“So much beauty in the middle of something so ugly,” he said, words a soft gruff from his chest.
She slowly turned around to face him.
“That’s funny, because I only see the beauty.”
He ran his knuckles down the side of her face. “That’s because that’s what you are.”
“Let’s make more of it,” she whispered, a tremble in her needy voice.
And he wondered if she was as nervous as he was. If she understood he was holding something so precious in his hands.
That she was offering it to him.
Trusting him with it.
She was holding his hand when she knelt, and he sank to his knees in front of her.
He let the backpack slide off his shoulder, and he opened it so he could pull out the blanket he’d washed and packed for them. He spread it out on the floor and helped her lay down on it.
Moonlight poured across her face, and he wondered if he’d ever witness anything so perfect again.
“I love you,” he said, carefully climbing over her.
“I love you more than anything,” she murmured back, letting those fingers trace his face, nothing but fire to his body.
He slipped the little straps of her dress from her shoulders, kissed her softly.
Carefully.
As carefully as he loved her.
They slowly undressed each other. Like both of them were memorizing every second.
He watched her through the shadows as her eyes went wide and her lips parted. As she whimpered his name and he groaned hers.
He loved her in the shadows.
With the howl of the ghosts whipping around them. With the promise of what this place might be one day.
After, he held her tenderly, Faith snuggled up in the crook of his arm, her head on his shoulder as she played her fingers across his bare stomach. “Are you goin’ to marry me, Jace?”
“The second you’ll let me.”
He could feel the force of her smile against the thrumming beat of his heart.
“How many babies are we goin’ to have?” she all but whispered, her mind racing into the future. He wanted to be right there, catch up, pray he could maybe be the father he’d never had.
“How many do you want?”
“Two,” she immediately said. “A boy and girl. Bailey and Benton.”
Jace laughed lightly, leaning up to kiss the top of her head. “You just want to add them to all those B’s.”
She was grinning wide when she looked up at him. “Oh, come on, Jace, this has to happen,” she teased so quietly, with so much love, parroting his words from the beginning of the summer.
Somehow that seemed so long ago.
“It does have to happen,” he whispered.
Like his own prayer.
He had to find a way to make this happen. Find a way to get himself out of the scary shit he’d somehow fallen into.
They stayed like that for the longest time, Jace just holding her and not wanting to let go before he finally sighed. “We should get you home.”
“I want to stay right here. Forever.”
“Me, too. Someday. Someday,” he promised.
They dressed and he stuffed the blanket back into his pack, held tight to her hand as he led her down the stairs and back to the window where they’d slipped inside.
He stepped out first, reaching back into help Faith through, when a streak of light hit him on the side of the face.
The blinding glare of a flashlight. “Freeze, right there.”
Jace froze, every inch of him going cold.
Jace sat at the cold metal chair at the cold metal table, cold cuffs around his wrists. He pressed his palms to his face, shook his head again. “I told you, it’s not mine.”
The sheriff frowned in disbelief. “Really? It was in the bottom of your bag.”
Jace pressed his eyes tighter, trying to believe. To believe that he could somehow get out of this. “It’s not mine,” he begged.
He’d already gotten rid of everything Steven had forced on him earlier that day.
Three goddamned stops where his heart had been in his throat, dread coating his skin in a slick of sweat as he’d slinked into three rotten apartments.
“Then who’s is it?”
Ian’s or Joseph’s. Ian’s or Joseph’s.
It’d had to be.
Somehow . . . somehow one of them had gotten wrapped up in this mess, too.
Besides, Steven had been giving him large, wrapped bundles. What they’d found in his backpack were little packets of coke already ready to sell on the street.
“I don’t know,” he said.
The sheriff laughed. As cold as the rest of the room. “Seems to me that you’ve got a problem. You had enough coke in there that we have you on intent to distribute. Not to mention the breaking and entering with that girl.”
That girl.
That girl.
She was the only thing he cared about right then. Her and his brother and Joseph.
Oh, God.
What was he going to do?
The problem was that Jace knew there was no getting himself out of this.