His hands flexed, and his eye twitched. “There’s no wrong way to love someone.”
I blinked at him. “Yes there is. There’s blood, murder, pain, lies. To everyone we know, we care about. Lies to ourselves. To each other.”
“No, babe. I’ll admit it, that I lied to myself, but never to you. Even when I tried with my words. You knew better. I fuckin’ know you did.”
I pursed my lips. “Maybe.”
“Definitely,” he corrected.
“I can’t go from zero to a hundred, Luke.” I went for a different route. The truth. Or maybe it was another lie. I couldn’t tell the difference anymore.
“Yes you can,” he argued. “Your life is zero to a hundred.”
I stared at him. “And my life has been a consistent series of Fuck-Ups.”
He frowned. “Don’t do that. Don’t belittle everything you’ve done, everything you’ve become. It’s the furthest thing from a fuck-up I’ve ever seen.”
I chewed my lip. “It’s all about perception, Luke. You might see it differently, but it doesn’t matter. What does that I don’t want this, us, if we really do this, to be another Fuck-Up.”
“It won’t be. We won’t be,” he promised.
I swallowed, deciding to say something else, to him, to myself, instead of answering properly. “Ever since I can remember, I was a nomad,” I whispered. “Not in the sense that I didn’t have a home. The Sons of Templar have been and always will be my home, of a sort. But spiritually, I’m a nomad. Since birth, maybe. Definitely since my dad died and I was put in a world where I was in without a patch. Where I would always belong but also didn’t. Then I met you, and my spirit found a home. Or it wanted one. But it couldn’t reside there or in me, so that’s what this, my whole life, has been about after that. Trying to find a home in someone else and trying to find a home in myself.” I stepped forward so my body pressed into Luke, so my body found its home. “I’ve never, not once in my life, felt like I was exactly, precisely where I needed to be. Where I belonged. Not completely. Because I was fighting. Because I knew it was right here that I needed to be.” I stroked Luke’s chest. “And I knew I could never be here. Thought I couldn’t, at least. It’s weird, isn’t it?”
He stroked my head. “What, precisely?”
“Peace,” I whispered. “I’ve never felt it. It’s like a pair of shoes that fit exactly perfectly but you’re suspicious because no pair of shoes is that perfect.”
Luke chuckled. “I’m the pair of shoes in this analogy?”
I smirked. “We’re the pair of shoes. A pair.”
He leaned down and kissed my head. “I knew there wasn’t a lot of things in life I could give you, not when I’ve taken years from you because I was running from this for all the wrong reasons—”
“We both were.”
He took that with a hard chin. I knew he wanted to disagree, but he kept going. “Whatever it was. If there was one gift I could give my beautifully wild, wonderfully chaotic woman, it would be peace.” He gave me a look that held the whole universe. “Even if it’s fleeting, because I know my wild woman can’t entertain peace for too long and stay sane. I can be happy, content, knowing I’ve given you that.”
I fought the tears, the happy ones, welling in my eyes. “It’s not fleeting,” I choked out. “It’s you. It’s us. We are each other’s peace, aren’t we?”
He lightly kissed my lips. “Yeah, and we’re each other’s chaos.”
“But it works.”
“Oh, it more than works.”
I traced the side of his head with my hand. “Can we just keep this slow? Just for us?”
He searched my face. “Don’t want slow,” he muttered. “Also want to shout from the rooftops that you’re mine.” He sighed. “But I get what you want, why you want it, and fuck if I’ll say no.”
I grinned. “It bodes well for me, that does.”
He shook his head. “And not for me.”
Luke closed the door quietly, his hands finding the back of my neck, landing on the exact spot that had been throbbing from tension and rubbing at it.
I sank back into his touch, the warmth of his front igniting the back of my body.
“I don’t suppose you’d consider not taking the job and stopping the vigilante stuff, even if I asked real nice?” he murmured, lips on my ear.
I shivered. “Not a chance,” I whispered, failing to find any anger at his request. “One or the other. You pick, buddy.”
He kept rubbing for a long while.
It was evening, the next day. Right after our first day at work. There were no stakeouts or foot chases through the streets; as I was disappointed to find out, it was more paperwork and meetings. And meeting the team.
I totally got why Greenstone was the most popular security company in LA. You threw a rock in those offices and it would hit a hot guy.
Not that you wanted to throw a rock at these guys. They all radiated menace.
The hot kind.
“Well, let me be the first to say that I’m very happy Keltan has finally been listening to my lectures on equality in the workplace,” Matt—one of Keltan’s kiwi buddies from the army, I’d found out later—said, grinning at me wickedly. “I’m all about women’s rights. And I can’t wait to see your moves.” He winked.
I thought Luke’s head might’ve exploded at that.
He was begrudgingly sticking to our secrecy pact.
That meant professional in the workplace.
Well, he’d fucked me on his desk about five minutes after that meeting. Oh, and then he’d buried his head between my legs and gave me two orgasms in the weight room a couple of hours after that. So it wasn’t strictly professional, but it was as close as I’d get.
“I don’t want you to get hurt,” Luke said, back at my apartment. There had been no question that that’s where he was spending the night. “That is the last thing in the fucking world that I want.” He paused, sucking in a breath and looking away. Even though he was focused on my sofa, I knew he was somehow still looking at me. Just not the me standing in front of him. A past me, perhaps. Or maybe the version of me he’d made in his head. The version he could completely nurture, love. The ideal Rosie. Maybe he was looking and her and wishing he could swap us out.
“I want to protect you,” he finished, cutting off my dangerous interior game of which Rosie does Luke actually want.
I laughed, more to shake off the chill that came with those thoughts of the ideal Rosie. “Protect me?” I repeated. “From getting hurt?” I glanced down to his hip. “Well, then there’s only one thing to do if that’s what you want. Put a bullet in my temple.” He flinched, visibly and harshly at my cold words. I ignored it. “Death is the only thing that’s certain to protect humans from the horror of life. Death isn’t the bad and scary thing everyone makes it out to be. In fact, for those in the business of dying, I suspect it’s a welcome reprieve from the pain of living. After the fact, of course. Death is only bad for those left behind.”