Her little fists curled so tight they might as well have been embedded in my soul. “I just need to know one thing right now. Tell me it’s true. Tell me you still love me because I’m done pretending like I don’t need you.”Twenty-NineVioletSage eyes flared, and a play of shadows danced across the carved lines that made up his formidable shape. He took my face in both of those big hands.
A tender bid of possession. “You want to know if I love you, Violet? Fuck. The only thing I feel is love for you. Loving you is the composition of who I am.”
He looped an arm around my waist and tucked me close.
The air thinned and my lungs squeezed, the beat of our hearts racing, racing, racing. A thunder that boomed.
Encroaching.
Rumbling
A storm that gathered strength.
And I knew—I knew it was getting ready to hit land.
“Told you,” he murmured in his rough way. “You are every song I have ever written.” He brushed back the hair from my face and tucked it behind my ear. “You are every lyric. Every riff. Every strum. Every echo. You are the song of my heart. I love you, Violet Ramsey. I love you with everything I’ve got and with everything I’ve got left to give.”
And I was swept away.
My feet no longer touching solid ground as he lifted me, my toes barely brushing the floor as he tucked me close against the warmth of his body.
Joy slammed me.
Overwhelming.
Beautiful and terrifying because I knew I was giving myself over to this. There was no more fighting these feelings.
They were free.
Running rampant.
His nose brushed mine, and he kissed the corner of my mouth. “I love what comes out of this beautiful mouth.”
He ran his nose up my cheek, and then he pressed a tender kiss to my eye, then moved to the other, his voice a low roll of emphasis, “I love the way these eyes see the world.”
He ran his lips to my temple, murmured there, “I love the way this mind thinks. The way it processes.”
Then his hand was shifting, running down to palm flat over the erratic thud of my heart that expanded, swelling to overflowing, breaking free of its chains. “And most of all, I love this. I love the heart of you. The trueness of you. I love who you are in the deepest places that only I can see.”
He grabbed my hand and pressed it over the battering in his chest. “Do you feel it, Violet? Do you feel it beating for you? It always has. And it’s never gonna stop.”
“I feel it,” I rushed the whisper. “I feel it, Richard. I feel it to my soul. I feel it in every one of those places that you love. I can feel you lovin’ them. Do you feel mine?”
My nails clawed at the fabric of his shirt. Digging in.
His fingers curled into my hair, scraping into my scalp, Richard’s voice raw, “I’ve felt you all along.”
That was it.
The walls crashed down.
Every reservation dismantled.
The rubble in flames at our feet.
We stood in them, in the fire that we’d walked through to get to this place, and I knew it didn’t matter that I didn’t have every answer—I trusted in this.
Richard watched me with those eyes for a baited beat.
In a moment of reverent silence.
“I don’t want to hurt you.” He brushed a thumb over the swelling on my jaw.
“You won’t. Just…kiss me, and don’t you dare stop.”
Then he curled his fingers tighter in my hair and dragged my mouth to his in a fiery, unapologetic kiss.
That storm hit land.
Mayhem.
A beautiful, unrelenting disaster.
A sudden deluge of desire.
A tidal wave of greed.
Bodies a needy collision of lust and everything we’d missed.
Our mouths hungry for what we’d been starving for over the last six years, nothing but nips of teeth and tugs of lips. Tongues delving into a tangle of devotion.
Richard hiked me higher, angling toward the wall to keep us balanced as I wrapped my legs around his waist.
The second I made contact, I moaned, rubbing myself at the hot, delicious friction of his hard cock that pressed at his jeans.
“Fuck. Baby.” He pressed a single hand to the wall and kept the other banded around my waist, angling me in the exact way he knew would light me up. “You are gonna kill me. Ruin me. Ruined me a long time ago,” he mumbled at my mouth.
I kept kissing him, biting and licking and stroking my tongue into his beautiful mouth, like I could taste the meaning of his song.
Knowing he would sing me.
That he would write me with those fingers and love me with that soul.
And I wanted it. Surrendered to it.
My nails sank into his shoulders. “Richard. I need you. I need you more than I’ve ever needed anything. I’m so tired of goin’ this alone.”