My freedom.
No strings.
No expectations.
He was letting me know, if I wanted to go, he wasn’t going to hold me here. He wasn’t going to cage me in. He wasn’t a new captor, swapped out for Adrian or my uncle. He’d promised I’d be free and clear.
And Cade Hightower always kept his promises.
My heart squeezed again — this time not in a painful way. In a new way. In anI think I might love youway. In anI don’t think it, I know itway.
I held his eyes and took a deep breath. “I can go anywhere?”
“Anywhere.”
“But… What if I want to stay here?”
His whole frame tightened.
I kept going. “What if I want to stay in Salem? What if I want to stay with you?”
His answer was a kiss. A bruising, thorough, amazing kiss that resulted in me sprawled mostly across his chest, my legs straddling his hips, my breaths reduced to choppy pants.
“You’re staying,” Cade growled against my mouth. His eyes were burning like I’d never seen them before.
“If you’ll have me.”
His hips shifted and he drove inside me, filling me with his length in one smooth thrust. My breath snagged in my throat as he ground deeper.
“I’ll have you,” he gritted, the double meaning of his fierce declaration not lost on me.
I rode him, slowly at first, then faster and faster as the pleasure built. Our eyes were locked the entire time. I wanted to tell him I loved him, but I was too scared. It was too soon. I wanted to tell him that he’d changed my life, but it was too much. I couldn’t say it. Not out loud, anyway.
Not with words.
There was only one way I could think to convey my feelings.
With touch.
My touch.
I released my death-grip on the headboard and brought my hands into the space between our bodies. I held them there a moment. Suspended. Waiting. Cade’s lips parted on a soft gasp as he realized what I wanted. He gave a tiny nod.
“Touch me, beautiful,” he rasped. “Been waiting six years. Can’t wait anymore.”
Before I lost my nerve, I lifted both hands up to cup his face.
A sea of purple sparks swallowed me whole.
The first time the man sees her, his world rocks off-kilter.
She is sitting in the precinct waiting room wearing a waitress uniform straight out of the 1950s. Frilly white apron, little cap sleeves on her pink button dress. It’s ugly. But the woman wearing it is the farthest thing from ugly the man has ever seen.
She is exquisite.
It is more than her cascading pale platinum curls, partially restrained by a plastic clip at the back of her head. It is more than her eyes, clear as the water of a lake on a summer day, scanning the chaotic room around her with an unshakable serenity. It is more, even, than the way she holds her petite frame — so perfectly still, so self-contained. Like the eye at the center of a hurricane.
It is all of her.