“You want that from me?”
I hadn’t been sure if I’d been what he wanted. I’d seen his past girlfriends, had hated them on sight. I’d even watched him with the few clubwhores he interacted with. They weren’t like me. They were all skinny and big-breasted. They wore barely any clothes too.
I, on the other hand, wore nothing but jeans shorts that didn’t spend its time up my ass crack and actually covered a decent amount of my upper thighs. I guess I wore tank tops, but not the strappy ones that looked like they’d snap if you needed to take off at a run. These were like the female version of wifebeaters—that name sucked now I knew a literal beater of his wife.
Who the hell had come up with that name? I asked myself, then I realized I was going off on a tangent when all my hopes and fucking dreams were close to being realized.
Stupid brain.
His hand cupped my wrist, and I shivered again as his callused fingertips drew shapes on the sensitive flesh. It was tender anyway, but mine was more so than most. I had scars there. Scars that I’d been teased over all my life because stupid people thought I’d tried to kill myself. Yeah, because when you slit your wrists, you went all the way around to the back of your hand, right?
I’d know, because I’d contemplated it a time or two when I was sixteen and the combination of no sleep and nightmares had gotten me so depressed, I didn’t know how to make it through the next day, never mind another night.
It was weird to research ‘how to slit your wrists,’ but a shit ton of stuff had come up. You sliced down, not across, but it had never reached that point for me. Mostly because I’d known the move would be selfish.
I was loved.
So, so loved. Not just by my family, but by my friends—Saint and Keys. Heck, their parents loved me too. And then there was Ink.
My warrior.
He’d been a soldier before he’d been a brother. I knew he had to have seen and endured worse things than what had happened to me, and yet, he stayed standing. He didn’t take the easy way out.
That was when I’d crept into his bed that first night. It was too easy. After my kidnapping, the security on the compound had become crazy, but only around the perimeter. More brothers were set on shifts of protecting the gates and any weak points on the compound. Extra alarms, dogs, barbed wire and broken glass on the walls, you name it, we had it.
The tree that Aaron had climbed to get into my bedroom had long since been cut down. My momma had set fire to the pieces and I’d watched, feeling safer for seeing the destruction, but I hadn’t needed to go to such lengths.
At sixteen, it wasn’t like my parents checked in on me at night before I slept. Sometimes, they went to bed before I did to do things no sixteen-year-old wanted to think of. I’d just stayed outside on the verandah, and when darkness had fallen? I hadn’t needed to climb down a tree. I’d simply crossed over to the compound, slipped past the party that was going down, and headed into Ink’s room.
I knew I’d been lucky to find him alone.
And every other night I’d spent there since, knew he had to have made a conscious decision to sleep alone just in case I showed up on a bad night…
Was that him wanting me all along?
Was that proof of that?
My stomach churned as these crazy thoughts flashed through my brain, and all the while, he stared at me as I waited for him to answer. Waited on him to tell me how he felt for me, if he wanted those naughty, dirty, dark things from me.
When he kissed my fingers, I almost fainted. Honest to God. I licked my lips as I lowered my hand and watched his mouth move as he answered, “I want everything from you.”
My throat worked as I processed that. “You know I love them too, don’t you?” I had to get that out there. Couldn’t hide the truth from him, even when I was so close to getting him… because without them, there was no me.
I knew that sounded crazy, dependent to the max, and a shrink’s wet dream as they tried to figure me out, but I didn’t give a damn about any of that. Ink wasn’t the only one who’d stopped me from hurting myself. I needed Keys and Saint just as much. They all grounded me. Kept me sane. And maybe I shouldn’t need men to do that, maybe that was what Prozac was for, but hell, I’d take my guys over that any day of the week.
“I do,” he murmured, and those words sent tingles waving down my spine. His eyes didn’t darken with anger, his face didn’t even flicker with a frown as he spoke. No, he looked just as calm as ever. “You’re your mother’s daughter,” he teased, then he winced. “I just… I wasn’t sure if you wanted me too. Thought, maybe, I’d be too old.”
I didn’t particularly appreciate being compared to my momma, even if Lucie Steeler did kick butt, but heck, I’d take it. If it meant I didn’t have to fully flesh out why I needed all three of them, then I was happy. My momma did things her way. She’d been raised with the five men who were my daddies, had almost been parented by them to a certain extent. I hadn’t had that with Saint, Keys, and Ink. They hadn’t been like my daddies. They’d been my saviors. My guardians. The keepers of my sanity.
So, nope, I was more than okay for Ink to confuse the two.
What I wasn’t okay with?
Him not being sure I wanted him.
“I sneaked into your room so often I’m surprised you didn’t kick me out, Ink,” I whispered rawly, the memory of all those nights flipping through my mind like a picture book. All those miserable nights where I’d needed him to hold me, and he had.
No judgment.
No questioning.
Just acceptance.
Of course, I’d wanted more, but that he’d been willing to give me so much had been an act of mercy in and of itself. And, as he’d said, if anything had happened, he could be looking at a statutory rape charge… That wouldn’t exactly be proof of my gratitude, would it?
“You didn’t come on to me.” He shrugged. “I just thought you wanted comfort.”
I gaped at him. “I could have gone to my dads for that!” When he just crinkled his nose, I reached up and rubbed that crinkle. “I need you, Ink.”
He cleared his throat. “Liam.”
My lips curved at that. “Liam. You want me to call you that?”
“Think it’s only right,” he said, his tone staunch. Well, for Liam.
Shyly, I smiled at him, and sighed when he raised his arms and drew me into them. When I pressed against his chest, I could feel his heart beating, but even better? I felt his cock under my butt, felt its hardness and knew without a shadow of a doubt that that was as much mine as his heart was.
“I love you,” I whispered. “Have since I was a little girl, and over the years, it morphed, changed. At first, I loved you for saving me. But every year, that feeling evolved, deepened, until I couldn’t even think about seeing another day through without you in it.”
“Hey,” he rumbled, his hand moving so that he could tip my chin back. “I ain’t going nowhere.”
How had he heard that from what I’d said?
How had he sensed my biggest fear?
I gulped. “You promise?”
“I fucking swear it, baby girl.” The pad of his thumb settled into the slight peach-butt of my chin. He rubbed there slightly, then murmured, his words almost a parallel to my own, “I love you, too. Have for a long time.”