Page 85 of No Saint

Maybe my head wasn’t working properly yet because I couldn’t have heard him right.

“Yes.”

“Why do I need a bodyguard!?”

“Do we really need to discuss that,leonessa?”

“But –”

“You can fight me later,” Gabriel lifts my hand, running his thumb over the small bruise on top where they’d hooked the lines. And then he shocks me by bringing the injury to his lips, kissing it gently. “I was scared.”

Suddenly the partition starts to lift between the front and back seats, blocking out Enzo. Gabriel smiles a little.

“Bastard has a thing against affection,” He jokes.

“Gabriel…”

Gabriel lifts his fire eyes to meet mine, “I thought I lost you before I even had you, Amelia.”

“I’m okay.”

He sighs heavily, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, I forgive you,” I rush out.

“I’m supposed to protect you!” He drops his brow to my hand before placing another kiss on the top. He then turns it, running his nose alone the thin skin on my wrist, following the thin blue lines of my veins, “I failed.”

“Gabriel,” I start.

“I want you, Amelia. Iwantyou. I’ve had you once and it wasn’t enough. I need more of you. And then I found you in the pool, and you were bleeding…”

“You’ve seen people hurt, Gabriel, I was fine.”

“I’ve seen a lot of shit, Amelia. I never want to see you hurt again.”

He presses his lips to my skin.

“Gabriel,” I thread my fingers into his hair, “You have me.”

33

Amelia sleeps but not in the same bed she was used to. Instead, I’d set her up with me, coaxed her into my own and now she rests beneath the heavy blankets, her body small and drowning in the pillows and sheets.

I take a step towards the bed only to stop in my tracks at the sound of a child’s cry. Lincoln was home.

I had very little experience with children, but I knew Amelia needed her rest, so for the first time since she was injured, I leave her.

I find my mother in the den, trying, and failing, to soothe a very upset Lincoln. He thrashes and screams in her arms, lashing out.

“What’s going on?” I demand.

“He needs his mother,” my mother says, soothing the boy as best she could. My mother was the best there was with children, having raised me, my brother and then the twins after my father took them. She helped with my men’s kids, treating them like family, their mothers too. She was a family type through and through so when I finally look at her, see the exhaustion, the loss of fight, I know she’s been trying to keep Lincoln happy far longer than healthy. The boy needed his mother, and no amount of coddling right now would fix it.

Amelia was a fantastic mother, anyone could see it and witnessing Lincoln’s unease to be without her, it cemented the fact, the fact I’d known right from the start, that she was the best person for my nephew, the best mother.

“Give him to me,” I demand but my mother hesitates.

A small pang of hurt radiates in my chest at her distrust. I’d never hurt the boy, I wouldn’t but deep down she didn’t believe that. My own mother.

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