My heart attempts to drill a hole through my chest, and a rush of sound fills my head like a howling wind trapped in a cave. Though every sense of self-preservation screams that I leave, I don’t heed it. Instead, I slowly turn and…
Fuck.
I blink. But no. She doesn’t disappear into the dark mists of my mind like she has too many times to count over the last decade. She isn’t a vision my fevered, hungry mind conjured. No, somehow she’s here. She’s real.
“Lennon.”
If I possessed any lingering doubts that it was her standing in front of me, that slight flinch she couldn’t quite manage to control swept them away.
“King. I’d heard you were back.”
That voice. In my dreams, it had remained the same. And it is…but different. Huskier but with the same low, cultured tone that she’d perfected even at eighteen.
Sliding my hands in the front pocket of my hoodie to hide their sudden trembling, I jerk my chin. “That was quick. It’s been what? Seven hours?”
“More than enough time to catalogue everything unloaded from your moving van, discuss exactly where you placed each piece in your house and speculate on whether or not you plan on turning Pike’s End into a den of rock ‘n’ roll iniquity like L.A.”
I snort and pretend the tightness in my chest is acid reflux from the Chinese food from dinner and not due to resentment.
“Small towns. I almost forgot that being in everybody’s business was part of its charm.”
“Why are you here, King?” she abruptly asks, voice hard.
As hard as that last email she sent me.
Fuck you for making me believe in you.
Fuck you for making me love you.
Every message, every word in them is branded in my brain, and I can recite them like a pastor quotes scripture. Since they’re all I have left of her, they’ve become my gospel—life and damnation.
“Here in this park or in Pike’s End?”
A beat of silence passes between us and it’s as deafening and as long as one of Kade’s drum solos. And as quiet and fleeting as a moment of true joy.
“Pike’s End,” she finally says.
“Coward,” I murmur.
What the fuck am I doing? I knew at some point our paths would cross—it’s inevitable in a town this size. But my plan had been to be polite, keep my distance, follow her lead. I’m in no position to push. But here I am…pushing.
“I see you haven’t changed.” Anger licks through her voice, and maybe I am a glutton for punishment because I shiver as if the hot tongue of it glides over my damp skin. “Still playing games.” She steps forward, and the wind shifts the leaves on the tree limbs, moving the shadows as well. Like a stage curtain, they part over her face, exposing the slight sneer curling the corner of her mouth. “Still so careless and arrogant. You don’t give a damn how you fuck up your life, so why should you care about how it blows back on other people’s?”
I’m better than her at controlling my physical reactions. My years in the music industry taught me early on that emotions—revealing them, giving people access to them—are like throwing chum in shark infested seas. So, yeah, I’m a pro at regulating what I allow people to see. But inside? Inside, I’m reeling at her words and the sight of her face cast in sharp relief by the moonlight.
Her voice isn’t the only thing about her that’s the same but different.
At twenty-eight, the roundness of youth had disappeared, leaving a sharper, more refined bone structure behind. Cheekbones so high, so sharp a person could experience vertigo staring at them. A proud slope of a nose with wide, flared nostrils. A deceptively delicate jawline that I know from personal experience could turn stubborn in seconds. The faint dent in her chin that she’d loved because her mother used to tell her it was where God had kissed her.
And then there’s her mouth.
A mouth that seems blasphemous to put in the same sentence with God. Because it’s sin incarnate. Sin and sex and temptation. That full upper lip with its deep dip in the middle and the even fuller lower curve that… A shudder ripples through me as I stare at that lewd mouth, and I lock my muscles against it. Nothing, though, can prevent the hot bolt of lust jolting through me. Or stop the throbbing in my cock that echoes the drumming of my heart. I clench my fingers tight in my pocket in order not to splay my fingers wide over the out of control organ…and not to fist my dick in a punishing grip. And stroke it. Get myself off just at the sight of those lush, profane lips.
What would Lennon do?
Curse me for being even more of a thoughtless, egotistical asshole and leave?
Stand there and watch me with hate and arousal burning in those dark, bedroom eyes?