Page 67 of Clean Slade
“King—” Slade stepped into my room, and I jumped, not expecting anyone to follow me.
But of course, Slade had. He was a good man. He’d helped a perfect stranger, uprooted his life for him, risked his life for him, and I’d put him in even more danger by making him a target for my father’s sadistic games.
He was too good. That was what he was. And I was taking advantage of him and hated it.
“Sorry. I should have knocked. Are you okay?” He stepped toward me, but I backed up, putting my hands in the air as if he were trying to attack me when, in reality, I was only trying to protect him from my world. My stupid, fucked-up world.
“No. I’m not. I can’t do it, Slade. I can’t…”
I stopped myself before I said something I’d regret. I didn’t need to make him a part of this. No more than he already was.
“You can’t do what? Talk to me. I can help you.”
I knew he meant well, but no one could help me out of this mess I’d created.
Maybe it would have been better if I’d never run. Maybe I should have just accepted my father and the family I came from. Maybe Mac would be okay. Grams would raise her well, how to be smart, think before she acts, and stay out of the men’s way. She’d teach her all about the family and how to protect herself from our rivals. Maybe she’d already be a master martial artist had I stuck around.
I was. I’d been dumped into a room and beaten until I’d learned to defend myself and take a life without a second thought.
“You can’t. No one can,” I told him, and I felt the wall against my back and the urge to slide down to the floor and cry like the weakling I was.
But I couldn’t do that. Not now and not in front of Slade. Not when he looked at me like he was making me a thousand promises he’d never keep if he found out the truth about me.
I didn’t deserve kindness and certainly not the amount he’d offered me ever since he met me. I was a monster, and he was anything but.
“Why do you think that? Why do you think you have to carry whatever you’re carrying alone?” His steps were slow as he approached me, and I felt each of them pound through me like a heartbeat.
His eyes burned the back of mine with their intensity, their sincerity. How could he look at me like that when he knew I was hiding something?
He wasn’t stupid. It’d be insulting to him to think he was. He knew I hadn’t shared everything with him, especially after the way I’d reacted tonight, and yet he still looked at me like I was this perfect little angel that could do no wrong.
“Be…because I have to,” I croaked as he stood only inches from me and his breath stole mine.
He was all muscle and warmth. Standing so close to him was like standing in front of an electric fence, leaning toward it even though you knew it would burn you, but you had no power to resist.
I’d never imagined that the man I’d shared a moment of bliss with in the midst of chaos, the man I’d crawl back to in the back of my mind and relive his touch to keep my sanity, would be in my life now, standing so close to me, wanting more from me than I could give.
Before I set my eyes on him at the Outpost, I’d started to believe I’d made him up, that he was a figment of my imagination. A hallucination that had kept me from losing my mind after Annie was murdered and the world crumbled under my feet.
But he wasn’t. He was real.
So real.
“Why?” His whisper charged the air between us, his exhale the spark to my gasoline.
I opened my mouth, the invite as clear as the attraction between us, and he leaned into it, into me, overcome with desire and something else.
Need.
I craved nothing more than his lips, his hands, his cock deep inside me. A rough and fast encounter just like the one we’d had all that time ago when I’d let loose and caved in, let him paint my grim world with the colors of his rainbow.
His mouth became a ghost over mine, and time seemed to stop around us, all the noise drowned by the tension of our beating hearts threatening to rip from our chests so they could become one.
I swallowed the knot in my throat with a sound like a torpedo in the stillness of the moment, and I knew no matter my resolve or strength, I couldn’t resist him any longer.
I closed whatever distance was left between us and tasted him, reconciling the memory with the man. Everything faded into the background. Time slowed to a halt. The sound drowned in the bliss that were his lips and my breath stopped for fear of disrupting the sanctitude of the moment.
Because his kiss? It was like an altar and I the acolyte to whatever beautiful faith this was.
