I opened my eyes to the bloodied face I’d created.
His lips pressed to mine. As he moved them slowly, I tasted the metallic blood along his lips.
He wasn’t mine, but I was his.
Our kiss deepened, and I moaned as his tongue slid into my mouth.
He wasn’t mine, but I was his.
As his mouth took everything I had to give him, his hands ghosted from my face to my shoulders, pushing off my robe. My fingers reacquainted themselves with his hair while his mouth sucked in a nipple. I seethed when his teeth dug into it, tugging it like he was on the verge of losing control.
He wasn’t mine, but I was his.
“Wylder …” I closed my eyes, arching my back.
He released my nipple. “Shh … don’t say anything.” He took my other nipple and tugged until I groaned from the clash of pleasure and pain.
My hands left his hair and curled at his shoulders and back, pulling up his shirt one inch at a time. He shrugged it off and attacked my mouth again, all control lost.
He wasn’t mine, but I was his.
Flipping me over onto my back, he hovered above me, controlling my mouth as I worked the button and zipper to his jeans. It was so wrong. But nothing about us ever really felt wrong except when we were apart.
Wrong …
He lifted onto his knees for mere seconds to push down his jeans and briefs to his thighs as I waited, naked on my wadded-up robe, hating myself for not being able to stop what was about to happen.
He wasn’t mine, but I was his.
Smearing blood from his face up my torso and over my breasts to my neck and face, he lowered his body and pushed into me with one hard thrust.
No condom.
No questions.
No regrets.
I was a monster too.
Two monsters fucking like nothing or no one else in the world existed. Monsters held no accountability. They were selfish. And they feared nothing … not even death.
I was his … and he was mine.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Wylder
You can never see her again.
You will always be dead to her.
Slade Wylder is dead.
Had I chosen prison, she would have lived knowing I was alive and forever taken from her.
So I chose to force her to let me go without choice.
I chose to watch her move on with her life, a special kind of torture that I felt like I deserved. Jackson Knight felt it was fitting as well. I knew he loved her; it was its own special variety of sick love, as most parental love is … overprotective, controlling, suffocating.
My father was a controlling, sick bastard who deserved to die.
My uncle shared those same traits, and he, too, deserved to die.
I didn’t think Jackson Knight deserved the same fate, but he also didn’t deserve one drop more than I promised him.
The marriage. That was the one secret I was not allowed to compromise. He vowed to personally remove my soul from the earth if I ever told anyone. It was his safeguard.
If you ever come face to face with her, she can never know.
At five in the morning, she tiptoed from the bathroom to her closet, wrapped in a towel, hair wet but combed straight. I reached across the bed and turned on the nightstand light.
She whipped around, eyes wide, hands tightening the towel around her body. “Sorry. I … I have work.”
I sat up, rubbing my eyes with the heels of my hands before scrubbing the rest of my face. “I know. I have to go too.”
“Yeah.” With her back to me, she dropped her towel and slid on black panties and a matching bra. “Who protects Floyd when you’re…” she glanced over her shoulder and rubbed her lips together to contain her smile “…up to no good.”
I scratched my jaw and neck. “I lead his travel team. When he’s on the go, I’m there. When he’s home or secured in a hotel, I’m allowed to roam and…” I grinned “…be up to no good.”
As she stepped into a fitted blue skirt and zipped it in the back, she glanced up at me, her lips the opposite of a suppressed smile. “I slept with a married man,” she murmured.
I wanted to lift the weight of the world from her shoulders, but I couldn’t. “There wasn’t a lot of sleep involved.”
She attempted a weak smirk while sliding on a gray satin blouse and buttoning it.
“Come here.” I eased my legs over the side of the bed and spread them. My hands reached for her waist as she took hesitant steps toward me, gaze sweeping along my face.
“You’re a mess. Don’t get blood on my work clothes.”
I nodded slowly as my hands slid from her waist to her ass, and she rested her hands on my shoulders. “I love you, Livy.”
She swallowed hard. “But you love her too.”
Tension gripped my face, tightening my brow as my gaze slipped from hers to her partially buttoned blouse. “I love you, Livy.”
“But …” I could tell from her shaky voice that emotions were gathering in her eyes, and I couldn’t go there. I couldn’t look up.
Taking her hand, I lifted her wrist to my lips and pressed a kiss to it. “No buts, Liv … no buts …”
Her hand moved to cup my jaw, fingers teasing my short beard. I closed my eyes.
“What now?”
I guided her back a step so I could stand. “Now you go to work.” After pressing my lips to the top of her head, I brushed past her toward the bathroom.
Livy met me at the door when I came out of the bathroom after my shower, wearing only a pair of jeans. “Here.” She handed me a shirt. One of my old shirts. “Since your other shirt is soiled with blood.” Pivoting, she sauntered back to the kitchen in her heels, looking sinfully sexy in that tight skirt and legs that made me weak in the knees. “I don’t have coffee. Ten different flavors of tea, but no coffee.” She shrugged, taking a sip of her tea as I pulled on my shirt.
“Did you take anything else of mine or just this shirt and my dog?”
Her grin hid behind the mug. “Shirts, sweatshirts, your denim jacket. A couple guns and a few knives.”
I lifted a single brow, unable to read her well enough to know if she was serious.
“And your boyfriend is okay with it?”
Her smile faded as she lowered her mug to the counter, cupping it with both hands. “I can end it with a call. Can you say the same?”
I shook my head.
“Wylder … Alex … whatever …” She gazed at the steam rising from the tea. “I need to know. Do you have children?”
I paused, not intending for my pause to be an assumed yes, but as tears filled her eyes, I knew that’s exactly what she thought.
“Oh god …” She covered her mouth and closed her eyes, shaking her head several times before dropping her hand. “You have a family. That’s … that’s not okay. What I did was not okay. It was wrong last night, but you have a family. You don’t …” She batted away a stray tear. “You don’t do this to your family.”
I made my way to her, pressing my chest to her back, hands snaking around her waist as my mouth dipped to her ear. “What bothers you more? The idea that I have children and I cheated on my family? Or the idea that I have children and they’re not ours?”