“Oh.”
One tiny sound as she jerked and fell.
I wasn’t prepared for the way she crumpled. The way her legs gave up supporting her. The way her body shoved aside her anger and tumbled pliant and welcoming into my arms. And I definitely wasn’t prepared for the way her eyes welled with a different kind of tear.
A tear full of heartache and years of hiding; a glistening, glittering joy that infected my heart until I felt forgiven. Understood. Redeemed.
Somehow, without saying a word, she gave me absolute absolution.
“I thought you hated me for that.”
“I did.” I pressed my forehead to hers, needing to be close, needing to sit down. “But not for reasons I made you think. Not for reasons I made myself believe.”
“You saw me that night? Truly saw me.”
“I saw that my feelings toward you were changing. That there was something unsaid between us. Something that wasn’t allowed. Something that only grew bigger and more incessant as we grew older.”
“Is this real?” she breathed. “Did you honestly just say you fell in love with me the night I fell in love with you?”
My knees quaked as I backed toward her bed, holding her tight and forcing her to trip with me. “I think I fell in love with you the day I returned for you in that house where I’d left you as a baby. The moment you saw me, you crawled so fast. You knew you were mine, and I was yours, even then. I’d never had anyone be so excited to see me. So innocent with their affection. So trusting that I’d keep her safe.”
I sat down heavily. The instant the mattress held my depleted weight, Della spread her legs and climbed onto my lap, her towel opening indecently, revealing naked heat-flushed skin that I desperately wanted to drink.
But I forced myself to keep my eyes on hers, adoring the way her legs wrapped around my back and her arms looped around my neck and our foreheads remained glued together, our eyes so close, our lips so near.
This was all so new, and yet, so heartbreakingly familiar.
This was Della.
She was my home.
“I’m not saying I fell in love with you in this kind of way,” I murmured as our lips inched closer. “I’m saying there are so many ways I fell in love with you. Most of them pure and utterly unconditional, but that night in the stable, the night you entered my dreams and made me plummet…that night was different.”
Her chest rose and fell, her nipples pink and tight in my peripheral vision as her towel fell away, draping damply over my arms where I hugged her.
She breathed quicker, harder, as our mouths crept ever closer, quietly, tentatively, afraid that any moment this perfection would shatter, and we’d wake from yet another life-tormenting dream.
“I’m sorry I made it impossible for you to stay,” she whispered, looking deep, deep into my eyes, all that trust and affection and connection back in place.
She was home, just like me.
She’d returned to being the girl I would kill for and the woman who had every power to kill me. Only this time, there were no shields. No blockage of honesty. No slurry of lies. The way she looked at me was unlike anything she’d done before.
I’d caught glimpses, sure. The nights in the forest after she’d run away. The moments before I’d head out for a shallow night of pleasure with unknown women. The seconds before I’d climb into bed and she’d stare at me from the corridor as I turned out the lights.
Glimpses and glances—windows into the world of just how desperately she loved me, the same world I’d been hiding from her.
“You didn’t make it impossible. You were trying to make things better by pushing me to admit what I was afraid of.” I brushed back her hair, my body hardening, heating. My mouth watering, tingling.
Our lips drew closer still, magnets intent on connecting.
A new kind of energy crackled around us—just as dangerous and potent, but this time, it was passion, not rage.
Passion I never believed I was permitted to feel around her.
Passion I never thought I could earn.
I basked in it, loving the spark and sizzle of her body pressed against mine. Of the wondrous anticipation of where this was going, the build-up of seventeen years of living in each other’s pockets, of being each other’s everything, of finally coming full circle from friends to possibly more.
More than I could ever deserve.
The first graze of mouths was barely there. A whisper of touch. A kick of taste. But my heart ran away, galloping and pounding as wild as our shared surname and just as feral.
Della jerked in my arms, sucking a shaky breath. Her legs squeezed around my waist, her arms twitching around my neck. “Ren?”
My eyes were too heavy to keep open. They went half-mast. My body aching. My mind messed and incoherent. “Yeah?”