His hand moved to the back of my neck. “If there’s one thing in this world I can promise you, it’s forever.”
Then he landed his lips on mine.
And there was a lot of fanfare.“You’re taking him back.” My mother’s voice was flat but the sounds of the pans clanging together and hitting the counter harder than they needed to told me how she really felt.
Cody leaving me had broken my heart. Though that sounded cliché, too common for what I’d gone through, it was true. I hadn’t been able to get out of bed for a week. Barely ate. Was in what Willow coined my "zombie chic status” for three months.
Naturally, this had worried my parents. My father, definitely. More than anything, it had pissed my mom off. Mostly she’d ranted about how this period of my life seriously jeopardized my college prospects, furious at Cody for doing this to me. But even I saw that it was more than that with my mother.
Once I’d gotten myself out of that funk, gotten myself good enough grades to go to college and had made a really good show of getting on with my life, my mother had decided not to mention Cody’s name again, pretty much pretending he didn’t exist.
So, despite my overwhelming sense of happiness and relief that Cody was back, I’d been dreading telling her. Telling her that I felt whole again.
“I’m not taking him back,” I told her, sipping my coffee as I watched her bang around in the kitchen from my spot at the breakfast bar. “He was always mine, and I was always his.”
Mom turned, a scowl already firmly in place. “Elizabeth, you’re too old for such idiotic romantic thoughts. He almost ruined your future. He will ruin your future if you don’t get smart about this.”
“He won’t ruin my future, mom, he is my future,” I tried to explain. “I’m not asking for your permission or your blessing. I’m an adult now. But I do want you in my life. I want you in our lives. In our children’s. And we are planning to have them.” I held my hand up as the vein in Mom’s head looked like it was about to explode. “You’re not going to change my mind on that, even if you think what I’m doing is idiotic. And I know you had bigger dreams for me, but they weren’t ever my dreams for me. They were ones that you lost. But mom, I’m not losing anything. I’m gaining everything.” I stood up, figuring I might as well peel off the entire Band-Aid. “And he’s patching in to the Sons of Templar MC. I’m going to support him.”
My mother no longer looked furious. She no longer looked anything. Defeated might’ve been a word for it, although that’s never a word I’d ever used to describe my mother.
“You’re giving yourself a harder life than you deserve,” she said quietly, shaking her head. “That club is going to poison what you have. It’s going to ruin your life. And it will take him from you. One way or another.”
Her words chilled me to the bone. Were they some kind of cold premonition? Or just the most logical outcome of the life I was choosing to live? It didn’t much matter, did it?
I straightened my spine. “Well, I’d rather be ruined with him than have to survive without him.”“Are you sure you want to do this?” Cody asked, his expression stoic.
We were both sober despite the fact that we’d been indulging heavily at the engagement party thrown by the Sons of Templar.
Cody still had another ten months of prospecting as did Gage, the man who had appeared in Amber the same time as Cody. I didn’t know where or how they’d met, but my guess was it was somewhere dark. I hadn’t asked Cody much about his time away. Where he’d been, what he’d been doing. I knew a lot of women wouldn’t be able to handle that. Would need to know what had happened. Why he’d left. Why he’d come back. How he’d encountered the tall, foreboding handsome man with ribbons of scars moving from his wrist to shoulder.
Parts of me were desperate for the details. To know where Gage had got his scars, where Cody got the ones I saw behind his eyes. But those scars were from their darkest of yesterdays. Healed as much as they would ever be. I didn’t want to rip them back open for selfish reasons.
Cody had said Gage saved his life, that the man had been near death himself, would’ve met the reaper if he’d left him where he was—wherever that was. I saw the death in Gage’s eyes, he made no effort to hide it. I hoped one day, there would be something, someone for him to live for.