Say It's Forever (Redemption Hills 2)

Salem stumbled in, her eyes wide and a gasp leaving her mouth as she took in the scene.

Paint covered every inch of the room.

I didn’t only utilize the canvases.

My art spilled onto the floors and the walls. Every surface cloaked in the artifices of my mind.

A kaleidoscope of images—images I’d painted and repainted again. Where the strokes were almost manic, my thoughts and fears and shame imprinted in the scenes.

Place a nightmare.

A mess.

A dream.

Surprise wheezed from her lips, and Salem eased deeper into the studio. In the middle of the room, she slowly turned around, studying it through the dim, hazy light.

“You said you didn’t know me.” I uttered it low. A morbid confession.

The heels slipped from Salem’s fingers, and they clattered to the floor. She all but floated to the far wall, her feet so soft it felt like I was watching a slow dance in the darkness.

She glanced back at me once before she turned and ran her fingertips over the deranged depictions smeared on the wall.

Demons climbing from Hell.

Angels falling from the heavens.

Whispers of dreams.

Half, undefined faces.

Scourges and eternal fire.

So much fire.

Some were rudimentary outlines of my family.

Brushstrokes of hope and joy and desperate devotion.

Indistinct intonations of those that I’d lost and others that I clung to.

They were all haphazardly woven together across every flat surface.

As if she were drawn to it, she moved, her fingers quivering over the crude image of the child that would forever haunt my mind.

Salem’s chest heaved and her body shook as she traced the cryptic shape.

The air locked in my lungs as a rush of old agony froze my blood.

“This is me, Salem.” I shoved my tatted hands into my pockets. Shame came at me tenfold.

She swiveled back to look at me. Tears soaked her cheeks.

“Jud.” My name was a whimper.

“Warned you it was ugly.”

Her head shook. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” She touched her chest. “And the most devastating.”

There she was, looking at me in a different light, in the way I should have shown her from the start.

Because what everyone else got was deception.

They didn’t get the scars and the tragedy.

But Salem?

Felt compelled to show her this.

A fucking fool.

But there I was, laying it at her feet.

“And you see me like this?” She whispered that, a spec of horror and confusion, her brow pinching in the most gorgeous way.

That frozen blood thudded.

Pulsed harder. A warning that lit in my veins.

Or fuck, maybe it was straight-up liberation. This moment I’d found with an enchantress who floated through my studio.

“No, Salem. Think that’s the problem. I see you in an entirely different way. In a way that fucks with my head. Because when I’m looking at you? I see beauty. I see light. I see a treasure and goodness and every fuckin’ thing that is right.”

She slowly shifted, her gaze soft as she carefully padded in my direction. Waves of energy rippled with each step. She stopped in the middle of the room, the girl warring, though she lifted that chin.

“And I see a man who found me in a storm where I was lost. A man who took the time to rescue me. A man who’s a protector. A man who’s good and kind. A man who’s also broken. I see the pain, Jud. I see it. I feel it because it lives in me, too.”

“Enchantress. You’ve got me transfixed. Don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.”

Energy crashed from her spirit.

Need fisted my guts, and the words left me on a low demand. “When do you feel the most beautiful, Salem?”

This fierce, unrelenting girl actually blushed. Heat exploded from that delicious flesh.

She lifted that stunning face. “I think I might have forgotten.”

I took a step forward. The air trembled and shook. “It’s all I see when I look at you. Beauty. You’re the definition of it. You don’t have to be shy. Don’t have to be afraid. You’re safe with me, darlin’.”

The savage promise stoked the flames. Truth that I wanted to erase that fear from her eyes.

The truth that I was asking her for some of that trust I didn’t deserve but wanted right then, anyway.

I should run from the fire.

But I took another step deeper.

Salem swept her tongue across her plump lips as those eyes were doing that thing that slayed me through.

Intense and wild and seductive.

Girl became a vixen in a beat.

Alive under my stare.

“I want to see, Salem, how you feel when I’m looking at you. Show me.”

Attraction blazed through the dull, dusky light.

Sparks and flames.

She hesitated—contemplated—then she stared me down as she reached around to loosen the zipper at the back of her skirt.

She let it go and it fell to her ankles.

Motherfuck.

I gulped. Tried to breathe.

She kicked the fabric aside, and the girl stood there in that loose, flowy, knit blouse and a pair of white underwear.