Giggles rippled free that she tried to temper in favor of not waking up the entire house.
I thought there might be too much joy for that.
This moment sublime.
I flipped her around until the girl was straddling me, Violet’s expression like looking at the first dawn.
I bucked my hips, and she let out a throaty sound. “Mediocre, huh?” I challenged.
Her face softened, and she played her fingertips along the tattoo I’d marked of her about three years ago. When I knew my love for her was never going to set.
“There isn’t a single thing that is mediocre about you, Richard Ramsey.”
My fingers threaded through the soft wisps of her black hair that hung like a veil around her face. “That’s good…because you are spectacular.”
“Oh, you enjoyed that, did you?”
My grin grew. “Think that’s pretty clear. Six years without bein’ in you? Without lovin’ you? Without touchin’ you? My poor dick was on a hunger strike. Nearly died.”
I gave her a faked, mopey frown at that.
She barked out a laugh, and then slapped her hand over her mouth to mute it, her voice shifting into a sexy whisper. “Poor, baby. Now you know how I feel.”
My hands cupped the outside of her bare thighs, and I was trying to keep it together considering the girl was sitting on me naked. Still wet. My poor, destitute dick was very, very aware of the exciting change in our situation.
“I knew all along.”
Could feel the shift, the lightness shifting into the darkness that surrounded us. No chance of eradicating it until all was exposed.
I just had to hang on for a few more weeks.
Pray she’d understand.
Forgive me.
Understand what I’d had to do.
“I hate that you left me,” she said, blatantly honest.
I pulled her down and shifted us so we were lying on our sides facing each other. Her little heart beating manic and those thunderbolt eyes searching me for the truth. “I hate that I had to.”
Her tongue darted out to wet her lips, and she glanced away before she looked back at me. “What that man said last night…”
My stomach clamped in a vice of rage. I managed to keep it in check. To just keep looking at her, waiting for her confession.
“I think I know why he came.”
My chest tightened. “You recognize something about him?”
Her lips pressed together, and she slightly shook her head where it was rested in the crook of my arm. “No, Richard, but I heard it. Where the threat was comin’ from. This is about my sister.”
Her throat bobbed in a shock of pain when she said the last while I tried not to lose my shit.
Instinctively, my arms tightened around her. “Why do you say that?”
The girl hesitated, warring. “Because I hired a private investigator to find her, and I think someone doesn’t want her to be found.”
Horror froze every cell in my body.
She sat up, and the words started to fly from her mouth in a tumble of desperation. “Richard, it absolutely terrifies me what that might mean. If it’s her that doesn’t want to be found or if it’s someone else. What…what if she’s in danger?”
I pushed up to sitting, too, taking her by both sides of the face, searching her through the grainy haze of her room.
“Baby,” I whispered, the word nothing but gravel. “When did you hire this person? What has he found?”
I mean…fuck.
Her chin quivered, and she spread her fingers over her chest like she could feel a part of herself bleeding out. “A few weeks ago. My mama…Richard…my mama needs to see her one last time. It’s the last bit of peace that she needs to say goodbye. The resolution she needs. The last I love you she needs to say.”
Gutting brokenness seeped from her pores, and I wrapped her up like I could hold those shattered pieces together and not be the one who was going to send it all crashing to bits in the end. My mouth moved to her ear. “Has he found anything?”
Her head shook in confusion, and she curled her arms around my neck. “A picture. A picture from back in LA. You remember that man, Martin Jennings? The one who took us out to eat all those years ago when they were trying to get Carolina George to sign?”
Fury went on a tangent in my rib cage.
A battering.
A storm.
It took everything I had not to fly from the bed.
“Yeah,” I managed to say.
“She was with him. How was she with him?” Violet begged, clinging to me tighter. “I’m terrified, Richard, terrified that I got her into something that she couldn’t get out of when I invited her there. That I’m somehow responsible for this. For whatever happened to her. And I’m so selfish…so selfish,” she wheezed, “so selfishly scared to find out. Scared to learn what it might mean. Scared of what is going to happen with Daisy. How could I be so cruel? How, Richard? I…I…”