Falling into You (Falling Stars 3)

“You’re not alone. I’m right here, baby. Fall into me. Let me hold you. Let me support you. Everything I’ve ever done, I’ve done for you.”

His words spun around as frantic as our bodies reached and begged and hummed.

Those secrets there, vibrating, fracturing the stones, so close to being set free.

He hiked me higher and started to carry me up the stairs, both hands on the outside of my hips, holding me tight, the man never breaking our kiss. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

He kept repeating it as we ascended the stairs and he rushed down the hall. He stopped outside my bedroom door to kiss me deeper. “I go inside your room…you’re mine, Violet. This isn’t a quick fuck. It’s not a distraction. This is you and me going back to the way we were meant to be.”

“I think you know full well that I’ve always been yours.”

“Mine,” Richard grumbled in something that sounded akin to pain, and he jerked me from the wall and carried me the rest of the way into my room. He set me onto unsteady feet, shut the door, and flicked the lock. “Mine,” he said.

The man was a dark tower in the room, his shape an eclipse that covered me in warmth, sage eyes flashing in that magnetic way.

For a beat, we stared, our hearts a mangle of the years we’d lost, writhing in the space between us.

It was Richard who breached it, broke through the disorder, and my breath hitched when he dove in for a possessive, mind-altering kiss. No room left for questions. No space for reservations.

We were bare.

Vulnerable.

We turned a circle, orbiting the other, our mouths fused while we fought to free the other of their clothes. He grabbed the hem of my shirt and eased it over my head, remembering my injuries, while I ripped and fumbled to get his shirt over his head.

He helped me, stepping back to peel it up his gorgeous body and tossing it to the floor.

A gasp ripped up my throat, and I gaped at him.

Walls spinning around us while my eyes ate him up.

Devouring the hard, carved lines of his abdomen.

The man a sculpture.

A god.

But it was the tattoo that covered the entirety of his left side and chest that had me shaken. A haunting full moon hung over his ribs, and it was surrounded by a cluster of violets where it sat in the sky. Stars fell from that sky, falling and falling, disintegrating into nothing.

It was suspended over what was unmistakably the rolling hills of Dalton.

It gave me the impression that the tiny promise on the inside of his wrist hadn’t been enough.

Like he’d gotten lost and this had been his map, only somewhere along the way, his compass had gone missing.

“Richard,” I whispered, overcome, taken.

I could feel myself falling right through the sorrowful abyss of that sky.

Stepping forward, I kissed across the image, my hands gliding up his sides. “Richard. My husband. My sun that ushers in the day. You will always be the beat of my heart.”

I murmured my confession against the raging of his heart.

He set a hand on my cheek and gently urged me to look at him.

“My wife. My moonflower in my darkest night. You will always be the song of my heart.”

He repeated the same words he’d given me on our wedding day.

Our devotion.

Our loyalty.

My palm pressed over the thunder that rioted at his chest. “Then listen to what it says.”

I repeated what my mama had taught me.

My own compass beating strong inside of me.

And it was pointed directly to him.

In an instant, we crashed together.

I felt desperate with the need to touch him everywhere. To sink in. To erase any distance. Blot out the past and fill it with the future.

“Richard. Oh god. I missed you. I missed you.” The ramble of words poured out of my mouth while I left a frenzy of kisses over his twitching stomach and up his chest.

Kissing me and kissing me, he flicked the hook of my bra and dragged the straps down my trembling arms. My breasts felt heavy, aching for his touch, my nipples tightened into hard, needy peaks.

Richard obliged, diving down and taking one into his mouth.

A moan tremored through me, chills streaking across my skin and pumping need through every vein in my body.

Dumping it into every cell.

That deluge just grew higher.

I was drowning in a sea of fire.

Richard’s palms spread down my sides and around to grip me by the bottom while he kissed a line down between my breasts. He kept going, moving lower and lower until he was lightly kissing over the bruise marring my abdomen.

A second later, he was on his knees.

He stared up at me with those mesmerizing eyes as he hooked his fingers in the elastic band of the sleep pants I’d been wearing the entire day, and I was shaking and shaking as he slowly dragged them down, taking my underwear with them.