Deadline to Damnation (Sons of Templar MC 7)

“Stop,” I said, my voice firm even though my soul was breaking. “I’m here, Liam. I’m going to get through. Nothing is going to happen to me. Nothing is going to happen to you either, I promise.”

His eyes cleared. “You can’t make promises like that.” He spoke a truth we both already knew too well.

“I can,” I whispered a lie we both needed.

I stepped away from him, his grip tightened for a millisecond before he let me go.

I moved around him, grabbing hold of the edges of his cut, feeling the worn and soft leather, a symbol of the hard life he was living.

I wanted to hate the cut. For what it took from me. For what it did to Liam. But I knew that it wasn’t the cut or the club that ruined him, it was another uniform, another symbol. If anything, it was the cut that saved him. Whatever of him was left to save.

He let me slip it off.

I hung it carefully on the back of a chair, staring at the grim reaper on the back for a moment. When I turned, I found emerald eyes, intense and focused like he was scared I’d fall right off the face of the earth if he moved his gaze.

I knew the feeling.

“Sit.” I pointed to the bed.

He obeyed.

“Boots.” I nodded my head downward to the muddy black motorcycle boots he always wore. I wondered how much of that was mud, and how much was blood.

Did it matter? Dirt and blood was all the same when it met the bottom of motorcycle boots.

Liam complied.

I bit my lip as I regarded him in his jeans and long-sleeved Henley.

A hunger that I’d pretended hadn’t been present and ever-growing was no longer easy to ignore.

Whatever had died between us—if anything ever had—the carnal way in which my body responded to his had only grown. I didn’t even know I was capable of feeling such an animalistic need. With the small number of men I’d had after him, I was only going through the motions. It was to see if a warm body might be able to chip some of the ice from my soul.

But this wasn’t a warm body. It was a soul as cold as my own.

It was Liam.

It was Jagger.

I didn’t know which man I was more attracted to.

It didn’t much matter.

I swallowed roughly.

Liam watched my throat. The veins in his neck stood out as if he were exerting some kind of great strength other than sitting on the bed.

“Don’t look at me like that, Peaches,” he begged.

Hunger ravaged his eyes. Pure carnal desire that shook me to the core.

But the pleading in his voice had me clutching onto reason and letting go of need.

“Lie down,” I said, my own voice little more than a rasp.

His eyes lingered on my body for a long and uncertain beat before he did as I asked.

He moved against the wall so I could lie beside him.

At first, my body was stiff, holding myself tight so I didn’t accidentally brush my skin against his. This was the closest I’d been to him voluntarily. I was in a bed with Liam, so close but also farther away than when we’d had an ocean between us. I ached to curl up to him, encase myself in his arms that had been second nature in another life.

But I couldn’t trust my instincts. Or I no longer had the right to act on them at least. I had belonged to a man named Liam and he had belonged to me. But in another world. Not in this one.

We lay there for a long while, side by side, not touching but somehow finding what little comfort we could in each other.

Darkness blanketed the room at some point, turning everything into shadows.

“I’m Jagger now,” he whispered against the darkness, speaking as though we were in the middle of a conversation, I wasn’t sure if it was the drugs or if it was us. “You know that. I’ve proved that to you.”

“No,” I said firmly as a response to the hopelessness in his tone. “You’ll always be Liam to me. Even if it’s only to me.”

I couldn’t decide whether I was lying or not. And sometime after trying to figure it out, impossibly, I fell asleep.

I expected him to be gone in the morning when sunlight and sleep heralded away the haze of drugs and whatever else had brought him here.

I wanted him to be gone in the morning, so I didn’t see him in the sunlight. So I didn’t wake up with him. Because even doing that once, I’d create a memory, and if there was one thing in the world that lasted forever, it was a memory. I knew that all too well.

He wasn’t gone.

It became painfully apparent when I woke, not curled into the fetal position like had become the norm for all these years.