My nails clawed at the fabric of his shirt. Digging in.
His fingers curled into my hair, scraping into my scalp, Richard’s voice raw, “I’ve felt you all along.”
That was it.
The walls crashed down.
Every reservation dismantled.
The rubble in flames at our feet.
We stood in them, in the fire that we’d walked through to get to this place, and I knew it didn’t matter that I didn’t have every answer—I trusted in this.
Richard watched me with those eyes for a baited beat.
In a moment of reverent silence.
“I don’t want to hurt you.” He brushed a thumb over the swelling on my jaw.
“You won’t. Just…kiss me, and don’t you dare stop.”
Then he curled his fingers tighter in my hair and dragged my mouth to his in a fiery, unapologetic kiss.
That storm hit land.
Mayhem.
A beautiful, unrelenting disaster.
A sudden deluge of desire.
A tidal wave of greed.
Bodies a needy collision of lust and everything we’d missed.
Our mouths hungry for what we’d been starving for over the last six years, nothing but nips of teeth and tugs of lips. Tongues delving into a tangle of devotion.
Richard hiked me higher, angling toward the wall to keep us balanced as I wrapped my legs around his waist.
The second I made contact, I moaned, rubbing myself at the hot, delicious friction of his hard cock that pressed at his jeans.
“Fuck. Baby.” He pressed a single hand to the wall and kept the other banded around my waist, angling me in the exact way he knew would light me up. “You are gonna kill me. Ruin me. Ruined me a long time ago,” he mumbled at my mouth.
I kept kissing him, biting and licking and stroking my tongue into his beautiful mouth, like I could taste the meaning of his song.
Knowing he would sing me.
That he would write me with those fingers and love me with that soul.
And I wanted it. Surrendered to it.
My nails sank into his shoulders. “Richard. I need you. I need you more than I’ve ever needed anything. I’m so tired of goin’ this alone.”
“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
