Page 77 of Deacon

“Fuck,” he says, eyes flicking up and down. “I got…I got a lot of adrenaline pumping through me.”

“Fuck me,” I whisper, nipping his broken bottom lip. He tastes like he’s wounded, not just plain blood.

He shakes his head. “No, sweetheart. Not now.”

“Deacon—”

His simmering, coal black eyes flash. “Not now.”

Since that day he took me home in the storm, he’s been open and gentle. But tonight, drenched in red, I can feel steel bars scraping up like gates, like a barrier between something dark that I tasted in the blacksmith shop but haven’t sunk my teeth into yet.

I think he might be different, deep down.

“Please,” I whisper. “Don’t leave me alone.”

He shakes his head—he keeps doing that, like he can shake off the frost creeping over his dark eyes. He turns on his heel, scooping up Stu, and disappears into the living room.

Unsure, I follow him. He sets the puppy in its pen and turns on me. I stumble back, but he scoops me up, holding me in both arms the way he carried me inside. He goes up the stairs, down the hall, and into his bedroom before I can react.

He kicks the door shut with his boot. I expect him to set me down, but he brings me into the bathroom and puts me on the sink. When he draws back, his brows are lowered.

“I don’t want to hurt you, sweetheart,” he says. “No fucking tonight.”

I wet my dry lips. “You won’t hurt me.”

“You don’t know me.”

The words come out forcefully. This time, I get the message.

He touches me like I’m breakable, like it matters if he hurts me. But he’s also violent, rough—I was so afraid he might be. He knows that all I know is violence, and he’s standing between me and himself right now so I don’t have to see what that side of him is like.

It’s heartbreaking.

I was foolish to think he was gentle with everyone the way he is with me. He’s a man, and he walks like one with all that confidence I’ll never have. Boots on his feet, gun on his belt, shoved up under his shirt. The hitch in his step is more a swagger, and there’s something else that’s been there all along but I haven’t noticed until tonight—he takes on the world like he doesn’t have backup.

Just him and his fists.

I don’t think people end up like that by accident. He’s carrying a lot of violence and darkness inside.

I stare up at him. For years, I looked out into my small world and I understood it. I sorted men into neat categories to keep them from hurting me.

Like Aiden.

Notlike Aiden.

Deacon doesn’t fit into either category, and that hurts my head and heart. He can be violent the way Aiden can, but I’d never have called him, scared and freezing in the driveway, if I didn’t know hewould protect me. My body knows something my head hasn’t realized yet.

It’s all too much. I’m scared. I don’t know where the train of me and him, which is now firmly hitched together, is headed.

“What is this?” I blurt out.

He sobers. He puts his hand on my cheek, holding it. His lids are low, and he’s got a faraway expression. “This is just me making sure you’re alright.”

“I’m alright,” I whisper.

“I want you to get some sleep,” he says. “I have to clean up.”

There’s no use arguing. There’s a little warning in his eyes, like he can be gentle if he wants, but he’s got enough edge to make me sit up and listen this time.

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