The whiskey.
The rest of the bottle I’d yet to be able to stomach. Scarlett unscrewed the top off with her slight fingers and pushed the mostly full bottle to my chest.
“You need sleep.”
Fuck, if that wasn’t true, but it wouldn’t be happening tonight. Probably not for a few nights. Might even become an insomniac after this.
“Go back to sleep, Scarlett,” I spoke, any authoritative tone I had trampled by the thick gravel in my voice.
In the thin light, she looked sad and then thoughtful. “I never fell asleep.”
“Try.”
“You first.”
A low growl went to rise in my throat at her unfailing stubbornness, but truth be told, it was kind of normalizing.
With just a few words between us, the spinning had slowed with a new point of green-eyed focus.
For as tired as my eyes were, the sight of Scarlett sitting right there, tracing her thumbnail along the edge of her bottom lip as she eyed me held my attention tight.
Behind my head, I slid both my hands and tightened them to fists so I wouldn’t reach out and grab her.
She wasn’t trying to look like such a goddamn temptation perched in front of me, absent-mindedly thumbing her soft-looking mouth while wearing one of my shirts. I’d gotten pretty good about telling when she was being a villainous vixen and when she was just being pure, untouchable perfection.
Right now, she was the devil’s handcrafted angel with wings so broken, she’d set them on fire instead of wanting them fixed. She didn’t want to fly. She didn’t want to soar. She didn’t want to be healed.
She just wanted to burn.
And now I understood why.
A stab hit directly between my ribs as I remembered her story. I might have already thrown my principles in the gutter tonight, but the longer I stared at her and thought about her stolen innocence, the more I wanted to commit a thousand more crimes to bring those fuckers that hurt her to their knees.
Her shitstain father included.
Taking the bottle from her small hand into mine, I pressed the top to my lips and let the poison through. I washed back two gulps and a smaller third before passing the bottle back to her.
She took it and placed her mouth where mine had just been, her thin neck moving as she swigged back enough whiskey to make me dizzy, but I let her drink as much as she could.
If she wanted to drown out what happened tonight, I wasn’t going to argue.
After a second, she pulled the bottle away and breathed a little heavier, swiping her thumb over her lips. Her eyes were a little wider now. Glossy too.
If I were to kiss her now, she’d taste like the richest whiskey—sweet lavender venom that would deteriorate my mind to nothing but her. Only her and those big sad eyes that made my heart fucking bleed.
I knew what a kiss from her would do to a man like me, and neither of us would survive its bite.
Scarlett blinked her stare over to me, catching me and my audacious thought in the act. Heat flushed down my bare chest, crawling its sticky sensation down to stir in my cock.
Tension pulsed to life in the air, and I grit my teeth together against it. No.
How fucked was I that I found her even more desirable after everything I’d learned about her? Tonight, Scarlett spelled out exactly how traumatic, how disgusting, and how vile her past was, and in return, all I could think about as I stared at her was how badly I wanted to shove my tongue down her throat.
How I wanted to take her and hide her beneath me so anything that ever tried to lay a goddamn finger on her again had to face me first. I’d tear anything that tried to touch her to unrecognizable shreds so she never even knew it existed.
How fucking badly I wanted to obliterate the line drawn between us right now proved exactly why I never could, even if by some bloody miracle it weren’t against the rules. I was just as bad as any of the things that I wanted to protect Scarlett against, if not worse.
I was a wrecking ball, and she was already too devastated to withstand my blow.