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“Stop being sorry for surviving, Caroline. Stop hating yourself for wanting something good.”
Knox took another stride closer. The rubber band tension eased. There was just two feet of distance.
My chest started to heave with oncoming sobs. I searched his face, seeking answers—seeking hate, lies, something to reveal all this was just pretty pretense.
I couldn’t find a single thing but raw honesty.
It broke me open completely. “What if that something’s you?”
Knox exhaled sharply. “Then fucking take it, Caroline,” he breathed. “Take me. Because I’m standing right here.”
I snapped the rubber band.
I collided into his arms and kissed him like it was the last thing I’d ever do.
CHAPTER 25
KNOX
I wanted Walter Bates’s head on a platter as much as I wanted to stick my tongue down his daughter’s throat. But I didn’t see her as Bates’s daughter anymore. I saw her as just Caroline, my spitfire, mine.
And I was going to do fucking everything to make her see that, too.
We fucked again, and damn was it good. It was a release in more ways than one.
The bed springs creaked like crazy, and the people on the other side of the wall banged their fists against it, shouting to stop fucking like animals.
Obviously, we didn’t.
Not until I made Caroline come so hard we had to shower and collapse onto the other bed in each other’s arms.
My hands skimmed her body, cupping her ass, palming her tits. All her marks, from Vane and running from everything she knew, were still present but fading—the physical evidence, at least. Her fingertips trailed down my chest and abdomen, then back up to tenderly touch my face.
I winced and said, “I feel like tenderized meat.”
Caroline rolled her eyes, but she was fighting a smile. “You look it, too. You’re an ugly motherfucker.”
“You’ll still let me finger you, right?”
“Yeah.”
She spread her legs, but then her brows furrowed, and I stopped. “What?”
She touched my inner right arm where my Devil’s Luck patch was inked—a skull and three shamrocks behind it. “Your patch.”
“Yep,” I said, remembering the day I got it. “Jackson was there with me. Local guy, pretty cool. It felt like a rite of passage, you know?”
“Hm,” was all she responded with. I didn’t like the tone, but before I could ask, her touch moved to the one barbed wire around my left bicep. “This one is…”
I chuckled. “Shitty.”
“You said it, not me.”
“Sixteen-year-old me thought it was so edgy and rebellious. Cheap back-alley job. Didn’t mean a damn thing back then except one thing—that I owned my body. First thing I ever really chose for myself. I got it three days before Harlon died.”
“This one?” she asked, feeling the Roman numerals on my ribs. “Even more edgy.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said with mock boasting. “The date my mom died. Hurt like a motherfucker.”