“You stole my bed.”
“Aye, I did.”
He turns to me with eyes a million miles from the hazy dead weights he went to sleep with. “And you stole a dog…right? I didn’t dream that?”
“You didn’t.” I put zero effort into any kind of restraint and insert myself into his space. “I found her in the woods and brought her home so she could ditch me and live with Jack instead.”
“So Jack has a dog now?”
“Maybe. She had pups too—the Kings found them and dropped them off at the Bosanko place. Jack and Sol took Fiadh there for the night.”
Skylar absorbs that while I process that his hair is damp, there’s water on his bare torso, and he’s no longer wearing my shirt. In the time I’ve been outside, he’s woken up alone in my bed and got himself a shower and I don’t like any of those things, except maybe that he’s feeling steady enough to do it.
“What’s wrong?”
“Hmm?”
Skylar rubs his thumb between my brows. “You’re frowning hard enough to give yourself a stroke.”
“Fuck off.”
He rolls those smoke and metal eyes and it feels so fucking real. As if the last few days haven’t happened. He’s not okay. Neither am I. But in this quiet moment, we’re okaynow, and maybe Skylar feels it too.
We’re already closer than blood and bone. Like this living, breathing thing between us wrote its own rules before we ever got a say. But somehow—somehow—he narrows the minuscule distance between us and kisses me.
And it’s different.
The heat is still there, the jagged edge ofwant, and there’s nothing soft and sweet about how he claims my mouth. But the frantic search for relief and distraction, for anything to dull the ache inside…it’s gone.
This isn’t a plea or a punishment.
It’s an anchor we don’t need to cling to.
We’re just here.
Or something. I’ll make sense of it later. For now, I sink into the bright and steady current that thrums to life. I kiss him back, done running, and with him so alive in my arms, even after everything, I wonder if maybe he is too.
“Mal?” Skylar pulls away, but he doesn’t go far—just enough to breathe my name and let it hang between us like mist on the ocean. For his eyes to dip to my mouth before he finds my gaze again. “You still want this?”
My restraint is paper-thin, ebbing away with every moment he has his hands on me and that barely there tremor beneath his skin. In my head, I’m already moving, jumping from the plane with no fucking chute. But I make myself wait, and give him the truth.
“I never fucking stopped. And Sky?”
He’s staring at my mouth again. “Yeah?”
“There’s no one here.” I let that sink in for him. Forme. “We don’t have to be quiet.”
31SKYLAR
I never fucking stopped.
I hear the rest of it, but that’s what sticks. What propels me to kiss him again, harder this time. Deeper. No questions left—for now, at least. No air. Just his lips and mine, and the healing heat that burns low in my belly as Mal’s long arm circles my waist and he hooks me to him, already backing me towards his bedroom.
To his bed.
He’s so physical. His blunt way with words has come to mean everything to me, but he speaks so much louder like this.
Every kiss.