Psycho indeed.
Within an hour, there was a city-wide BOLO—be on the lookout—for Elliette.
After evidence was collected—video footage and GPS location that put her cell phone in the area at the time of the tampering of my equipment—there was no going back from it.
She’d tried to murder me.
Long hours later, after everyone but Gable and Auden had gone home—they were currently on the couch in the living room, just in case—I was lying in bed next to Quinn and going over my day.
Remembering how helpless I’d felt as I’d fallen toward Earth, thinking that I’d ruined a lot of perfectly good years because of my fear.
Well, that wouldn’t be something that happened for me anymore.
And…
“I’m never going skydiving again,” I said to him, knowing he’d been lying there overthinking just like I’d been. “I’m… I’m never doing it again.”
It was something that I wasn’t going to get over.
Not ever again.
The helplessness. The utter horror that Quinn was going to have to watch me die.
“I’m glad,” he rasped, shifting in the bed to pull me just a little bit tighter. “I don’t think I’d have ever let you go again.”
I started to run my hand up and down the length of his abs, getting lower and lower each time.
It hadn’t been my intent to start stirring anything up for the two of us, but it was what happened.
“I’m sorry,” he rasped. “But I don’t think that I can do any of the work tonight.”
I twisted so that I was now on top of him, legs straddling his hips, and looking down at him.
“Gasp,” I teased. “You can’t perform, Quinn Carter?”
His hands ran up the length of my thighs, stopping when he met the crease of my hips before squeezing. “I can let you do all the work, but I’m too sore.”
I leaned forward and allowed my lips to drag up the length of his sternum, remembering how it felt to be cocooned in his arms right before we hit the ground.
He’d literally wrapped himself up around me, cocooning me from the fall that was going to rip us apart.
He held on throughout, too.
I remembered the moment of impact. The haybales. The smell of straw in my nostrils. The intensity of the impact.
I remembered the jolt and the hiss of air that left his lips, and the groan that followed.
I felt his throbbing cock as it pressed against my bare pussy—I’d only worn his t-shirt to bed—and I smiled against his chest.
Then I felt the press of my tooth—or lack thereof—and grimaced. “I hate to say this, but I’m vain enough that I want to get to the dentist tomorrow for a consult on getting my tooth fixed.”
He chuckled, his hands moving past my hip creases, underneath my shirt, to the smooth skin of my waist.
His hands spanned my belly, thumbs sweeping over my belly button and down, to right above my pubic bone.
“Can you be completely honest with me for a second?” he asked, pulling me in tighter to him.
Excitement flared in me at the feel of him there. “Yes.”