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Mine

Mia

He ran to me.

The first step was slow, hesitant, unsure.

The second was solid, steady, determined.

And then his strides were long, each one making my breaths come harder, the tears in my eyes welling too fast to stop before they spilled over my cheeks.

I couldn’t move. I stood rooted to the spot by the SUV, James at my back and a thousand phone camera flashes going off from the line of people outside the bar while Aleks ran to me.

His eyes never wavered.

His steps never slowed.

And I choked on a sob the second he wrapped me in his arms.

“Please don’t make me do this.”

He crushed me to him, his arms hard and hot around me as he kissed my hair and mumbled the words again in my ear.

“Please, Mia. Please don’t make me do this.”

“I thought this was what you wanted,” I croaked, clinging to him, hands fisting in his dress shirt as fresh tears dampened the fabric on his chest.

“All I’ve ever wanted is you.”

And then his lips were on mine.

It was a claiming kiss — his hands in my hair, fingers curling around my neck, thumbs caressing my jaw. His lips were warm and firm and insistent, seeking more more more until I opened for him and melted and relented and surrendered.

Mine , that kiss said.

Mine, mine, mine .

I heard it in the groan that came from his throat, saw it in the bend of his eyebrows, felt it in the desperate way he held me to him — like I might disappear if he loosened his grip even slightly.

Yours , my body echoed.

Yours, yours, yours.

All the worry I felt in the ride over, all the hesitation and anxiety that had bubbled in my stomach evaporated instantly.

Because I knew now without even asking.

He felt the same way I did.

“You,” Aleks repeated, the word muttered in between kisses. “All I’ve ever wanted is you.”

And then he was pushing me back toward the SUV, not taking his lips off me until James opened the door and Aleks helped me inside. As soon as the door shut behind us, snuffing out the lights and the noise, he was on me again.

Hands. Arms. Lips. Eyes.

“I didn’t want to do this,” he said, the words apologetic and anguished. “I couldn’t. I tried but I couldn’t go through with it. She was there, in my lap, and I felt sick, Mia. I felt so fucking sick I wanted to die.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you say something when Isabella made the call?”

“I knew what I’d agreed to. I knew it would all end eventually. I just thought…”

“After the hurricane…”

“Yes.”

“Something changed.”

“Yes,” he breathed, kissing my neck, my jaw. James was in the front seat next to our driver, and I was thankful for the privacy as Aleks’s hands roamed and pawed and claimed.

“I thought it didn’t matter to you,” I whispered. His thumb wiped away the tear that came with that admission before it could fall.

“I thought you didn’t want me.”

“I thought you were avoiding me, that you were worried I’d read too much into what happened.”

“I thought I wasn’t good enough.”

My chest cracked with that one, with how strained the words were when they left his lips. I kissed him just as urgently as he did me, pausing to press our foreheads together.

“I thought I wasn’t your type.”

A breath of a laugh from his nose, but it wasn’t a humorous laugh. It was sad, devastated, the weight of all we never said crushing both of us.

“I hate our thoughts,” he murmured.

“Yeah, same,” I said, and then I was clinging to him even more, climbing into his lap, desperate to be closer. “Fuck our thoughts.”

“Fuck them so hard.”

I straddled his lap and Aleks kissed me and kissed me, his mouth roving over my lips, my neck, my collarbone and my jaw before they restarted the route. I whimpered under his confident touches, heat building in my core like a volcano sure to erupt.

And the second the car pulled up to Aleks’s building, my hand was in his as he dragged me inside, the world and all its questions left behind us.