Page 38 of Assassin's Prey
Smooth palms slid along my cheeks, drawing me down until our foreheads met. I was so close I could see the individual blue and green and brown stripes in her irises. Close enough that I couldn’t miss the flash of something uncertain as her gaze dropped to my mouth.
“Do you?” she asked.
I dug my fingertips in deep, grinding my semihard cock against the softness of her belly. “Of course I do.” How could she doubt that?
Abby dropped her gaze to the tie, hiding her expression. “I want you to love more than just my eyes, Levi,” she whispered.
My knee-jerk instinct was to force her head back, take her mouth in a long, hard, branding kiss, and not stop until we were both sweaty and sated. I didn’t. That would be a way to hide, to keep the focus on sex and not being as naked before her as she’d just made herself before me. Abby deserved so much more.
Instead I took a long, deep breath, gathered my fucking courage, and transferred my grip to her neck, holding her still as I stared straight into those goddamn gorgeous eyes.
“I love you, little bird.”
Her eyes went wide.
I leaned in until my lips brushed hers. “I love you. I have from the moment you stared up at me with those eyes and said yes when I asked you to dance.”
“Before you kidnapped me?” she asked, one side of her mouth quirking up.
Maybe even before that. I had spent days watching her, learning her habits, waiting for just the right opportunity. I’d wanted her as much for me as I had for revenge by the time I approached her at the club that night we met. It would’ve been so easy to snatch her at any time, but I hadn’t been able to resist the chance to take her to bed before I took her away from her life. Call me a bastard, but I’d needed her in a way I was only now beginning to understand. Only now that I’d realized I loved her.
It was Abby who kissed me then, soft and sweet and honest. The kind of honesty I’d tended to avoid before with fast, hard sex. Abby had taught me better; in the months we’d been together, she’d taught me that it truly was safe in her arms.
“Have you thought about what this means?” she asked as she went back to work on my bow tie. Like she needed a focus, which, granted, I could understand considering the confusing loops and tucks she was performing under my chin. But that wasn’t why she was avoiding my eye. The question was anything but casual.
“That I love you?”
“No.” She flipped me a glance of pure joy at the declaration, though. Did just sayingI love youreally mean that much to women? “That you’ll be outing yourself to society.”
The shudder that hit me couldn’t be hidden. “Only because those are the circles Chadwick runs in. The circles that matter.”
Abby laid her hands flat on my chest. “Those are also the circles that will know very quickly about your inheritance. Once you do this, you’ll have no choice but to claim it. What is that going to mean to you? Your life? Your brothers’ lives?”
The shudder was nothing compared to the surge of fear that hit me. Fear had been nonexistent in my life since I’d learned to use my fists. Abby was the only person on the planet that could make me afraid, and this step, necessary though it might be to protect everyone, could change our life together. Would she want to go back to what she’d known before, the glitz and glamour and wealth her father had been immersed in? Would she find someone else, someone more sophisticated, less ruthless? Would she still want me if I chose to continue the life I’d led up to now? I’d never known anything else, not really. Two-thirds of my life had been tied up in violence.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I don’t know what to expect, what I want.”
A vee dug deep between her eyebrows. “But…?”
“But…not doing this would mean walking away from my parents, and I can’t do that, not anymore. There are a hundred practical reasons to go public, but the one that really matters to me is making the past right. For them.”
She kissed me again, but it wasn’t soft or sweet this time. Apparently my woman had a thing for altruism.
“Explain to me again where we’re going?” I asked when she released me. Tuxedo pants weren’t exactly made to accommodate a screaming erection.
Abby stepped back, eyed my dilemma—which only made it worse—and snorted in amusement before turning her attention to my question. “The St. Mary’s Sisters of Charity was the place that took my mother in when she ran away from home.”
Abby’s mother had escaped an abusive family as a teen, I knew, and been helped by the shelter here in the city to get on her feet. “So the charity dinner is for them?”
“Among others,” she said. “It’s an annual event that highlights charities for the homeless in the city. St. Mary’s is honored every year.”
“Why did they invite you when you aren’t on the society circuit anymore?” Abby had lived quietly in her new home, far from the circles her father, then a gubernatorial candidate, had frequented. All she’d wanted was to go to school, have friends, get a job, have a boyfriend. Be normal.
My heart squeezed.
“Because when I sold Derek’s mansion, I donated the money to them.”
This time my heart stopped. That was millions of dollars.
