Page 26 of Faron (The Golden Team #8)

Blue

H e didn’t speak as he guided me down the hallway.

No lights. No rush. Just his hand, warm and steady on the small of my back, his thumb tracing soft circles on the bare skin under my shirt like he was memorizing me with touch alone.

And God help me — I wanted to be memorized.

Bear curled up by the bedroom door like a sentinel, his big head dropping onto his paws, eyes watching us with something close to approval. I’ll guard you two this time, he seemed to say.

Faron nudged the door shut with his boot.

He turned me toward him, the soft slant of streetlight catching his face in the dark — jaw bruised, eyes tired, mouth tight with everything he wasn’t saying. Everything he didn’t have to.

I lifted my hands to his face. My thumbs brushed the ridges of old scars and new ones, the bridge of his nose, the sharp line of his jaw.

“Say something,” I whispered.

He leaned in, forehead to mine, breath feathering my lips.

“You first.”

“Idiot.”

He laughed. Quiet. Broken. Whole.

“Meanest doctor in LA.”

Then he kissed me — slow, reverent, devastating — like he didn’t care that the world was falling apart outside my walls. Like he was here to ruin me one last time… or maybe save me for good.

I lost my shirt first — not torn, not rushed. Just slipped off and forgotten. His hands were careful but firm, his mouth tracing the path down my neck like he was rediscovering a homeland he never stopped dreaming about.

When the backs of my knees hit the bed, I caught his face in my hands.

“Don’t be gentle if you don’t want to,” I rasped.

His grin in the dark was pure sin. “Blue, I haven’t been gentle with you a day in my life.”

He pushed me down — mouth, breath, hands. He undid me like I was his favorite prayer and he’d been starved for worship.

He tasted like sweat and steel and the kind of forgiveness I didn’t know how to earn.

And when he finally sank into me — slow, deep, true — I arched under him and gasped his name like a confession I’d waited too long to say.

“I know,” he whispered into my throat. “I know, baby. I know.”

He moved like we were on borrowed time — relentless, tender, furious.

I broke first. Fell with a ragged cry and a laugh that shook loose years of shame and armor.

He followed with a groan against my neck and a vow scratched into my skin.

“Mine. Still mine.”

When it was over, he didn’t roll away.

He stayed. Held me. Kissed my hair.

I fell asleep to the sound of his heart under my hand — steady, fierce, impossibly alive.