It was the same look that’d had me on my knees then, too.
“What are you sorry for, Logan?” I didn’t know if it was rejection or a plea.
Hesitation held the words before they left me like a twisted admission. “That nothing turned out the way it was supposed to. That I didn’t fight harder. I promise that won’t happen this time.”
The last was gravel. The coarse scraping of determination that infiltrated body and mind.
Her eyes dropped closed for the barest moment, and she sucked for cleansing air before she opened them again. Torment rained down, a misery that flooded a drought-stricken desert.
“Would you have changed it if you could have? If you knew it then, would you have stopped it? If you could go back and know everything, would you still have done it?”
Vulnerability trembled through the words.
The woman laying herself bare and asking me to do the same.
A rock got lodged in my throat.
Buying time, I focused on cleaning the dried blood from her abrasion and the line down to her knee. Meticulously, I applied the bandage, my movements careful.
Then I stood, keeping my eyes on her face as I eased my T-shirt over her head and dragged it over her beautiful body.
Then I fisted the hem in my hand and jerked her my direction.
Aster gasped as she jolted forward, and her fingers drove into my dress shirt like she might never let go.
My mouth found that sweet spot at her jaw, right where it curved up to meet the lobe of her ear. “I would go back and change everything. Losing you. Losing Nathan. I was blind. A fool.”
Grief clamped around my heart.
“Was it worth it?” she pressed, like she didn’t know how to believe me.
“You already know it wasn’t. I would have given up everything. I would have burned the world down to get to you.”
“Why didn’t you?” The question trembled from her mouth.
My hand found her face, my thumb tracing the angle of her cheek. “I did. I burned it all to the fucking ground, Aster, and you already know what happened when I got there. You were no longer mine.”
Those eyes found me in the whispering night. “I thought you said I’ve always belonged to you?”
It was a challenge.
My hands slipped low, gliding down her sides and molding to her hips. I yanked her so close every inch of her was pressed against me. “Is that what I should have done? Taken what was mine?”
One hand curled into her hip while the other slipped up her spine until I had a fistful of her hair. I angled her head to the side, and my lips grazed the length of her jaw.
Inhaling her sweet, exotic scent.
Potent.
Powerful in a way I shouldn’t let it be.
But she had always been my weakness.
She looked up at me with torment in those agate eyes. She barely shook her head. “I was already ash.”
There was a confession in it.
It didn’t matter.