Blackbird (Redemption 1)

“Come on, let’s feed you.”

We’d spent hours after breakfast talking about nothing and everything while lying on the king-sized lounger in the cabana. I was pressed close to Lucas’s chest as I took my time studying his arms and his face for the first time, my lips twitching into little smiles every time he’d hum in appreciation when my fingers would trail over his tanned skin.

I paused over one of the many scars on the arm I was focused on and chewed on my bottom lip for a second before whispering his name.

One of his dark eyebrows lifted before his eyes slowly opened.

I start

ed to speak but stopped before I could ask my question.

“Whatever it is, ask.”

I searched his eyes for a few seconds, letting my gaze trail to where my fingers were drifting over his forearm. “I thought I knew you,” I began, my voice soft and unsure. “I thought I had you so figured out . . . but your arms make me wonder if there’s a part of you I don’t know at all.”

If I hadn’t been pressed so close to him, I wouldn’t have noticed how still he had become at my comment, because his face and his eyes gave nothing away. But I knew in the way he’d tensed I was right, and there was another layer to my devil I had yet to meet.

And as I lay there waiting for him to respond, I wondered if I wanted to meet him at all.

His brown eyes danced and his chest jerked from the force of his unexpected laugh. “My arms? What exactly are my arms telling you, Blackbird?”

I held his stare as I continued my slow dance up and down his arm. “You live in a multimillion-dollar home and have a driver. You wear suits ninety percent of the time and buy me everything, even if I don’t ask for or want it. You aren’t even thirty and you own an energy company—”

“I’m not the only owner.”

“You own a fifth of it, but it’s an equal share,” I amended. “You live in a world where men buy multiple women who are stolen from their lives, and where rape is a form of teaching those women a lesson. But somehow you’ve all twisted your minds to believe that raping them is still better than what they had before.”

Lucas’s eyes had gradually hardened with each point I brought up, and when he spoke, his voice was tight. “What’s your point, and what do my arms have to do with this?”

Without looking, I moved my hand down to where one of his tattoos began, the design wrapping around the inside of his left forearm. “These don’t fit.”

His eyebrows ticked up. “You don’t like my tattoos?”

“I didn’t say that. I said they don’t fit with the guy I just described. Especially not yours.” Before he could respond, I let my fingers slide up, tracing a long scar. “And neither do these. People have scars, Lucas, but you have so many,” I whispered as I moved to another, and then another. I studied the scar I was touching high up on his arm, and asked, “What happened to you?”

“That one was a bullet.”

My head snapped up at his reply. I hadn’t expected him to answer me, and I would’ve never expected that response. “What?”

But no matter how much I silently begged him to repeat himself, hoping that maybe I’d heard him wrong, he just stared at me as a minute passed by.

“Why were you shot?”

Instead of answering, he turned the conversation around to me. “Why do you stop singing when I walk into the room?”

As it had so often with Kyle, my body tensed. And just as I’d known I’d had Lucas not two minutes before, he now knew he had me.

He didn’t wait long for a response, and from the look he was giving me, he hadn’t expected one. He curled his large hand around my neck and traced feather-soft circles against my throat with his thumb as he spoke. “You don’t need me to tell you that your voice is beautiful; you already know it is. But you stop when you know I can hear you, and you sing when you’re scared . . . like it’s an involuntary reaction you can’t stop even though I could tell in those first days that you’d wanted to.” Another sweep of his thumb across my throat had my fear receding and my breaths growing heavy. “Now tell me, Briar, why would someone with a voice like yours be so afraid of it?”

Again, my body stilled, but it no longer had anything to do with the suspicion that crept through my body whenever anyone mentioned my voice . . .

Kyle had asked me countless times what I’d had to be afraid of when it came to singing, implying that I was good enough to do anything I wanted with my voice. But he’d never once in the years we’d been together noticed that I sang when scared, just as he’d never noticed I was afraid of my own voice.

But the man holding me . . . he missed nothing.

“There are parts of my life that you don’t know,” Lucas continued, “but there are parts of yours I haven’t begun to understand.”

I shook my head slowly, subtly. “You understand more than he ever did.” I didn’t have to say Kyle’s name. Lucas knew who I was talking about. “I used to love singing.”