It’s probably not smooth to tell you that. That for the year I’ve been here in the City of Angels, of perpetual summer, I’ve been thinking of Snow. Of the queen. But I don’t give a fuck. Because I’m still running.
And I know today, of all days, you need someone to tell you that it’s okay. To run. To stand still. To fucking embrace that broken shit you try so hard to separate yourself from.
Yours
K
In the movies, when heroines got heartfelt letters from their sweethearts, they read them over and over, staining them with their tears or fading the paper with the sheer amount of reading.
But this wasn’t a movie.
And he wasn’t my sweetheart.
Yet I stayed up all night poring over the words anyway.
Because I was self-deprecating like that.
Then I got my ass up. After deleting the e-mail.
Made some resolutions as I got ready for the club party celebrating Gwen and Cade’s anniversary. The resolutions were not to let him fuck me up anymore. Not to have him in the back of my mind like a squatter in an abandoned building. I’d try to find a way to evict him.
Mia’s daughter’s band was playing. Mia’s sixteen-year-old daughter, who was dating seventeen-year-old Killian. Though he didn’t look seventeen. He was a man already, and he should have been breaking hearts all over Amber. He probably was now that his man-boy heart only belonged to one girl. I’d known him since he was in diapers, known his dad too, until he died. His mom was a fucking shit show of a human being. His remaining blood failed him after his father died, but the club would never do so.
I had no doubt he’d be after a patch the second he turned eighteen.
Again, I couldn’t be happier, watching the way he watched the pretty young teenager with a penchant for boho and the most amazing voice I’d ever heard.
So yeah, I’d been happy. Until I lost my breath. Until my eyes had stuttered on chocolate ones that swirled the second I locked my gaze on them.
My guess had been right. He did grow his hair longer, so it curled down the nape of his neck.
“Here,” Rosie shoved a martini glass in my face, her eyes on the same place as mine. “You totally need this.”
I took it, swallowing once, twice, three times as Keltan’s eyes never moved from mine, even though he was fisting a beer bottle of his own and talking to Gwen.
“Yeah, I totally need about twelve more,” I agreed, tearing my eyes from him. Stopping myself from thinking about how fucking good he looked in his plain tee and jeans. Better than I remembered. Bigger than I remembered. Bigger in the sense of his muscles had grown, and bigger in the sense that his presence seemed to take over the entire party. Which was a feat in itself considering the caliber of men attending, each of whom radiated masculine hotness and testosterone. All of whom were nothing. Not when I only had eyes for one man.
Rosie’s hand gave mine a quick squeeze, her kohl-rimmed eyes deep with sympathy. “You good?”
I nodded once. “Of course. It’s been a year. And it was one night. I’m over it,” I lied.
Rosie, the good friend she was, pretended she believed me.
I tried to pretend too.
I’d been dodging him the entire time. Physically, at least. My eyes kept betraying me and going in his direction. Since I couldn’t control my gaze finding him, I made sure that every time his stare met mine, I was glaring.
His stare met mine a lot. It was burning into me the entire afternoon.
“You still got your rules?” Dwayne asked, sipping his beer, the column of his throat moving pleasingly as he did so.
Dwayne was an attractive male, so I appreciated it. His real name wasn’t actually Dwayne, but we all called him that since Gwen had arrived and christened him due to his unbearable likeness to The Rock. His features were a little more harsh, rough, wild than the man himself, but that made him hotter. And the hardness behind his eyes too. Chaos that didn’t exactly hide, but you didn’t see it purely because you were looking straight at it.
I sipped my own drink, trying to focus on the attractive man’s face and not look to Keltan for the thousandth time. “What?”
He gave me a hard yet soft look, tinged with chaos. “You know, the rules against you having any sort of relationship with anyone in the club?”
My brows rose in surprise. “You know about them?”
He chuckled, the sound rough and pleasing. “Babe, everyone knows about them. Look at you.” His eyes went down to my dress. I’d deviated from my usual black and gone for a nude, tight tank dress with sandals that tied up my legs.
His gaze was hungry. And it didn’t even register downstairs.