And he followed like the besotted moth he was, ready and willing to burn in the pits of hell as long as she looked at him like that.
“I have something for you too,” she told him softly, opening her black clutch and handing a plain envelope to him.
Tristan looked down at it, confused.
“I met the airport guy today,” she explained and Tristan felt the tightening in his gut like he always did whenever another man was mentioned. Although he tried to keep it contained, fact was he knew the kind of men who lived in this world – men with no morals and no scruples and no decency. They would see her and steal her without a thought to her wishes. The one thing that kept her safe, as much as it irked her, was his reputation. They would steal her but they wouldn’t cross him.
He still didn’t like it. Fuck.
“I’d made a deal with him so I told him a little of what he wanted to know and he gave me that,” she continued, completely oblivious to the possessive fire running through his blood.
Tristan stared into her eyes for a long minute, reading each fleck of olive over the light brown, her heart bared for him to see. Fuck anyone trying to take that light from him. He would rip them apart with his bare hands. Taking a small breath, calming down his territorial ass, he looked down at the envelope in his hands and ripped it open, taking out the single scrap of paper.
It was an address.
His heart thumped louder than it had in a long time as he stared at the simple hand-written address, a location five hours out of the city, and looked at her.
“I’ve already had the address checked,” she told him, her voice shaking as she knew what this could mean. “It’s a house. We’re going tomorrow.”
He wanted to thank her, to tell her what she had done for him, was still doing for him made him feel like the luckiest bastard on the planet. The words, as always, never made it out his lips. But she understood. She always fucking understood.
He wanted to tell her that love was too tame a word for everything that happened inside him where she was concerned. She had shifted him, realigned him from the inside out. Like a planet that suddenly pulls a moon into its orbit, she had bound him to her, given him direction for longer than she knew, gave him purpose to exist.
She was his gravity, his fucking planet, and he was lost without her.
With pasts bathed in death, with foundations bathed in blood, he had found something so precious he wondered sometimes if he wouldn’t go through all of it again just to find her.
The rain came down on the windows outside, thunder rumbling, and he leaned forward, telling her everything with his lips the only way he could. She held on to him.
She always held onto him.
And with one woman he loved beside him, searching for the other he had lost, Tristan felt loved, accepted.
Whole.
And he would go through it all, over again, just for her.