Together, we walk down the stairs and we say nothing. Together, we walk into the living room where we sit down again, where we’d been when this all started, where our food still sits. I close the lids and take it all to the kitchen where I store it. When I come back, Eric is standing at the window with a Rubik’s cube in his hand. I don’t close the space between us. I just know on some level that he needs me to be here, but that he needs space. Instead, I pick up one of the cubes and hold it in my hand, watching him. Time passes by, told in the darkening of the sky, the disappearance of stars, the shift of the city lights beyond the window where he stands, the window that frames this room on top of the world where we hide. Where he thinks. Where the man, who is like no one I have ever known, thinks through what comes next. Right now, the storm is at bay. Right now, every bullet I feared might fly remains locked and loaded in a weapon that is this man. Right now, he’s more savant than man, and it’s the man that will hold that weapon.

I don’t know how much time passes, but sud

denly he goes from standing there to pressing his hands on the glass, his chin on his chest, and I have this sense he’s emerged from a tunnel. He’s here. He’s present. He’s made decisions and those decisions are where trouble could emerge. This is where the man takes control. This is where this woman, his woman, needs to be ready to take control.

I set down the cube and stand up, hurrying across the room. Once I’m behind Eric, I wait, giving him time to face me, but I have this sense of him waiting on me, on him willing me to come to him. I slide between him and the bar running in front of the window, in almost the exact spot where he’d demanded I tell him everything. I don’t touch him. He doesn’t touch me. We just stand there, staring at each other, so close we could touch. So close that we are fire and there is no ice to be found. That’s how we operate. That’s how we ignite when we’re near.

He reaches up and caresses my cheek, goosebumps lifting on my skin with that touch, tingling sensations sliding all through my body. “Princess,” he says softly, and that word is both silk and blade to me. Silk on his tone, and in that rough, sexy voice of his, but still it cuts. It cuts in so many ways.

I want to tell him to stop calling me that damn name again, as I have before. I want to tell him to never call me that again. His hands are suddenly on my upper arms, his eyes holding mine. “That name is on my body forever. Your name. To me, it means Harper. It means my heart.”

His heart. He’s my heart and I’m bleeding for him right now. “I didn’t tell you. I wanted to but—”

“I wouldn’t have wanted to tell you either.”

“Would you have?”

“I’d like to say yes. I’d like to say that you deserved to know, but I would have battled with that decision.”

He’s okay. I can tell he’s okay. My hand settles on his chest and his heartbeat is steady. “How are you okay right now?”

“I already knew they’d done something to trigger her decision.”

“You thought Gigi had.” My fingers curl on his chest. “Your father—”

“Is born of the same cloth. I knew that.”

“Everyone wants to believe they have a parent that cares about them.”

“I had that. I still do. My mother will always be with me. She’s always dictated many of my decisions. She’s always been my moral compass, not Grayson. She just spoke through him.” There is more to that statement. Something he hasn’t said. Something he doesn’t want to say.

“Eric—”

“They have to pay.” His voice is hard. His emotions controlled. This is not the man on the plane who’d just found out that his father was following us to New York. Whatever trigger that hit is gone now. Controlled. Dealt with. This is about control and Eric has it. “You have to know that,” he adds, and then repeats. “They have to pay, Harper.”

I could fight him on this. I could bring up my mother. I could say so many things, but the truth is, my mother hid this from Eric. My mother hid this from law enforcement. I have to trust Eric right now. He needs to know that I’m with him, the way his father knows that my mother is with him. She’s made her choice. Now I have to make mine. And so, I ask simply, “How?”

CHAPTER NINE

Harper

“What do you want to do, Eric?” I ask, my hand on his bare chest, where I often lay it, over his heart, that is steady, still even. He remains calm.

Suddenly he’s tangling fingers in my hair and pulling me to the edge of the couch, his body trapping mine against the arm. “Aren’t you going to tell me to save your mother?”

“I think this family has told you enough. You don’t need that from me, too.”

“What about your mother?”

“I don’t even know who she is anymore, Eric. How can she know what he did and still protect him? I told you, I let myself believe it wasn’t true because if it was, you lost your father and I lost her. And so we did. So we have.”

“Harper,” he whispers, his voice a raspy torment. “I want to protect you. I want to protect her to protect you, but damn it, she—”

“Doesn’t deserve it. I know. But I want to. I do. And I want to protect you. Nobody protects you and that’s another reason I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want to hold the blade that cut you deeper, and yet I did. I’m the one who told you.”

“They cut me. Not you. You—you make me whole again.” His mouth closes down on mine, wicked and hot, and I’m drowning in his anguish and pain. It’s not controlling him, but it’s there, it’s living inside him, tunneling straight to his soul and I have this sudden sense that if I don’t rip it out from inside him, it might just end him, not his father.

I lean into him, press my body to his body, trying to get closer, trying to be there with all that pain, absorbing it, taking it from him. He tears his mouth from mine and stares down at me, his eyes glinting with some unnamed emotion, some judgment I don’t understand.

Tags: Lisa Renee Jones Filthy Trilogy Romance
Source: readsnovelonline.net