Now I was begging for it.
I got brave and let my fingers wander down to the monkey pinned between him and my mattress, somehow knowing the simplicity of it was anything but simple.
Sebastian winced, and those full, full lips tipped down on the crooked side, a subtle frown that struck me deep. “Julian.”
Another one word answer.
One that wasn’t an answer at all. I traced the exposed edges, my silence asking for more.
He trembled at my touch. “My brother. His name was Julian.”
Was.
Oh. God.
I could feel the sympathy twist my face just as tight as it twisted my heart. I knew I was in way too deep when this news physically hurt. Focusing on my face, he reached out and pressed his thumb to the lines that had gathered between my eyes, ironing them out, like he needed a distraction for his attention while his thoughts went far away.
“He was eight. Had this monkey he dragged around with him everywhere he went. Didn’t matter how many times our mom tried to get rid of it because it was ratty and filthy, or toss it in the garbage because he was getting too old for it, he always managed to dig it back out.” The words broke, his pain sinking into my bones. “Fuck…he was a great kid.”
“What happened to him?” I asked through a quiet rasp.
Deeper.
Deeper.
Deeper.
Darkness clouded his expression, and he swallowed hard. “Let’s not talk about that, yeah? I’ve been trying to forget it for a long time.”
I touched it once more, knowing this scar was so much deeper than any of the others.
Blowing out a pursed breath, I settled closer to his side. Warmth wrapped me tight, just as tight as the arms anchored around me.
“Tell me about your friends,” I asked lightly, changing the subject, figuring this one was safer, because I knew the other was closed.
He sighed, though a trace of a smile lifted at his mouth. “Assholes. All of them.” It was pure affection beneath overt annoyance.
“I like them,” I said, picturing Ash and Lyrik on the dance floor, the easy confidence they exuded. The way they’d all jumped in to protect me tonight.
“Been with them for years. Since we were all just kids trying to figure out a way to make it in this world. Of course we fucked more stuff up than we figured out.”
Trouble.
Recognized it when they all showed up at Charlie’s door.
But there was more to them than that, something better than I’m sure the rest of the world chose to see.
“They’re the only family I’ve got,” he continued. “All except for my little brother.”
I smiled a small smile. “You have another brother?”
“Yeah, he just turned eighteen. Been taking care of him for the last ten years. Austin.” He spoke his name with a quiet reverence, cloaked in a ton of concern. A sad sigh slipped from him and he held me a little closer and admitted quietly, “Julian was his twin.”
Whoa. I didn’t expect for that admission to hurt so much, but it felt as if my chest was being squeezed, some kind of weight crushing my ribs. I didn’t know why. Maybe it was the turmoil I could feel billowing through him just talking about this.
Where were their parents?
“That’s good…you taking care of him…Austin,” I offered pathetically, because I knew I didn’t have the first clue about his life.
But it was the wanting to that kept me prodding a little more.
He huffed out a frustrated breath toward the ceiling. “No, Shea. It’s not. I tried. I fucking tried, but I led him into all kinds of shit I shouldn’t have…just a kid myself, having no clue how it was going to affect him. Both of us have been paying for it ever since.”
I lifted up on my elbow, looking down at Sebastian who laid flat on his back. “What does that mean?”
“It means I’m not a good guy.”
A flash of fear. I gulped for air.
“I don’t believe that,” I whispered almost desperately.
He reached up and held my face. “That’s because you see all the good in this world, Shea. Don’t even know you, but I can see you do. Maybe you see the guy I wished I could be, but I’m not him.”
I frowned, and I knew it was sad and confused.
“Took my whole crew down with me. Fighting…drugs…women…taking shit that wasn’t ours.”
“They look pretty okay to me,” I argued.
In the shadows, agony blanketed his eyes. His expression was haunted, hurt and hard and filled with a self-hatred I couldn’t understand. “No…there are some things you can’t take back.”
Asking more got caught on my tongue when he cut me off.
“Who’s Kallie’s father?” he asked way too out of the blue, making my insides recoil in bitterness.
“He’s dead,” I shot out just as quickly.
Dead to me, at least.
Baz blanched like the news hit him viciously, before he reached out and caressed gentle fingertips along the angle of my cheek. “God, Shea. I’m so sorry.”
Guess I could lie better than he thought I could. But this wasn’t something I was willing to share with him, to drag out into the open when this was the way we lived. The way we survived. I couldn’t survive Kallie’s father, the disparity of what he’d given to me and what he’d robbed me of, any other way.
“Don’t be,” I urged, wishing to drop it but needing him to understand, wishing with my entire being to reveal it all but refusing to break the promise to myself that I’d never allow another man the power to wreck me the way Kallie’s father had.
Not because he’d broken my heart. He hadn’t.
He’d simply crushed my world.
“He never would have loved her, and it’s better for us both that he’s not a part of our lives.”
It sounded cruel, I knew.
I could tell he wanted me to explain more, so I cut him off with a kiss, pulled him to me and wrapped my arms around his neck.
Sebastian suddenly reached down and cupped my sex. Startled, I jumped. “My whole life, I’ve been taking what’s not mine to take. Took this, too. Not sure I wanna give it back.” Tease was injected into his tone, but this was no joking matter, because honest to God, every last part of me already belonged to him.
Did he know? Could he read it like a playbook in my eyes?
Quickly, he rolled to his back and pulled me on top of him. I giggled, some giddy feeling sweeping through me. “So tell me Sebastian from California, what happens there?”
Who could blame me for digging more?
He sighed, deflected as he looked over my shoulder at the ceiling. “Sex, drugs, and rock and roll happen in California.”
Right.
Another warning—as vague as it was vast.
“Why are you here?” I whispered as he rubbed my naked body up and down his, a slow dance that immediately lit me up.
Why are you here in Savannah? Here with me?
I’d seen the way he affected the women in the bar. I knew he could crook his finger and they’d come running.
Squinted eyes met with mine. “I don’t have a lot of good in my life, Shea. People would tell me I’m spoiled. That I have everything at my feet. But none of it makes me happy because all of it comes at a cost, one I’m not sure I’m willing to pay any longer. Only thing that matters to me is my brother and the boys.”
I frowned. It seemed like everything he said was at odds with the other.
“But you…you got under my skin,” he continued. He squeezed me like the idea of it hurt. “Don’t know how to get you out from under it.”
“Will you stay?” I heard the insecurity wobble through the question, and I knew Baz heard it, too.
“No,” he admitted.
Simple. Simple dreams. They were so easy to crush.
“We shouldn’t have done this, should we?” he said with more of that remorse as he looked up at me.
“No,” I whispered quiet.
He gripped my hips. “But I want to do it again.”
“Me too.”
In five seconds flat, Sebastian had me on my back, rolling a condom on his dick, and was sinking into me.
And it was every bit as hard and demanding as the first time, but every touch felt more beautiful to me. Every caress pulled me deeper. Every brush of his skin as if he was sinking into mine.
Tamar was right.
I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
I BARELY CRACKED OPEN AN EYE. My limbs were sluggish and sated, my dream-addled mind still swimming in a residual sea of lust. A mass of sweet and hair and silky flesh was tucked up close to me. Shea’s back burrowed into the den of my body as we lay on our sides. Soft breaths were threatening to lull me right back into the most restful kind of sleep.
Would have, too, if it wasn’t for the bustling energy emitted from the source of the mound of tight curls cresting the top of Shea’s shoulder that was dragging me out of it.
Pale light filtered in through the large window at my back, and the tiny, tinkling voice to my front had me pressing my eyes shut tighter, wishing that with the simple act I’d disappear.
Three clicks of my heels or some kind of magical shit like that.
Or maybe a get out of jail free card.
Because there wasn’t a single circumstance in my mind that made this situation okay.
“Momma,” the hushed, slight voice continued on in a whisper, all kinds of endearing manners as she lured Shea from sleep. “Wake up, Momma.” Excitement infiltrated her tone, and with it, she ticked up the volume, just a notch. “Sunshine is way, way, way up high in the sky. Is pancake time.”
Roused, the mattress shifted under Shea as she moved, her bedhead popping up just an inch from her pillow, the perplexity of her movements telling me she was just as disoriented as I’d been thirty seconds ago.
I felt it when the sharpened spikes of coherency caused her to stiffen and stifle whatever freaked-out reaction her good nature made her inclined to have.
Shea slipped discretely out of my hold before she whispered a quiet, “Okay, baby. I’m coming.”
Guilt saturated the mote-laden haze stretching through the wedges of morning light, like pillars of salt tossed haphazardly into her room. Shea’s guilt. My guilt.
It was suffocating.
I don’t have time for distractions.
Never had that sentiment been more glaring than now.
Lying on my side—because really, I was barely allowing myself to breathe, let alone move—I watched Shea awkwardly clutch the sheet to her chest and rummage around on the ground. She did her best to slink into a robe to cover herself, discomfort so thick in the air I couldn’t discern if it was hers or mine.
Standing up, she tied the belt around her waist, all that gorgeous hair swishing down her back, teasing me with the memory of just how incredible it’d felt fisted in my hands last night. She leaned down and scooped her daughter into her arms, hitched her onto her hip.
Kallie.
Her daughter’s name was Kallie.
Barefoot, Shea shuffled across the carpeted floor, those long legs exposed beneath the short, satiny white robe, her little girl hugging her neck. Contentment gentled across the small, round face when she peered back at me with wide, curious brown eyes.
Caramel.
Just like her mother’s.
No fear in them.
Just a soft interest as she met my discomfited gaze.
Shea pressed a kiss to her temple and brushed back the overabundant curls from the child’s forehead. Something about it felt apologetic and frantic, like she couldn’t believe she let her daughter find her this way.
Kallie just clung tighter, little fingers pulsing in her mother’s neck where she held on, her curious stare locked on me.
My chest screamed some unknown emotion. The guilt clotting off the airflow to my lungs was in an outright brawl with the affection that kept trying to find those cracks surrounding my heart, looking for a way in to corrupt and confuse.
Fuck. Couldn’t afford feeling this way.
Was feeling it last night under Shea’s touch, beneath her eyes, that seemed to see and understand far too much. Like she got me. In a way no one else ever would. Even when she didn’t have one fucking inkling who I really was. I felt it strong in the possessiveness that swelled through me with another man having just the audacity to touch her, socked with the protectiveness of it when he made the mistake of hurting her.
Truth was, I’d been feeling it all along. It’s what had kept calling me back. What’d gotten me into this fucked-up situation today.
It was hard to resist when you’d experienced little affection in your life. Sure, I loved. My brothers. The guys. But this emotion was something else entirely, something I doubted I even had the capacity to feel. Hailey had come the closest and she had nothing on what I was feeling for Shea. It wasn’t even in the same spectrum, just pasty pastels of muted emotion up against the vibrancy of Shea…intense reds and bold blues, blinding white, the deepest black.
Light and dark and simple and profound.
More.
More.
More.
Shea didn’t look back at me, while her little girl seemed not to be able to look away. Instead, she quietly latched the door shut behind them when she stepped out, her only acknowledgment she was even considering my presence, like she thought she was leaving me there to sleep away the morning. Thoughtful and kind, the way she always seemed to be.
Or maybe she was just trying to whisk her daughter away from the remnants of our debauchery with as little fanfare as possible.
Didn’t blame her a bit.
Groaning, I rolled onto my back and pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes.
Shit.
Shit.
Shit.
Shit.
What did I do?
With a strained sigh, I pushed myself up to sitting at the edge of the bed, scrubbed my face, and forced myself to stand. I stretched my arms over my head, squinted at the muted light seeping in through the early morning fog.
And for the record, the sun was so not way, way, way up high in the sky, and after last night, I could have used about fifty more hours sleep with a little more Shea peppered in between. God, the woman was a fucking masterpiece. I’d have gladly stayed in bed with her all damned day.
But Shea didn’t have time for distractions, even though that’s exactly what I’d become, quite wittingly, because I knew exactly what was gonna happen when the words shot from my mouth last night.
I’ve got her.
And I did. Just for a little while, I’d had her.
And for a little while, she’d made me forget.
She’d let me get lost in all her light and dark, let me discover it was far greater than I ever could have imagined. Made me wish for something greater, too.
We both knew that was impossible. This morning had proven that.
I snagged my underwear from the floor and pulled them on as I fumbled toward the adjoining bathroom, stopping long enough to snatch up the three forgotten condom wrappers I’d carelessly tossed onto her floor. Both of us forgetting. Figuring if we had one night, we were going to make it count.
Now both of us were remembering why this was a really fucking bad idea.
I took a piss, hunted through her bottom cabinet for mouthwash that wasn’t all that hard to find, swilled a mouthful straight from the bottle. It fucking burned and stung, but somehow that sensation was somewhere down in the cavern of my chest, and I spit it out as if it could rid me of all this shit I didn’t want to feel.
Straightening, I stilled when I caught myself in the mirror, something unsettled in my eyes. Regret I knew I’d feel, taking Shea when I knew I shouldn’t, knowing it was going to mean more than it should.
I rubbed my palm over my mouth, lifting my chin and dragging my hand down the stubble that was getting way too thick, to my throat that felt way too tight.
>
The messed up part? I didn’t want to feel that regret, didn’t ever want to look back on what I’d experienced with her as something stolen, when I was pretty damned sure if I was living a different life she would have been mine.
Didn’t want her looking at me like I were sin.
A mistake.
Didn’t want it to hurt when I walked away.
But I couldn’t have all the other elements without the last.
I plodded back out into her room and quickly dressed. I felt like some creep when I cracked opened the door and peered through the slit to take in the landing of the top floor of Shea’s house, wondering just what the protocol was for skipping out with the woman’s kid lurking below. Shea had given me no indication of what she wanted me to do, and part of me was wishing that right before we’d finally succumbed to exhaustion at just before dawn, she’d have told me to grab my shit and go.
But that would’ve meant I’d have been robbed of those two hours of having something I’d never again have—holding Shea while she slept—and fuck it all if I had to give up that.
Outside, it was quiet, zero movement. I sucked in a deep breath and stepped out. Polished hardwood floors creaked beneath my feet, and my attention darted to the large, ornate frames that housed old faded pictures along the wall. Placed at the center was a black and white wedding photo of a couple I could only assume were Shea’s grandparents. The man was in a formal military suit, the young woman who was just as striking as Shea, in a simple white-skirted suit, her hair coiled and topped with a little hat with a swath of tulle attached to it.
A bunch of photos were placed around it, growing out.
A single child in a photo that was clearly old, but new enough to be in color. Another with a group of three…three sisters that had to belong to that old couple. A young boy. Another after he’d become a man. Even newer still a group of what had to be grandkids. I stepped closer, searching the faces, picking out Shea right away, all sweet smiles and big curly hair, kind of like her daughter’s.
Then there was a large photo. New. But it too had been placed in one of those old frames. A picture of Shea holding a tiny baby, her face in profile as she peered down into the infant’s eyes.
My gut clenched tight, and I turned away.
A Stone in the Sea Page 13