Page 25 of Charming But Reckless

His eyes went wild as he took in the scene.

Ronan turned to me a minute later and nodded. I climbed out of the back, and it was his voice that stopped me before I could really move.

"Arick," he said.

When I looked at the man again, I noticed he had the same eyes, the same nose and lips, the same cheekbones that I remembered from our youth. They were just much more refined, more… manly.

Attraction shot through me before I could catch hold of it.

"Orion," I called back, letting him know that yes, it was me, and I did know who he was.

He started down the steps slowly. I moved around Ronan and the open car doors to meet him halfway.

When we were face to face, I realized just how much we had both changed. He was taller than me, just by an inch or two. And there were subtle differences I’d missed at a distance.

With how close we were, the smoke from our warm breaths intertwined.

"It's really you. You're here.”

I nodded. "I am. I was told you have someone important to me here. My son."

He smiled then, and that feeling of attraction returned.

God, he was beautiful. Maybe stunning was a better word..

These feelings weren't something my adolescent mind could have come up with. He was my best friend back then, my protector.

And now he stood in front of me, a full-grown man, in his pajamas, after having kept my son safe until I could find them. I was defenseless against anything but appreciation and respect, along with a familiar sense of love.

I had never stopped loving my best friend for everything he'd done for me, for all the ways that he stood by my side back then. Now, the older version of him had also earned that same affection, just for very different reasons.

"Where is he?" I asked.

"He's asleep. I was with him. He was having nightmares.”

I closed my eyes tightly. It wasn't a relief to know that he was having nightmares. At the same time, I did feel a sense of balance that Orion was who helped him through.

Because at one point, he had been there for me too when the nightmares had come.

It was a full circle moment, that was for sure.

Fate or destiny or whatever higher power I needed to believe in had arranged it to where my son would wind up in the hands of the one person in this world that I would have trusted him with.

“Is everything else okay? How has he been?”

Orion shook his head, his teeth digging into his bottom lip. “I can't,” he started, then stepped forward, closing the gap between us. His arms wrapped around my shoulders, pulling me tight to his chest.

“I'm sorry, I can't keep talking to you like we’re strangers. It's you, Arick. You're here. I've been looking for you for years.”

My arms went around him as a confession. I couldn't not hold him back. I couldn't avoid touching him and letting the relief I felt move through us both.

Not just relief about Sol, but also relief that someone somewhere had cared about me. That for as many times as I had thought about him and wondered what happened, he had also thought about me.

I felt a flicker of guilt knowing that I made his job that much harder whenever I decided to scrub our presence from existence. Sure, it was to keep us safe, but also how many times did he come up against a brick wall when everything would have been laid out in black and white had I not made that choice?

The men around us remain quiet while we hugged. It was as if they understood the severity of the moment. They accepted just how deep this bond was even if they didn’t have the full picture.

Hell, I didn't even have the full picture. I had no clue what happened to Orion all those years ago. He doesn't know what happened to me once he left. We'd have to hash it all out at some point.

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