Page 139 of Sinful Desires
My fingers tightened around the bottle until the plastic groaned.
She’d spent the last two days half naked, drinking fruit juice with umbrellas in it, and moaning about tan lines while some poor maid rubbed sunscreen on her back.
“I still don’t get why you’d leave all this for New York.”
“Same reason you run away here from a stage that’s bleeding you dry.”
Our eyes met.
Blue and grey. Fire and smoke.
Both of us burning for different reasons.
“Sometimes we don’t run because we want to,” I said. “We run because what we love is the very thing that ruins us.”
She stepped in closer, her finger drifting back to my chest, tracing the ink etched into my skin. Symbols. Numbers. Faces. Flowers.
She paused over my ribs, right where the bouquet of lavender was freshly inked.
Her brows pulled tight.
I saw the exact second she recognized it.
The same bouquet I used to leave on her nightstand. Every Thursday.
For a whole year.
“What are you running from, soldier?”
My breath became shallow as she leaned in. Her mouth brushed the tattoo, soft and warm and completely fucking undoing me. Then her arms slipped around my waist, and her forehead pressed to my bare skin.
“My mistakes.”
She looked up, her chin brushing against my ribs. “What mistakes?”
“The kind I can’t fucking forgive myself for.”
She hummed as her mouth grazed over me again. “Angelo said you saved his life?…?how?”
My lips pressed to the top of her head. “That bastard’s never been good at keeping his mouth shut.”
She smiled. “And you’ve never been good at letting anyone in.”
I tugged her braid roughly enough to tilt her head. Yanking the tie loose, I wrapped it around my wrist and ran my fingers through that red mess of hair, undoing it until it spilled down her chest.
“James Greg thought he could turn Lazzio’s legacy into ashes. Planted twenty-two micro-bombs inside the museum, tucked under ancient stones, embedded into ventilation shafts, masked as sensor triggers beneath the glass. Lazzio called me the night before the exhibit opened. Said his system flagged a breach and needed my help.”
I paused. Watched her fingers still against me.
“Three men placed them during daytime hours, dressed like tourists. I spent seven hours in front of a screen, scrubbing footage frame by frame. I disarmed them all alone through my system, sweating through every line of code, every bypass, every override, knowing one wrong move and they’d find Angelo’s body in pieces beneath the ruins of his own fucking legacy.”
I kissed her forehead.
“He offered me two hundred million as a thank you. But I wanted something else.”
She tilted her head, smirking. “What’s worth more than that, soldier?”
“You.”
