by Olivia Gates
Richard stared at him, overwhelmed all over again as everyone murmured their corroboration.
Antonio turned to Richard. “Any debt here is all yours, buddy.”
Richard’s nod was vigorous. “Unequivocally. I’m indebted to everyone here, and to the whole world, an unrepayable debt in the value of Rico’s invaluable life.”
Antonio chuckled, no doubt enjoying seeing Richard, who always antagonized everyone, so ready to be everyone’s eternal slave.
Richard only dragged him into a hug. He even kissed him.
Pulling back, blinking in surprise, Antonio laughed. “Whoa. Who are you, and where’s the lethal and exasperating Richard Graves I know and love, and occasionally loathe?”
Richard exhaled. “He doesn’t exist anymore.”
Antonio laughed. “Nah, he’s still in there. But I bet he’ll never again emerge around our current company.” He wiggled an eyebrow at him. “I would have loved to squeeze you for an installment on your debt, but there’d be no fun in that when you’re beyond collapse.” He pulled Richard’s hand, wrapped it around Isabella’s. “Go get some rest.”
“But...”
“But...”
Hand raised, Antonio ended their protests. “I’ll hold the fort here, not that I need to. Rico is stable, but I’ll keep him sedated until his brain edema totally resolves. I’d rather you don’t look ninety percent dead, as you both do now, when he wakes up.” He shoved them away. “Go home...now.”
Twelve
All the way to Isabella’s house she sat beside him, unmoving, unresponsive. Not that he’d tried to make her respond. She’d been shattered, had put herself back together so many times, he could barely breathe around her in fear that she’d finally come apart for good.
Once inside, she stopped at the living room, her eyes glazed, as if she was envisioning their evenings spent there. Without warning, a sob tore out of her, sounding as if it actually ripped things inside her to break free.
She’d held it all in until this moment. Before another thought or reaction could fire inside him, she was a weeping heap on the ground.
Crashing to his knees in front of her, he wrapped himself around her, reciting her name over and over, hugging and hugging her, as if he’d integrate her whole being into his own, or at least absorb all traces of her ordeal.
She suddenly exploded out of his arms. His heart almost ruptured. She hated his touch, couldn’t bear his consolation.
But instead of pulling away, she tackled him. Stunned for seconds before relief burst inside him, he let her ram him to the ground, needing her to take her revenge, expend her rage, cause him permanent damage as he’d done to her. Hoping he’d finally atone for a measure of his crimes against her, he opened himself completely to her punishment.
She only crashed her lips over his.
Going limp with shock beneath her, he surrendered to her as she wrenched at him with frantic, tear-soaked kisses that razed whatever remained intact inside him. Then she was tearing at his clothes, clawing at his flesh in her desperation, bathing him in her tears, her pleas choking.
“Give me...everything...I need it all...now, Richard...now.”
That was what she needed? To lose herself in him, to ameliorate her ordeal and douse her pain?
This was an offering he didn’t deserve. But it was the least of her dues. To have everything that he had. He’d give it all to her, now and forever, to do with what she would.
The barbed leash he’d been keeping on his need snapped. He completed her efforts to tear his clothes off, ripped her out of hers and surged to meld their naked bodies, squashing her against him as if he’d absorb her.
Nothing, starting with him, would ever harm her again. Or Rico. Not while he had breath left in his body.
She met his ferocity halfway, the same remembered horror reverberating in her every nuance, the same need to extinguish it driving her. She sank her teeth into his lips, whimpering for his reciprocation. Giving her what she needed, he twisted his fist in the silk of her hair, imprisoning her for his invasion. She fought him for more, urged him deeper until the stimulation of their mouth mating became distress. Tearing her lips away, she bit into his deltoid, broke his skin as she crushed herself to him. Growling his painful pleasure, the bleakness of despair shattered inside him as her unbridled passion pulsed in his arms, dueled with his, equal, undreamed of. He’d do anything...anything...to make it permanent.
He heaved up with her bundled in his arms. “Bed— Isabella...where’s your bed?”
“No...here...I need you inside me...now.”
Her keen sent the beast inside howling to obey her. Running to the closest horizontal surface, he lowered her there, flung himself over her even as she dragged him down. Madness burgeoned between them as she rewarded his every nip and squeeze with a fiercer cry, a harder grind of her core into his erection, a more blatant offering of herself. Her readiness scorched his senses, but it was her scream for him to fill her that slashed away his sanity, made him tear inside her.
He swallowed her scream, let it rip inside him as her unbearably tight flesh yielded to his shaft, sucking him into their almost impossible fit, hurling him into the firestorm of sensation he craved. The carnality, the reality, the meaning of being inside her again... This was everything.
And he’d always cede everything to her, the one he’d been made for.
He withdrew, his shaft gliding in the molten heat of her folds. She clung to him, demanding his return, her piercing cry harmonizing with his tortured groan.
Sanity receding further, he thrust inside her once more. She collapsed beneath him, an amalgam of agony and ecstasy slashing across her face, rippling through her body, hot passion gusting from her lungs.
“Give me all you’ve got... Don’t hold anything back...”
Her need rode him, making him ride her harder. The scents and sounds of her pleasure intensifying, her flesh became an inferno around him, more destructive than everything he’d ever faced combined. And the one thing that made him truly live.
With every squeeze of her flesh welcoming him inside her, needing what he gave her, another fraction of the barrenness of his existence, the horrors he’d seen and perpetrated, dissipated. The poignancy, the liberation, sharpened until he bellowed, pounding into her with his full power. Crying, begging, she augmented his force, crushed herself against him as if to merge their bodies.
Knowing she was desperate for release, he sank his girth inside her to the root. She bucked so hard, inside and out it was like a high-voltage lash. It made him plunge ever deeper inside her, sending her convulsions into hyperdrive, suffocating her screams. The gush of her pleasure around his thickness razed him, the force of her orgasm squeezing his shaft until her seizure triggered his own.
His body felt as if it detonated from where he was buried deepest in her outward. Everything inside him was unleashed, scorching ecstasy shooting through his length and gushing deep inside her as if to put out the flame before it consumed them both.
At the end of the tumult, she slumped beneath him, unconscious, her face streaked in tears. He could barely hang on to his own consciousness enough to gather her and go in search of her bedroom.
Once there, he laid her on her bed, every vital piece of him that had gone missing without her back in place. She’d tell him when she woke if they were back for good, or only temporarily. If she’d bestow another chance at life, or if she’d cut it short.
* * *
Isabella felt for her phone before she opened her eyes.
Finding it on her nightstand, where she didn’t remember putting it, she grabbed it in trembling hands, sagged back in a mass of tremors, tears overflowing. There were a dozen messages from her mother and Antonio throughout the night, the latest minutes ago. Rico was perfectly fine.
Before she could breathe, another blow from her memory emptied her lungs again. Richard.
She’d almost attacked him, made him take her...then she remembered nothing. The
explosive pleasure his possession had given her had knocked her out. Afterward he’d put her in bed and...left?
Before mortification registered, a silent movement did, making her sag deeper in bed. Richard...in only pants, walking in...with a tray. The aromas of fresh-brewed coffee and hot croissants made her almost faint again. She was that hungry.
She was hungrier for him. Not that she’d jump his bones again. The overwrought situation, her excuse and what had ignited him, was over. He’d decided to walk away, and she had to tell him he was free to go. She’d be damned if she clung to him through his guilt over Rico, or any obligation to her. Being unable to stop wanting him was her curse.
Suffocating with heartache, she struggled to find words to breach the awkwardness as Richard put the tray beside her then sat on the bed. His eyes downcast under a knotted brow, he silently poured her coffee, buttered a croissant, adding her favorite raspberry jam. His heat and scent and virility deluged her, hunger a twisting serpent in her gut.
Cries bubbled inside her: that he didn’t need to stick around, or coddle her, that she was okay now—they’d be okay. Before any escaped, he put the croissant to her lips. But it was the look in his eyes that silenced her, made her bite into the delicious flaky warmth, her senses spinning.
It felt as if he was showing her inside him for the first time. It was dark and scarred and isolated in there. A mirror image of her own insides. She’d already worked all that out, but she’d thought he’d grown so hardened, was so formidable, that his demons were just more fuel for his power, that he didn’t suffer from his injuries the way she did. But he was exposing facets of himself she would have never believed existed—wounded, remorseful...vulnerable.
Enervated by the exposure, she could only eat what he fed her and drown in his gaze, in a world of aching entreaty, and what she’d despaired of seeing directed to her...tenderness.
Then he began speaking. “I’ve been damaged in so many ways, been guilty of so much, I can’t begin to describe it. But Rico...he’s purity and innocence and love personified. And you...by God, Isabella, you. Against all odds and in spite of all you’ve suffered, you are all that and everything that’s shining and heroic. And while I can’t breathe without you...”
That statement was so...enormous it had her pent-up misery bursting out. “B-but you didn’t come near me for weeks!”
His gaze flooded with incomprehension, then incredulity. “Didn’t you feel me warring with myself not to?”
She shook her head, every despair she’d been resigned to evaporating, bewilderment crashing in its place. “Why?”
“Because I spoiled everything, in every way possible. In the past and in the present. But even after I discovered the extent of my crimes against you, you still gave me another chance—but only for Rico’s sake. I was going out of my mind needing you, but though I knew you wanted me still, physical intimacy had so far only driven you further away, made you despise me, and yourself. And I didn’t blame you. I didn’t know if I had more in me than what you already rejected. So I enforced the no-touching rule on myself to see if I could offer you what I never did, if I had something inside me that was worthy of you, of Rico...of the extended family who’d reached out and accepted me as one of their own because of you.”
Every word unraveled the maze of confusion she’d been lost in, shattered the vice of anguish gripping her insides.
He’d been holding back. He still wanted her.
He went on, dissolving the last of her uncertainties, giving her far more than she’d dared dream of. “But as I fully realized the extent of my emotions for you, I started to worry about the sheer depth of my attachment to Rico, the staggering force of my love for you. I started to fear myself. Then Rico asked if I was his father and Numair summoned me, and it all spiraled out of control in my mind.”
The staggering force of my love for you... My love for you.
The words revolved in her mind, spinning an all-powerful magical spell, enveloping her whole being.
Richard loved her.
As mind-blowing and life affirming as this realization was, the more pressing matter now was his distress. The need to defuse it was her paramount concern. Her trembling hand covered his fisted one. “What happened? I could have sworn you’d come back to tell him the truth.”
He continued staring at her, adrift in his own turmoil. “I was so lost in you, in my yearnings for a future together as a family, I totally dropped my guard. I almost got myself killed. And I didn’t even notice it. Numair saved my life unbeknownst to me.”
Each nerve in her body fired, every muscle liquefied. A wave of nausea and horror stormed through her at the idea that he could have been...been... The images were...unbearable, unsurvivable...
“That was the last straw. It made me believe that whatever I do, just because of what I am, I’d only blight your lives, cause you even more untold damages. I had to keep you safe, from myself most of all. That was why I had to walk away.”
Another surge of dread smashed into her.
He believed his love, his very life, would be a source of threats to them? And that was why he’d still walk away?
His eyes were haunted, desperate, as they left hers, searched space aimlessly. “I thought my control and strength of will limitless. But it all crumbled in the face of my need for you. What can I do now when it’s beyond me to leave you?”
The heart that had been pulping itself against her ribs did a full somersault. She swore.
And she did what she’d told herself she couldn’t do again. She launched herself at him, over the tray, knocking everything over, tackling him down to the bed, bombarding him with kisses and raining now-ready tears all over him.
“You can do only one thing for the rest of our lives. You can love, love, love me, and Rico, as much as we love you.”
Richard, lying speechless beneath her unrestrained passion and relief, looked as if he was coming out of a fugue. “You love me?” If she’d told him she could stick to walls he wouldn’t have looked more stunned. “You love me? How? When I did everything to deserve your loathing?”
His guilt, his hatred of himself, his conviction he didn’t deserve her love felt so total, she knew he’d need a lengthy argument to persuade him otherwise. She wasn’t up to that now.
She wanted to get to the good part at once. At last.
So she asked one simple question. “Do you love us? Me?”
And if she had any doubt, what came into his eyes now put it all to rest forever. It was staggering, the purity and totality of emotions that deluged her.
“I far more than love you. You. I’ve always loved you...from the first moment I saw you. But I thought you never really wanted me, and that was why you didn’t come with me, never sought me again. I fought admitting my love for years, so I could move on. But I was done fighting weeks ago. I only want to worship you forever, and be the father Rico deserves, and never let you go.”
Crying out, she snatched a kiss from those lips that had been the cause for her every ecstasy and agony.
“You want to know how I could love you? That’s how. I loved you from the first moment, too. I must have felt your love, and it kept me bound to you, even through the misconceptions and estrangement.” She melted caresses over the planes of his rugged face, sizzling in delight at the open adoration in his eyes. “And if I loved the old you with all my heart, I adore the new you that Rico unearthed, the magnificent man and human being your terrible life had buried deep within you, with all my being.”
He shook his head adamantly. “Rico only melted what remained of my deep freeze, but the one who brought the whole iceberg crashing down into tiny fragments has always been you. The moment I saw you again, it was over for me.” He heaved up, had her beneath him in a blink. “I want you certain of one thing. I would have admitted it sooner rather than later that I wanted nothing but to be yours, to make it all up to you, even if we didn’t have Rico.” His face twisted. “But we do have him, and you saved hi
m... You saved all of us.”
He buried his face in her bosom and she felt another thing she’d never thought possible. His tears.
Crying out, as if they burned her, she dragged his head up, her hands and lips trembling over his face, needing to wipe them and the pain behind them away.
No longer hiding anything from her, his emotional state or anything else inside him, he worshipped her in return. “This perfection makes me even more terrified. I don’t deserve a fraction of it. How could I possibly have all this?”
After another fervent kiss, she looked into his eyes, intoxicated with the freedom of showing him everything in her heart. “You better get used to it. You have all of me forever. And Rico. And you also have Rose and her family. And my family. And your best friend back. Not to mention that army of partners who drafted you into their brotherhood.”
His eyes turned into shimmering pools of silver. This time she knew it was with joy and gratitude.
His next words confirmed her suspicion. “It’s too much.”
Wrapping his massive frame in a fierce embrace, she pressed his head to her fluttering heart. “No, it isn’t. You see only the bad things you did, when you had overpowering reasons...or at least was under as powerful misconceptions. But you also did so many incredible things for so many people. You sacrificed yourself for your family, then for Rafael and Numair and their—your brotherhood, then you gave Rose a second chance and watched over her all her life.”
He pushed himself off her, as if unable to bear her exoneration. “But what I did to you...”
She pulled him back, never intending to let him go again. “I don’t care anymore what you did when you thought I was Burton’s accomplice. Neither should you.” He shook his head, face gripped in self-loathing. She grabbed his face, made him look at her. “What matters is that you gave me everything.”
A spectacular snort answered her claim.
It made her burst out laughing. His scowl deepened, not accepting that she should make light of it. Her lethal Cobra had turned out to be a noble knight after all.