Devour (Unbreakable Bonds 4)

Ian blinked back tears of relief and joy and fear. He knew that Hollis was joking so he wouldn’t worry, but he couldn’t hold back the words any longer. Didn’t see any reason to. “You know I love you, right? I don’t care if it’s too fast or that maybe you don’t feel that way about me. I need you to know that I’m not going anywhere. That I want to watch movies with you and argue about who’s making dinner and whether or not we should get a dog. I want you. I want us.”

Hollis’s mouth twitched, but his bottom lip was split and swollen so Ian couldn’t quite tell if it was a smile or a grimace. “You know I’m never gonna be like Lucas or Snow. I like cheap beer and casseroles and holey jeans. I’m just a cop. Well, I was…I—”

Leaning down, Ian gently pressed his lips against Hollis’s to stop his words. “I love you exactly the way you are. Especially your holey jeans.”

“I fucking love you, Ian Pierce. And you are never getting rid of me.”

Ian smirked down at Hollis, though the man couldn’t see it. “Deal, but I think you need to leave the cooking to me for a little while.”

Hollis started to let out a heavy sigh but stopped suddenly, wincing again. “Fine. If you insist.”Chapter 20Ian hadn’t realized what having Jagger gone from the world would actually do for him. It felt like he’d been carrying around a smothering black entity that kept him from truly breathing clean air deep into his lungs or seeing the world without shadows. He hadn’t realized that while he’d been loved and free, he hadn’t truly felt any of those things. He couldn’t help but wonder what everything would feel like now. His friends had given him a new world, a new family, but he’d still looked at everything through a filter of fear because one threat had never gone away.

And he felt no guilt over killing the man who’d made his teen years a nightmare. A man who’d made a lot of lives nightmares. He’d thought taking a life would carry a burden, but he felt weightless like a balloon free to soar high through the sky to look down on everything with new eyes.

He hadn’t realized the stain Boris Jagger had left on his soul until now.

He wanted to run, to laugh, to have wild, noisy sex with the sexy detective sleeping in the back seat of his car.

Lowering the rear-view mirror so he could glance at Hollis as he drove, he couldn’t help but smile. There wouldn’t be any athletic sex anytime soon because his cop had been roughed up, but they could freely be together. In home, in public.

Ian didn’t have to look over his shoulder in fear ever again.

It was all he could do to not put on some power anthem and sing at the top of his voice. It was probably too soon in the relationship to introduce Hollis to his favorite car-singing songs. Grinning, he glanced at him again.

It was no wonder Hollis had passed out five minutes into their drive. Between grueling police questions, Lucas’s surgery, and Hollis’s own injuries, they were just now getting free nearly twenty-four hours after Jagger had fallen in the museum cave. The sun was setting in streams of red, orange, and gold over the city. He pulled the car off the expressway and up the winding hill into Westwood, less than fifteen minutes from downtown, but a seemingly long distance from his own condo in Mount Adams. If Hollis left his house for Ian’s for a late-night booty call, it could take the man well over twenty minutes to get there. Unless he had one of those dashboard police lights that would allow him to cut through traffic.

Smirking, Ian pushed the thought aside, focusing on the directions spit out by the GPS on his phone. He took in the older, blue-collar neighborhood with the two-story homes and chain-link fences. Amusement brought a smile to his lips as he realized that he was one-hundred percent into a relationship with the man but hadn’t seen where he lived.

There would be more questions from the police. More paperwork. But Lucas’s lawyer, Sarah, had told him that everything had been caught on security cameras, so it was obvious the killing of Boris Jagger had been self-defense. Ian got the feeling Hollis might be in more trouble than he’d let on, though. His captain had shown up at the hospital and the fierce conversation they’d had in private had looked rough and left Hollis paler than before.

Christmas lights were popping on up and down the street and large evergreens glowed with white twinkles. The streets were relatively barren for a Sunday evening. Everyone was tucked away in their homes as the street lamps came on. It was just a week until Christmas, but it didn’t feel like it. The chaos of the past three weeks had left him feeling disconnected from the world and while he was anxious to return to his restaurant and settle back into his life, he wasn’t ready to leave this bubble he found himself in with Hollis.