Page 53 of Ruthless Consequences

“Ung! Ung!”

I let up on the paper and Minnie goes back to scribbling.

“You know,” I snap.

He shrugs. “We had a talk.”

“Henevertalks. Not to us.”

“He talked to me.” His eyes turn to the glass and then back to me. “It had something to do with finding a strange man in his house—alone.”

“I had to get Minnie. I didn’t think he’d be home so soon.”

“Doesn’t change what happened.”

“What happened?”

“I told him who I was. He reacted. I respect him for that. For respecting you and your feelings.”

“Who did you tell him you were?”

“Not your boyfriend.”

My eyes narrow.

“We both know it’s more than that.”

The look he’s giving me, and his words, hit me straight where he did last night. It’s starts in my heart and ends between my legs. I can still feel him moving all through me. My eyes soften, and so does his. My mouth parts, and he licks his bottom lip. We’re being pulled again. My eyes flick to the end of the hall and then back to him. The once haunted room has never seemed so far before. But now it’s filled with something else. Warm memories of us.

“You okay, baby?”

His eyes are narrowed, and the expression on his face is severe. I open my mouth to respond, to tell himwhy wouldn’t I be?But suddenly, it feels like all the blood has drained from my body. The last thing I remember is falling into his arms.

SIXTEEN

LILO

PRESENT DAY

I steppedout of the door, and my boot bumped a solid mass knocked out on the doorstep. Mooch looked up at me. Not really caring that he was in my way, though, he went back to sleeping with his head on his two front paws. His leash extended two steps down.

Lucila was sitting on the second, her back and elbows resting on the first. Her face was turned up to the sun, and her eyes were closed. Her knees swayed from side to side to some imaginary beat inside of her head. Or maybe she was remembering the melody I had just been playing for Ma.

If it wasn’t for the flush of her face and the constant movement of her legs, I would have been picking her up in my arms to make sure she hadn’t lost consciousness. Years ago, after she passed out on me, we found out she was anemic. The doctor had called it thalassemia minor. He’d used a lot of unfamiliar words, but when I told him to speak plainly, he’d said that she had a less severe case. People of Mediterranean descent had a higher chance of getting it. And it was inherited.

Sonny had thought back and was sure his grandmother and mother had had it. But they had called it a “blood disorder” and tried to rectify the situation by eating a lot of red meat. Because Lucila had a less severe form of it, it had probably gone unchecked, passed off as panic attacks or tiredness, until her body had run so low it didn’t have enough oxygen to sustain her.

Something about the way her legs were positioned, and the sway of her knees, told me she was thinking about something other than the music, though. The look on her face, how she softly brought her hand to her throat, letting her fingers drift over her heart and linger, said everything she didn’t have to.

She was thinking about us. All the nights and days we couldn’t get enough. I’d never buried myself inside of a woman until the first time with her. And I wasn’t referring to sex, though that was how it started—me wanting to give her something of mine to protect.

She was the safest place I’d ever been. The one place I knew no one could find the pieces of me that I wanted to bury. The pieces that were not touched by the darkness and could live inside of her light.

It was the first time that sex, or fucking, had ever become something else entirely for me. It was more than my body using a woman’s to get off. The first time with Lucila, emotions tangled me up, permanently twisting my life with hers. It had become more than just about pleasures of the flesh. It went so much fucking deeper. It was an emotional connection that could never be severed.

Her flesh, though? It spoke to mine. And my dick got hard just looking at her. She carried so many of our memories that it was like a sweet scent around her. I breathed it in, and stronger than a rush in the vein, it could take me back.

How she tasted. The noises she made. How warm and wet she was when I was deep inside of her. When our eyes locked, there was no escaping whatever it was that possessed us.

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