Guess I could lie better than he thought I could. But this wasn’t something I was willing to share with him, to drag out into the open when this was the way we lived. The way we survived. I couldn’t survive Kallie’s father, the disparity of what he’d given to me and what he’d robbed me of, any other way.
“Don’t be,” I urged, wishing to drop it but needing him to understand, wishing with my entire being to reveal it all but refusing to break the promise to myself that I’d never allow another man the power to wreck me the way Kallie’s father had.
Not because he’d broken my heart. He hadn’t.
He’d simply crushed my world.
“He never would have loved her, and it’s better for us both that he’s not a part of our lives.”
It sounded cruel, I knew.
I could tell he wanted me to explain more, so I cut him off with a kiss, pulled him to me and wrapped my arms around his neck.
Sebastian suddenly reached down and cupped my sex. Startled, I jumped. “My whole life, I’ve been taking what’s not mine to take. Took this, too. Not sure I wanna give it back.” Tease was injected into his tone, but this was no joking matter, because honest to God, every last part of me already belonged to him.
Did he know? Could he read it like a playbook in my eyes?
Quickly, he rolled to his back and pulled me on top of him. I giggled, some giddy feeling sweeping through me. “So tell me Sebastian from California, what happens there?”
Who could blame me for digging more?
He sighed, deflected as he looked over my shoulder at the ceiling. “Sex, drugs, and rock and roll happen in California.”
Right.
Another warning—as vague as it was vast.
“Why are you here?” I whispered as he rubbed my naked body up and down his, a slow dance that immediately lit me up.
Why are you here in Savannah? Here with me?
I’d seen the way he affected the women in the bar. I knew he could crook his finger and they’d come running.
Squinted eyes met with mine. “I don’t have a lot of good in my life, Shea. People would tell me I’m spoiled. That I have everything at my feet. But none of it makes me happy because all of it comes at a cost, one I’m not sure I’m willing to pay any longer. Only thing that matters to me is my brother and the boys.”
I frowned. It seemed like everything he said was at odds with the other.
“But you…you got under my skin,” he continued. He squeezed me like the idea of it hurt. “Don’t know how to get you out from under it.”
“Will you stay?” I heard the insecurity wobble through the question, and I knew Baz heard it, too.
“No,” he admitted.
Simple. Simple dreams. They were so easy to crush.
“We shouldn’t have done this, should we?” he said with more of that remorse as he looked up at me.
“No,” I whispered quiet.
He gripped my hips. “But I want to do it again.”
“Me too.”
In five seconds flat, Sebastian had me on my back, rolling a condom on his dick, and was sinking into me.
And it was every bit as hard and demanding as the first time, but every touch felt more beautiful to me. Every caress pulled me deeper. Every brush of his skin as if he was sinking into mine.
Tamar was right.
I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
I BARELY CRACKED OPEN AN EYE. My limbs were sluggish and sated, my dream-addled mind still swimming in a residual sea of lust. A mass of sweet and hair and silky flesh was tucked up close to me. Shea’s back burrowed into the den of my body as we lay on our sides. Soft breaths were threatening to lull me right back into the most restful kind of sleep.
Would have, too, if it wasn’t for the bustling energy emitted from the source of the mound of tight curls cresting the top of Shea’s shoulder that was dragging me out of it.
Pale light filtered in through the large window at my back, and the tiny, tinkling voice to my front had me pressing my eyes shut tighter, wishing that with the simple act I’d disappear.
Three clicks of my heels or some kind of magical shit like that.
Or maybe a get out of jail free card.