He leaned down and began to quietly sing along to the mournful love song.
I’ve been livin’ a lie
Without you by my side
When did I surrender
When did I let go
When did life become a gamble
Your heart on the cutting line
Didn’t mean to stumble
Wish I had the strength to stand
Still lovin’ you and I’m not able
To forget the touch of your hand
Richard heaved out a breath and curled his arms tighter around me, words a grunt of desperation, “Every song, Violet. Every fuckin’ song is about you.”
His confession covered me like the warmest caress.
Cascaded over me like seduction.
Like the lulling waves of a faraway dream that I’d had for so long.
I wanted to slip into it.
Into his warmth and his safety and the comfort of his touch.
Just let go.
Fall.
Soar in this surrender.
With that single thought, panic hit.
Realization of where I was letting myself go.
My entire body shivered.
Terror and dread.
I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t do this.
He tried to hold me tighter. I fought him off, slapping at him as alarm took me over. I wrangled out of his arms, my heart hammering so hard I could feel it in my ears.
It hurts too much.
It hurts too much.
Even though we were secluded, I could feel the weight of the eyes of the nearest tables shifting to stare at the drama going down.
That’s all we needed.
To start a flashfire in the Dalton gossip gang. The news would be back to my daddy before we even made it home.
I stared at the floor, barely able to find my shuddering voice, “I think you should take me home.”
“Violet.” He reached for me again.
I stepped out of his reach.
“Please. Just take me home. I can’t handle this, Richard. It’s too much.”
He sighed. Frustration and devastation.
Sage eyes churned with sadness and calamity, and he roughed a hand through the locks of his hair that my fingers itched to feel. But I knew goin’ there would only bring me more sorrow.
That I was slipping.
Falling into him.
Falling into his abyss.
Into an endless, starry night.
And if I let go, I’d be the one to blame if there was no one there to catch me before I hit the jagged rocks waiting at the bottom.
Finally, he gave a clipped nod of resignation.
He dug into his wallet and pulled out a few hundred-dollar bills and tossed them onto the table to cover the meals that hadn’t yet arrived.
“Let’s go.”
Shame covered us as we walked out, people watchin’ in prying, morbid interest.
Too bad it wasn’t a ridiculous datin’ show and there weren’t actual hearts at stake.
All of it draped us in a heavy, oppressive silence that felt as if it would suffocate. So dense and sluggish that I was having a hard time getting my feet to cooperate as I treaded across the dimly-lit parking lot.
But I had to do this.
I had to protect myself.
Had to protect Daisy.
Had to remember.
He opened the door for me, and I was struck with another shockwave of need when he gripped my elbow to help me into his fancy new truck.
Leather seats were there to welcome me while I felt like anything touching me would burn right through my flesh.
Consume me.
Leave me nothing but bones and regret.
Richard shut the door, hurried around to his side, and climbed in.
He drove us home through the bated unease that lapped with the questions that begged to be answered. The problem was that I wasn’t sure I could handle the answers.
The one truth I had was that I was terrified of forgiving him.
Of accepting that vulnerability.
Above anything else? I knew my father was right.
Richard Ramsey held ugly, horrible secrets.
We made the twenty-minute trip in abject silence. The wreckage of our hearts clanking so loud that nothing else could be heard above it. Headlights speared through the darkness and spread out on the deserted country road as he sped through the night.
I didn’t look at him.
Didn’t dare glance at the rigid, hard beauty of his profile. At those hands that I could feel clutching the steering wheel in a grief I’d grown to believe he wasn’t capable of.
Finally, he took the last sweeping curve that would bring the simple home into view. A haven where it rested on the grassy hilltop with the expanse of darkened, sleeping flowers making up the backdrop.
He slowed and eased onto the long drive, winding up it and coming to a stop in front of my house.
I was out the door before he had the chance to be a gentleman. Couldn’t take him touching me without completely falling apart.
I started for the house. He flew out of the truck and was standing in front of me before I could prepare myself. Cutting off my path. Eyes wild. As unchained as my insides felt.
“Violet.” My name grated through the air.
Shards of broken glass.
Panic setting in, I shifted gears, and I darted away from him and down the path that led to my sanctuary. To where the flowers grew and blossomed and became something so tangibly beautiful.
A labor of my love.
Footsteps pounded behind me, that energy jolting through the cool air with each step that he took.
“Violet,” Richard shouted again, and I just drove deeper, flying through the low rows of flowers.
Hydrangeas and carnations and lavender. Until the rows grew higher.
Until I was surrounded by every color of roses.
Thorns snagged my dress and pricked my arms.
I didn’t care.
I just ran.
Not even sure where I thought I was going. How I thought I would escape.
I angled through a narrow row of holly, leaves smacking across my bare shoulders on both sides.
I swore under the starlit sky every fear I had came to a head. Climbing out of those cracks and getting free. Gathering as a united force to take me hostage.
I almost gasped out in relief when I no longer heard his footsteps pounding behind me.
I should have known better.
Should have known better.
Because his voice coming at me trampled me with the same force as if he’d tackled me to the ground. “What are you afraid of, Violet?”
I tried to keep running.
“What in this world are you most afraid of? Because what I’m most afraid of is losing you.”
A haggard breath raked up my lungs. Harsh and hard and disbelieving.
I whirled on him.
Anger flashed through my bloodstream.
“You’re afraid of losing me, Richard? You left me. You. Left. Me.” I slammed a fist against my chest. “And you don’t get to stand there and act like any of this was my fault. No matter the circumstances, no matter what happened, it was still on you.”
Richard stood beneath the pour of moonlight. So ruggedly beautiful it hurt. Hair striking like bronzed silk, the sculpted, immaculate lines of his face glinting in the milky rays, the span of him tall and oppressive and making me lose my mind.
“You’re right. It was my fault. My fault.” His voice slashed and scraped, and he curled his hands into fists at his sides.
“Your fault,” I wheezed into the breezy air, fighting tears that stung and burned. Leaves rustled all around us, the hedges tall enough that it left us hidden in the maze of vegetation. “It’s your fault that I’m broken like this. It’s your fault that I don’t trust. It’s your fault that I’ve been livin’ alone for the last six years to raise a little girl by myself.”
I didn’t know if admitting this was assuaging something or making it worse, but I couldn’t stop. “A little girl who became my entire world. My entire life.”
I took a surging step toward him, holding my chest like it would keep that bleeding organ in the middle from tumbling out to land at his feet.
“And you want to know what I’m afraid of most in this world, Richard?” My tone was laced with ridicule and accusation. With a violent despair that came on a torrent from within.
“What I’m afraid of is losing her. I’m afraid that one day my sister is going to show up at my door and take her away. I’m afraid of not getting to be her mama, anymore.”
I guessed I hadn’t allowed myself to realize the true weight of that fear.
The sheer terror of what dredging up the past was going to do.
The fact my sister had abandoned that baby at our doorstep when she was three days old. Said she couldn’t keep her. I’d chased her down, begged her to stay before she’d jumped into a car I didn’t recognize and disappeared into the night.
Now I was petrified of her changing her mind.
In that second, the full impact of that burden pressed down on my shoulders.
Daisy.
Richard.
My mama.
The private investigator who was currently searching for the one person who I loved with every piece of me and selfishly prayed I would never see again.
Guilt and shame and grief.
They hit me all at once.
Too heavy.
Too much.
And I crumpled to the ground.
Twenty-Two
Richard
Grief tore through me like a raze of gunfire. Penetrating through flesh and bone. Blowing me back and toppling me forward.
My knees hit the soft dirt and trampled grasses in front of her, and in two seconds flat, I had her pulled onto my lap and my arms wrapped around her sweet, trembling body. I started rocking this girl who was shaking and weeping so uncontrollably I didn’t think I could hold her pain.
Knew I couldn’t.
But I was going to try.
It made me a bastard. I knew it did. But I was fuckin’ gonna try.
I pressed my lips to the top of her head while sobs ripped from her heaving chest.
“I’ve got you, Violet. I’ve got you,” I murmured into that wild mane of black.
Fingers curled into the fabric of my shirt, and she pressed her face into the well of my neck. “Why does it have to hurt so bad, Richard? Why does it feel like every good thing in my life gets ripped away?” she cried through gasping, quaking words.
“I’m sorry. I would take it away if I could.”
“Why did you have to do it in the first place? I needed you. I needed you.” The words continued to spill in a deluge. The barriers she’d tried to keep fortified between us broken down to nothing. Rubble in this mess that was our lives.
I held her closer. “I didn’t want to. It killed me, baby. Killed me.”
“I don’t understand.” It was a whimper. A plea. Questions billowed, trying to take hold.
The confession burned on my tongue.
She was going to hate me. Soon enough, she was going to hate me.
“Wished I could make you understand, but I can’t. Can’t give you that, baby. I would if I could. Please believe that. Please trust that. Please believe I am trying to make it right.”
A tremor ruptured through her entire being. She burrowed deeper into the security of my arms. The cries she was emitting didn’t lessen but they were changing shape.
Becoming guttural. Whimpers of something that bellowed through the night. The sky hung low, the stars so bright and close where they dangled from the heavens that I was sure I could pluck one out and offer it to her.
A dream that we’d shared but had burned out far too fast.
The canopy held us.
Covered us.
A bubble of protection that refused to allow in anything else.
That energy thrashed in the confines of it. Whipping and wrapping us in the same twine that had bound us at first glance.
Our connection fierce.
Unrelenting.
Endless.
Eternal.
A little fist pummeled on my chest. Then another.
No. They weren’t to injure.
Just got the sense she wanted to bash her way in and get to the truth of what had become of the love we were supposed to share for all our days.
“I’m so mad at you. I’m so mad at you. I want to hate you. I need to hate you.” She rambled the words against the rampage battering my chest.
“I know. I know,” I whispered back, and she was kissing across the spot where she’d just been releasing her torment over my heart.
“Let me hate you,” she said there. “Don’t let me trust you again.”
It was a broken plea, and she kept kissing higher, over the fabric of my shirt. Tremors shivered and need rushed.
“Violet.” It hit somewhere between a petition and a warning.
The exploration of her hands became frantic as she searched me in the night below the murky, opalescent glow of the moon that sagged low.
Under it, something hysterical came over her being, girl’s spirit screaming out in this madness I didn’t know how to sate.
How to tame.
How to fix.
“I’m sorry. I’m so fuckin’ sorry,” I kept murmuring into her hair. At her temple. At her cheek.
Like I could offer the comfort that she needed.
Take it away.
Do something to make her life better.
“I hate you,” she said again, trying to convince herself of the lie.
It’d be so much better if I wanted her to.
If I could let her go.
I’d tried. Fuck I’d tried.
Impossible.
My hands splayed across her back and rode up toward her shoulders. A covering of affection.
Need blistered.
I tried to force it down. To beat it into submission. This wasn’t the time nor the place.
But Violet was kissing higher, those lips making a frenetic path up the column of my throat, tiny caresses of her mouth sending me into madness.
“Richard, Richard,” she chanted.
Her hands gripped.
Her spirit grasped.
“Violet. Baby. You need to stop.”
She just nipped at the scruff of my jaw, her tongue coming out to taste the flesh.
Lust bounded.
I hissed.
Didn’t she remember the admission I’d made to her back at the restaurant? Because this was brutal. Torture. She kept up like this, and I was gonna blow.
Guessed the sentence was fitting. The temptation she was meting. This girl kissing on me and not being able to have her.
She shifted her position to sit on my lap and wrapped her legs around my waist.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
She started rocking, and my hands shot to her waist to attempt to stop her, but I was moaning out a greedy sound when she rubbed herself on my rock-hard cock. She did the same, the sexy mewl rolling from her throat.
“Why do you make me feel this way? Richard. Please.”
She nipped the corner of my mouth with her teeth and her fingers drove into my hair. “Please.”
“What do you need, baby? What do you need?” My voice was a growl. Desperation and the knowledge that I shouldn’t do this. That this girl had reached a breaking point and I wasn’t fit to hold her together.
The secrets I was keeping from her were more than enough to make me a criminal just for touching her.
Still, I was edging back to look into the expanse of those eyes, unable to push her away when she was clinging to me like I was the one thing that was going to keep her grounded.
Like maybe I wouldn’t be the one to destroy her in the end.
“I need t
o go back. I need to remember. I need to remember the way it used to be when you loved me. I need you to remind me what it feels like.”
“There is no used to in this equation,” I rumbled beneath her assault.
She leaned in and whispered at my ear, “Touch me.”
I nearly came undone.
“You don’t want this, Violet.”
At least the girl who’d run out of the restaurant because of the declarations I’d been making didn’t. Wasn’t so sure about the girl who was currently grinding her sweet heat all over the bulge in my jeans.
Friction flying.
Zinging through the air and making it hard to cling to reason.
“You owe me. Remember the way you used to touch me? The way you used to make me fly? Remember when you told me you’d do it forever? I’m achin’.”
Well, fuck me.
How was I supposed to argue with that?
She kissed across my mouth. Lips brushing lips in a tender caress.
Flames leapt in the space.
Enticing, excruciating heat.
She exhaled at my mouth, and I swallowed it down, muttered, “I do. I owe you. I owe you everything.” Then I followed the words with my tongue, delving into the treasure that was this girl’s mouth. “Want to give you the world. Anything. Everything.”
Hot flesh stroked the other. Tangling in this desire that caught fire.
A blaze that burned right through the middle of us.
Sparking and spreading.
This girl was straight-up arson.
Torching all reason and discretion.
No longer gave a shit about anything other than making this girl feel good. Satisfying this one request.
Stupid?
Hell yeah.
So fuckin’ stupid because Violet was still trembling and shaking and expelling tears while she clamored to get to me, moisture glinting and striking as it rolled down that breathtaking face, and my guts got jumbled in a warning that she was going to regret this.
That I was only making this coming end worse.
But those thoughts were drowned by the desperation that rose and lifted between us.
Stirring the disorder.
Each movement more delirious than the last.
Hands and tongues and teeth.
Wild kisses.
Needy pants.
My palms glided up the smooth, bare skin at the outside of her thighs, riding underneath the fabric of her dress.
Falling into You Page 21