Can't Tie Me Down! (Sinclair Sisters 1)
“Okay,” she whispered, never taking her eyes from him. “I have a confession.”
“Yeah?” His heart stuttered, and he hoped this was a good confession, because he didn’t think he could take one that came with disappointment. Not when she was finally looking at him without the fear that had lived in her eyes for far too long.
“I still love you,” she said.
Keir breathed in her words, with his eyes closed, and his head bent forward. He’d spent years dreaming of hearing those words from her lips.
“I want to put the past behind us,” she said. “I want to try again.”
He shook his head, hardly believing this was real. “You destroy me,” he whispered before he threaded his fingers into her hair and pulled her lips to his.
She tasted of strawberries and chocolate, and she sank into his embrace without a moment’s hesitation. He kissed her long, hard, deep—stamping his possession on her mouth. Letting her know, through his kiss, that he was never letting her go. Never again. When they broke for air, he rested his forehead against hers.
“I have a confession of my own to make,” he said.
“Yeah?” She slid her hands under his shirt and up his chest, distracting him with her sensual touch, until she caressed the tattoo that sat over his heart. “Does it have anything to do with this tattoo that looks suspiciously like curly red hair?”
He smiled and pressed a kiss to her nose. “You figured that out, did you?”
“It wasn’t exactly subtle, babe.”
His heart thrilled at the endearment, but he had to get rid of the last barrier between them. “I need to tell you about the night I left you.”
“I don’t need to hear it, Keir. I’ve thought about it and realized that I was too hurt and angry to notice something obv
ious about that night.”
He stilled, hardly daring to breathe. “What was that?”
“That it was completely out of character for you. You wouldn’t have left me unless there was a good reason.” She frowned. “It has something to do with whoever was in that car with you, doesn’t it? The people you wouldn’t sell out to the police.”
“Aye, Rusty, it has a whole lot to do with them”—he took a deep breath—“and the fact I wasn’t even in the car.”
He watched realization dawn. “It was Sean. You took the blame for him. He was always in trouble back then. You stepped in to keep him from getting some serious jail time, didn’t you?”
“Aye. I thought they would give me a rap on the knuckles and send me away, but they sent me to jail instead.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You were mad, gorgeous. Spitting mad. We couldn’t trust that you wouldn’t take our secret straight to the police. Then I’d have stayed locked up for lying under oath and perverting the course of justice, and my idiot brother would have done time too.”
She huffed. “Okay, I’ll give you that, because it’s exactly what I would have done.”
“I left you that night because I had to save my brother. I had to buy him a chance to get away from the losers he was hanging out with and turn his life around.”
“And he did.” She didn’t sound happy about it, and he suspected that it would take his grudge-bearing redhead years to get past it.
“Aye, but you need to know I would never have left your bed for something less than that. Something less than life or death.”
“He didn’t die,” Mairi said with a pout. “But I can fix that.”
“Don’t tempt me. Between that night and this mess with the hacking, I’m sorely tempted to put him out of his misery as well.”
“Agnes says I stay angry for an unreasonably long time and that I can’t think rationally while I’m like that. There’s a good chance I’ll make Sean suffer for years. I feel I should tell you this, because of the whole brother love thing.”
He wisely kept his mouth shut about her tendency to bear a grudge long term. “You should also know that he hacked your site and set up this whole husband competition to force the two of us together. He said we were stuck in a stalemate, and he wanted to make you notice me again.”
That didn’t make her look any happier. “Maybe we should wait until I calm down before we deal with Sean.”