“Look at that, a goddess under the stars,” he called down to me.
It didn’t matter how much time had passed. It still rushed heat across my flesh and splashed redness on my cheeks, my teeth clamping down on my bottom lip as I swayed my way up the walk.
“You must have hit your head,” I teased him.
“If I did, no one better wake me.”
I climbed the three steps to the porch, and he was pulling me into the warmth of those massive arms. He swooped in and planted a fierce kiss to my mouth. Those blue, blue eyes glowed their sweet severity when he pulled back. “How was the meeting?”
Lily and I had started an advocacy group here in Dalton for women who’d been through trauma of any kind.
A safe place.
Small, but needed.
I was still earning my counseling degree. Slowly but surely. But I knew this was what I’d been called to do.
That where my circumstances had shaped me, I had something to offer from those folds. Maybe—just maybe—I might be able to envelop myself around someone else to help them shape their own future.
“It was good. Really good.”
His smile was adoring, and I couldn’t do anything but scratch my fingers into his beard. “I missed you. How was your night?”
A smirk kicked up at the corner of his delicious mouth. “Um…went to Mama’s for dinner. Couldn’t be bad, now, could it?”
He’d wanted to level his mama’s house and build something new. But after everything that had happened, she hadn’t wanted that. She wanted those walls that swam with the memories.
The good and bad.
Of course, we’d settled right down the road because we didn’t want to be far from her. She and Rhys were closer than ever, and we wanted to raise our family with her nearby.
We wanted her a staple in our lives. A fundamental piece.
It’s what I’d always wanted.
A place to offer all this love that had been burning inside me.
Rhys and the band were still traveling. Touring. Their stardom had hit stratospheric levels.
Just like Sebastian Stone had been sure of, Carolina George had become a household name.
But all four of them knew what was important. Their families were their center. The grounding that drove everything else.
“I wish I could have been there.”
He shook his head. “You had important things to do. I’m just glad you’re back now. Been missin’ the hell out of you.”
“That so?”
We’d started to sway.
That energy spinning.
Drawing us closer and closer.
He rocked his hips forward, rubbing my belly with his hard cock.
Shivers raced but still I managed to tease, “Oh, guess someone did miss me.”
He rumbled a chuckle, and then he was lifting me off my feet and into those arms.
Carrying me to our bed.
A place that was only ours.
A place where we met and loved.
Where he held me, and I held him.
Where we shared our dreams and held each other in our sorrows.
When life got heavy, and in the times when we felt like we were flying.
And he loved me there.
Wholly.
Easily.
Completely.
Those blue eyes gazing down as our bodies met in a tumble of need and devotion.
Giving.
Taking.
“Sweet Siren,” he murmured through our kiss, his hands in my hair and my heart in his fist. “What are you doin’ to me?”
“Loving you.”
Eternally.
This beautiful man.
My stallion.
My forever.
Rhys
With our heartbeats thrumming their content, Maggie and I lie staring at the ceiling, trying to catch our breaths while smiles rested on our faces.
“I guess someone really did miss me,” she said, shifting a fraction so she could press a kiss to my pec where she curled up in the well of my arm.
Was pretty sure that arm had been made to hold the shape of her.
“Warned ya.”
I glanced down and found those charcoal eyes tracing me. Writing me in her story. This girl with the greatest belief. One who I’d been terrified held the power to change everything.
Love nearly busted right through my chest.
Just lookin’ at her.
The fact that she had.
Her truth that I was worth so much more than just a good time, though I was all too happy to give her a whole lot of that, too.
“Sweet Thing.”
She sighed and kissed me in the same spot again, and then a tiny cry was coming from the monitor. “Sounds like someone else was missin’ you, too,” I told her. I dropped the peck of a kiss to her temple. “Why don’t you get cleaned up, and I’ll grab him.”
“Thank you.”
I slipped from the bed and into my underwear, then I crossed the creaking hall because when my girl said she wanted an old house, that’s what I’d delivered.
Walls aged to a glowing, thrumming perfection.
But it was the love livin’ here that did that.
I eased open Keaton’s door, and I knew he felt me approach, way his little spirit shifted from his distressed cries to the sweet little grunts coming from his mouth.