But inside, she quaked at the responsibility. She wanted to save everyone, mourned every loss. Even the ones she made with her own hands.
Her trust made him both the luckiest man alive and the most cursed. Reese would show him her vulnerability, but she wouldn’t allow him to comfort her. And he never put her in the position of having to turn him down. That was one burden Sloan wouldn’t place on her shoulders—the knowledge that he ached for her and her alone.
He knew how she felt about love. How she shied away from commitment and those tender emotions that glowed around couples like Lennox and Jamie or Connor Mackenzie and his woman. Reese would never say it to their faces, but she believed that kind of love didn’t have a place in this world.
She was doing everything in her power to change that. To make it so the young girls and boys in her care would grow up without the need to foster their fierce, angry, wild sides in order to survive.
Still, all that change came at a cost. It meant putting her people in danger. Their lives were in her hands and every mission she laid out had very real consequences.
“They trust me.”
Even though her eyes weren’t red, Sloan suspected some of the water in that shower hadn’t come from the reservoir tanks. “They should.”
“Should they? Should they really? Am I even doing this for the right reasons? We both know I want to bring down the council for my own personal pleasure. It has nothing to do with that pretty ideal of freedom.” Reese’s fingers clenched into a ball.
Sloan crossed the room and sat beside her. She leaned into him immediately, and the need in his blood spiked hard. With ruthless self-control, he tamped it down. Picking up her hand, he pulled her fingers apart, wincing at the sight of the bloody crescents in her palms. Yeah, there’d been plenty of tears shed in that shower, all right.
He allowed himself this touch, just as he allowed himself a million other small tortures. Because these small things were worth all the pain of not having her.
“You can want both—revenge and freedom—and still be on the side of good.” He rubbed her fingers. Hard calluses met hard calluses. Reese was a warrior, not a soft-palmed woman of the Colonies. And the thickened skin at the base of her fingers, the weathered pads of her fingertips, the wind-burned cheeks . . . it all made her sexier than any woman had the right to be.
“I . . . worry that I’m not making the right decisions.”
What she really meant was that she worried that the number of lost lives would be higher than she would be able to live with in the end.
“You’re overthinking this. Listen.” He tipped his head toward the open window. Outside the building, people were starting to gather at the rec hall. Music had been turned on and the sound of laughter and singing and merriment mixed together. All of it existed because Reese was willing to put her neck, heart, and soul on the line.
Yes, there were going to be losses, but it wasn’t healthy for her to sit up in her room and count them when she could be out there with the people she had saved.
“That’s the sound of celebration. We need to have these moments too. All of us.” Sloan pushed to his feet without letting go of her hand. “So get dressed, find a man tonight, and ride his dick until you’re limp.”
3
Sloan was right. She needed to be around people. Needed to let the voices and laughter and music drown out the doubts that were pounding through her brain.
And he was right about the other thing—she needed sex. A hard cock slamming into her until she was mindless would be the perfect antidote to her melancholy.
Any man in this room could help her out with that. It was just a matter of deciding which one to pick.
Her gaze swept over the small crowd as she moved deeper into the rec hall. The old building had once been a place where the long-since-dead residents of Foxworth had come to amuse themselves. Kids would pop in after school to play Ping-Pong and do arts and crafts. There’d been knitting classes and book club meetings, according to the faded flyers on the bulletin board near the door, and aerobics classes in the gym upstairs, though all the equipment was now covered in rust and essentially unusable.
Since nobody had felt like lugging broken treadmills and exercise bikes down two flights of stairs, they’d decided to pretend a second floor didn’t exist. On the main floor, they’d brought in furniture—couches, chairs, a pool table Jake had found in one of the wealthier homes in town.