Page 83 of Healed Heart

Words escape me.

Everything escapes me as I gaze down at her naked flesh, at the marks I made on her beautiful breast.

I nearly lost control, and that should frighten me.

But it doesn’t.

I shouldn’t have let it happen.I knew better.I always know better.But knowing doesn’t stop the fire, doesn’t silence the hunger, doesn’t erase the way she looks at me like I’m not broken, like I’m something more than the wreckage I’ve become.

I almost crossed that invisible line I swore I’d never go near.

And I don’t regret it.

I should.I should be drowning in shame, and I am—but it’s tangled with something else, something darker, something I can’t bring myself to name.Satisfaction?No, it’s more than that.It’s the raw, unfiltered truth ofher—the way she moaned my name, the way she trusted me, the way she let me take when I should have been giving.

I didn’t hold back.Not the way I should have.

And now the guilt sets in, thick and suffocating, clawing at my soul like it wants to rip me apart from the inside out.

She doesn’t know how close I was to losing myself.How easily I could have let go, let the weight of everything I’ve been holding inside consume me in her touch, in her body, in the desperate, frantic need to feel somethingreal.

But Ididfeel it.And that’s the problem.

It should have just been release, a moment of weakness, something I could chalk up to exhaustion or stress or the thousand other excuses I could conjure up.

But it wasn’t.

It was her.

It’s always her.

She’s in my blood now, in my bones, in the parts of me I thought were long dead.And that terrifies me.

The intensity of what I feel for her—what I’ve never felt before—terrifies me.

And I don’t know if I’ll ever come back from it.

ChapterThirty-Three

Angie

Jason is still in his clothes.Only his jeans are open, his dick out and still hard.

I wait.

Wait for him to fuck me again.

To do what he needs to do.

I don’t regret a single second of it.Not the way he touched me, not the way he fought himself, not even the way he looked at me afterward—like he’d done something unforgivable.

He hasn’t.He never could.

I saw the war in his eyes, the way he battled against what he wanted, as if desiring me was the same as surrendering to something dark inside him.As if his control was the last thing tethering him to sanity.

But I don’t want his restraint.I don’t want his careful distance.I don’t want the version of him that holds back.

I wanthim.Every raw, aching, tortured piece.