Page 355 of Don’t Say Mafia

This—Jagger—was different.

This was overwhelming.

All-consuming.

This was the kind of love that made everything else in your life rearrange itself around it.

My hands slid up into his hair, and I pulled him back down, kissing him hard enough to steal his breath the way he had stolen mine.

“I love you, too,” I whispered against his mouth, my voice trembling under the weight of it.

“I love you, Jagger.” His name felt sacred when I said it, and I brushed another kiss across his lips. “Always.”

He exhaled as if the confession had punched the air out of him. His thrusts slowed even more, changing into long, rolling strokes that let me feel every inch, every pulse, every shudder that ran through him.

Jagger reached up to cradle my face. “I’m never letting you go,” he murmured against my lips. “Never.”

“Never,” I echoed.

He buried his face in my neck as he spilled inside me, and I clung to him, my legs tightening around his waist as we rode out the aftershocks until we were both trembling.

“I love you,” he said again as he carried me down the hall to our bed, still buried deep, like he couldn’t bear even an inch of space between us.

We collapsed onto the sheets together, our hearts beating in the same frantic cadence.

And for the first time in my life, a man’s promise didn’t feel like something fragile.

It felt like something unbreakable.

CHAPTER 38

JAGGER

Iinhaled the smell of gun oil, fresh-cut plywood, and the dry desert dust that always seeped through the warehouse cracks no matter how tight we kept the doors.

Men moved quickly under the fluorescent lights, sealing weapons into foam-lined cases and sliding them into eighteen-wheelers that would be gone before the sun came up. There had been too many close calls with the Irish lately, so Cruz and I were personally making sure these made it onto the trucks.

Vegas glittered miles away, but out here on the outskirts, the desert swallowed the noise of the city until the only sounds left were metal on concrete and the pop of nail guns sealing crates.

I stood at the center table, watching a case of rifles get locked down.

Across from me, Cruz leaned against a steel beam, lazily flipping a knife open and closed while he supervised the loading crew.

“You know,” he said after a moment, glancing around the warehouse as he picked up a clipboard and started checking things off a list, “when I imagined my adult life, I didn’t picture this many spreadsheets.”

I didn’t bother looking up. “You’re welcome to go back to investment banking.”

He considered it thoughtfully.

“Tempting,” he admitted, “but then I’d have to die of boredom instead of because I got shot or poisoned, and we can’t have that.”

A forklift carrying a pallet of ammunition crates rumbled past us, and I sighed. We were slightly behind, and I just wanted to get back to Eden.

The thought had barely finished forming before the side door burst open.

Gage stumbled through, one hand clamped to his side where blood was soaking through his shirt and dripping onto the concrete in fat, dark drops. His other hand was still gripping a Glock.

“They’re coming,” he groaned. He took two more steps, and then his knees buckled. The gun clattered to the floor as he hit the concrete hard, unconscious before he even finished falling.