifted into something tighter, more guarded. “I know.”
“I mean it. You can’t keep avoiding it.” I kept my voice gentle but firm. “It’s not going away just because you ignore it.”
“I’m not avoiding it,” he protested, but even as he said it, I could hear the lie in his voice. He knew it too.
“You are.” I pulled back to look at him, needing to see his eyes, to make him understand. “And I understand why. Believe me, I do. But you need to know the rest. You need to face whatever else Christina wrote. For Grace. For yourself.”
He was quiet for a long moment, his jaw tight, the muscles working beneath his skin as he clenched and unclenched his teeth. I could see him wrestling with it, could practically feel the turmoil churning inside him.
