He paused at my entrance, torturing me some more with just how close I was to being full. Complete.
“It was Gage that did all this to you.” His finger brushed my neck, where I imagined small bruises were already blossoming. “It’s Gage whose bike you ride on the back of. Who you wake up to. Sleep with.” The darkness was snatched away, but I still saw the abyss as I blinked Gage into focus.
He was held with violence.
With utter agony.
With painful beauty.
Demons clawed at the backs of his eyes.
“It’s Gage you’re gonna share your life with,” he growled. “Your pain.” He moved, just slightly, so he probed my entrance, teased inside.
I let out a harsh moan.
“But in here, and only in here, I’m Christian,” he said through clenched teeth. “He’s dead and buried, Lauren. And you’re an angel, but you’re never gonna resurrect him.” He pushed into me with a brutal beauty and I screamed, seeing stars.
Gage didn’t move as my pussy clenched against him.
He merely stared at me, waited for my vision to clear.
“Christian comes to life inside your pussy. But he dies outside of it, and there’s no saving him. You need to know that. It’s important, fuckin’ vital. He’s dead and gone. But here?” He moved slowly.
I bit my tongue.
“You get that, Lauren?” Gage—Christian—asked, voice strained.
“Yeah,” I rasped, at the edge of ruin. “Yeah, Christian, I get it.”
He twitched inside me as I said the name of the man he used to be. The name of the man the world had killed. I got it. This wasn’t the story where love saved something inside each of us.
No, it wasn’t that kind of story.
He moved, slow, beautiful, as if tenderness were the only way to fight the demons between us. I arched my back, straining against my shackles, meeting his thrusts, moving my lips against his.
It wasn’t that kind of story, but it didn’t matter because this was the only one we were going to get.
And it was everything.
Twelve
One Week Later
“There’s a club party tonight,” Gage said.
He was Gage now.
He was always Gage. I knew that, because there was no way he could be anyone else. I understood Gage was who he had built together from the skeletons of the man who had been Christian—the stranger who made love to me in the darkness—and I couldn’t think of him as being anything but Gage.
I glanced up from the pot I was stirring—I was melting chocolate for brownies because it turned out that Gage had a serious sweet tooth—and still, even now, seeing him and all his chaos in my ordered life was jolting. Like an earthquake that people were convinced meant destruction, but really it was nature’s way of shaking things into place.
I’d been so surefooted for so long, I forgot the excitement that came with unsteady ground.
Gage was on the other side of the kitchen island, watching me bake, talking to me. Whenever we were together, there was nothing else—no phone, no book, no TV. His intense attention was focused completely and entirely on me.
He was growing his hair. I liked that. He knew I liked it long and wild, running my fingers through it, tugging at it when he kissed me. When he was inside me.
“You gotta stop lookin’ at me like that,” he growled, rounding the kitchen island.
I put down my spoon just in time for him to snatch my hips and yank my body to his. “And why, pray tell, do I need to stop looking at you like that?” I asked, my voice husky. “It seems it’s got you right where I want you.”
His hands tightened at my hips, dancing to the point of pain. Because he did that now that he knew I could handle it, knew I liked it.
And I didn’t just like it.
I loved it.
“If it’s wrapped around your little finger, then yeah, babe, I’m right where you want me,” he murmured against my mouth.
I smiled, my heart beat increasing with his proximity, his hardness pressing against me. “No way could anyone wrap my big, bad, scary, all-powerful biker around their little finger,” I whispered.
His fingers clutched my chin so I met his eyes. “You’re not anyone, babe,” he said, his voice thick.
The words curled around my heart, settling there, warming it. That’s what this ice-cold, menacing man was doing to me, warming places I’d been sure would be frozen solid forever.
“But you can’t wrap me around your finger right now,” he said, leaning back, breaking the moment and turning off the stove.
I folded my arms, a little pissed, and hurt, but still turned on. So the folding was mostly to communicate the pissed part, and partly to hide the turned-on part.
Gage’s eyes went to my chest, flaring with desire, the corner of his mouth turning up in his version of a smile.