More of You: A Confessions of the Heart Stand-Alone Novel

by Jackson, A. L.

  Thirty-Three

  Faith

  Through the shadowy darkness of the old house, Jace carried Bailey up the sweeping stairs. I’d almost wanted to argue with him. Tell him I was capable. That I wanted to do it. Needed to do it.

  But it was the look on his face when he’d pulled her from the backseat of the rental car that had silenced every question begging to be released from my tongue.

  That hatred that had blazed in the depths of those coppery eyes as he’d searched the property as if he were prepared to run into the whipping shadows with a sword drawn.

  A warrior who was preparing for war.

  A fight to the death.

  It was as if a switch had been flipped, and that menacing, terrifying boy who’d do anything to protect his family had been zapped back to life.

  Born in that accident.

  Or maybe he’d just been there all along, waiting to be released.

  The presence of it crawled the walls and buzzed in the atmosphere.

  Crackling.

  Snapping where it struck.

  I could feel it, flames against my skin.

  Inciting a terror inside me unlike anything I’d ever known. Not of him, but of what was to come.

  I could feel it. The threat of it rising in the air. Clouds that rained disaster.

  I struggled to breathe against it. Everything up to this point had felt as if whoever this was wanted to scare me. To warn me into handing over whatever it was they wanted.

  Didn’t they know I would if I could?

  But now . . .

  A shudder tumbled down my spine, the trauma of the accident so fresh it was the only thing I could see when I closed my eyes.

  This had to end.

  Jace stepped over the gate at the end of the hall, and I followed him into Bailey’s room where he carefully laid her onto her tiny bed.

  His hands were shaking when he pulled back the covers, his jaw clenched when he tugged off her shoes.

  But what destroyed me was when he knelt beside her, when he kissed her forehead and brushed her hair back from her face and looked down on her sleeping form as if she had become the focus of his world.

  As he tucked the Beast doll into her arms as if it were a promise to watch over her all night long.

  Terror shivered through my being.

  The what-ifs.

  What if they’d hit a little harder or a little differently?

  What if they’d backed up and slammed us again?

  What if they returned?

  But my tiny girl? She was safe.

  Safe because of Jace, the man so stupidly brave when he’d faced down that car as if he were invincible.

  Dragging his attention from Bailey, he turned the force of that gaze toward where I stood uneasily in the middle of the room.

  Right then, he was wearing the same expression he’d worn this afternoon.

  Devotion and love and hate. A glow in his eyes.

  It pinned me to the spot.

  Energy blasted.

  Rushing and racing and spiraling.

  His mouth trembled as promises fell from his lips. “I will kill them, Faith. I will hunt them down and destroy them before I let them hurt you or Bailey.”

  A tremble ridged my spine, and I found myself voicing the question I didn’t even want to entertain. “What is it they really want from us? I don’t have anything anyone could possibly want.”

  Why did I get the devastating impression that he knew? My mind filled with the vision of him in that intersection, going for that car with a gun drawn.

  Stricken, he blinked at me, and the accusation flew from my mouth—gratefulness or confusion or blame—I didn’t know. Whatever it was, it left me on a whimpered cry. “You had a gun.”

  His head jerked to the side before he slowly pushed to his feet.

  The man towering.

  A blistering shadow in the darkened depths of Bailey’s small room.

  He stalked my way. Slowly, though his strides were purposed.

  A shiver rushed across my skin, and my back banged softly into the wall. His voice was rough, caressing across my face like a sharp promise. “Yes, I had a gun. I told you that I was here to protect you. I won’t leave you defenseless.”

  My eyes slammed closed for a second, trying to find my senses.

  I could feel the questions twisted across my face in deep lines when I opened my eyes again and stared up at the man who looked so dangerous and forbidding standing there.

  “Tell me what’s happening, Jace. What did Mack tell you? Do you know who hurt Joseph? What do they possibly think I could have?” My voice cracked on the last.

  A consuming kind of grief was sucking the life from my spirit. Stealing away the flickers of joy I’d felt the last couple of weeks. That shimmer of hope that had risen from the depths of me.

  As if maybe we could escape all the grief and sorrow. Never forget but find joy in the shadows.

  The questions were coming too fast for me to entertain that any longer, though.

  “What did he do?” I finally whispered the culmination of it all.

  As soft as he tried to make them be, his words scraped across my soul.

  A lash.

  A blow.

  “Joseph was never honest with you, Faith.”

  Tears streaked free, and my mind was tumbling back to those days when Jace had been taken from me. When Joseph had warned the exact same thing about Jace.

  What was I supposed to believe?

  Jace’s mouth pinched. As if he were holding something in. Holding something back.

  My eyes slammed closed, the accusation a low, pained cry. “What aren’t you tellin’ me?”

  God, I was a fool.

  Falling so fast and so hard.

  But that was the way this boy had always had me. Hooked in his grips with nothin’ but a glance of those knowing, fierce eyes.

  It seemed impossible with the savage state that he was in, but I was sure it was hurt that blanketed Jace’s being when he jerked back. As he blinked at me as if he were trying to see through his own questions.

  His own torment and grief and guilt.

  What was happening?

  What did he know?

  Jace paced, roughing a hand through his hair, his voice quieted as he hissed the words. “If I knew who was responsible, I would erase them, Faith. If I knew exactly who Joseph was involved with, I would have had Mack beating down their door the second this happened. But I don’t.”

  He hit his fingertips against his chest, pain wheezing from him on his sharp breaths.

  “The only thing I know is Joseph was never good enough. Never deserved you. And I never should have given him the chance to let him steal you from me.”

  Steal me away?

  I stood there shocked when he blew out of Bailey’s door as if it’d all become too much of a burden for him to bear any longer.

  Footsteps pounded down the hall, and I craned my ear, listening for him to take the stairs and disappear out the front door the way I’d been terrified that he would do all along.

  Forever.

  But then I felt it. Jace came to a sudden stop.

  As if he hadn’t expected to do it, either.

  His hesitation bled through the old walls before I heard the creak of the hinges of the neglected door.

  The room I’d scarcely been able to bring myself to enter for all these years except to clean it every now and again, hit by a landslide of memories every single time I went in there.

  There was nothing I could do to stop myself from moving that direction.

  Drawn to the magnet.

  Drawn to the light.

  I was a shaking mess when I came to the door that was left open an inch.

  When I nudged the crack wider, I found Jace standing in the middle of the room with his back to me, staring out at the garden of roses that filled the window as if the gorgeous scene had been framed.

  All that hostility and rage brimming from his muscl
es.

  My beast.

  His shoulders tensed when he felt me inch in from behind him, and his hands fisted at his sides.

  Shock reared me back a step when he suddenly whirled around.

  It was almost fear that skated through me with the look on his face.

  He pointed toward the wall. “When I came here, I thought I’d hate her.”

  Hurt blistered beneath the surface of my skin, unable to fathom that he’d even let a thought so cruel slip from between his lips.

  He took a looming step forward. “I wanted to. I wanted to hate her so badly because she wasn’t mine.”

  If it weren’t for the deep sincerity breaking in his voice, I would have walked out. Turned my back on him. Instead, I was blinking at him, trying to process what he was saying. What was hidden in the deep emotion that burdened his words.

  His eyes pinched closed, and when he opened them, they were blazing.

  A thunderbolt.

  Striking through me the way he always had.

  “You want to know why I came here, Faith? You really want to know?”

  My head started bouncing all over, as if I were begging for the answer but couldn’t control the quakes that rocked the floor.

  His fist came down hard on his chest. “Because I never stopped loving you. Not for a second. Not for a day. Because you’ve consumed every one of my goddamned thoughts since the second I left.”

  His body angled toward me. “Because I’m. In. Love. With. You.”

  He punctuated every single one of those last words with the desperation that rolled from his tongue.

  “Because I always have been, and I’m always going to be.”

  His tone softened in some sort of grief. “And I fucking love her, too.”

  Oh.

  I almost folded in two, slammed with the magnitude of it.

  Because I’d finally caught up to what he was sayin’. I finally understood the way he’d been looking at her.

  Desperation lit, caught up in the dense, dense air.

  The strike of a match.

  Tossed right into the rippling energy.

  Gasoline.

  My throat grew dry in the same second my heart boiled over, and there was no containing what I’d tried to keep buried deep inside me.

  “And I never, ever stopped loving you. I might have hated you in the middle of it, but I never stopped, Jace. How could I? Not when you were the boy who made me realize what it was like to really love. The one who’d taken a fantasy idea in my mind and made it a reality. You touched me in a way no one else ever could. I think I’ve loved you since the day I met you.”

  The admission fractured out of me. Just like the last pieces of those memories that I’d been so desperately trying to cling to since Joseph was ripped out of my life.

  Guilt churned at admitting it aloud, as if it might be a dirty secret I’d kept for all these years.

  But it wasn’t close to being as great as the love that poured free with the confession.

  Because Jace Jacobs?

  He could never be erased from me.

  Thirty-Four

  Jace

  The room echoed with our proclamations.

  As if the words were etching themselves onto the walls. A knife dug deep into the wood.

  A statement made.

  Permanent.

  No going back.

  It was the room where I’d first taken her. Loved her. Where she’d taught me that life might hold more meaning than simple survival.

  More than just a struggle.

  More than just brutality.

  With her?

  It’d been more.

  It’d been everything.

  I’d lost it. Let it slip through my fingers like a fool.

  I stalked toward her, no longer able to tolerate the space between us. Every echo of my footsteps vibrated through the floorboards.

  Because it was fucking alive.

  The air and the energy and the feeling.

  The connection.

  The truest thing I’d ever had.

  Faith was trembling when I dove my fingers into those long locks of chocolate hair and captured her mouth.

  Possessively.

  Desperately.

  With all the fear I’d felt this afternoon.

  With all the devotion I felt in that moment.

  All my defenses down.

  My lips pressed and pulled and sucked, and she whimpered into the assault, “Jace.”

  I pressed her against the wall, my forehead rocking on hers, the words a breath of a whisper against her lips, “I mean it, Faith. I fucking love you. I love her. This . . . this was what I was always meant to do. Protect you and love you. I’m supposed to be here with you.”

  Her fingers gripped my shoulders, pulling me closer than I already was. Like she couldn’t get close enough. “Then why’s it feel like I’m the one who has finally made it home?”

  Her fingertips fluttered up over my face.

  Across my lips.

  My nose.

  My brow.

  Not quite touching when she flitted them over the row of stitches that had been made at my temple. Like she’d give anything to heal them.

  What she didn’t know was that, just by standing there, she already was.

  Until that moment, I wondered if I’d ever really known what devotion meant. As a kid, I had been too scared and broken and insecure to realize what she’d really needed was me.

  “Because that’s what this place was always supposed to be. Ours.”

  Didn’t care if it was some kind of blasphemy. A straight shot of betrayal sent Joseph’s way.

  Fuck him.

  After today? After seeing what he’d gotten them into? I couldn’t find it in myself to give half a shit about what he might want.

  He’d stolen what was mine.

  And I was taking it back.

  My hands found the angled curve of her face, lifting it to me, and I stared down at her through the flood of moonlight that poured into the room.

  Or maybe it was just the girl who was lighting it up.

  “Do you remember?” I asked her. “The night you gave yourself to me? What I told you?”

  “That you’d love me forever.” Her hands wrapped around my wrists. Her voice dropped.

  Low with seduction.

  Still, the girl was so damned sweet that it still managed to come out sounding shy. “I remember everything. The way you touched me. The way you loved me. But I’d already belonged to you, Jace. Just like I do now.”

  I pressed her up harder against the wall, her back hitting it with a soft thud, an echo that wound with the promise that fell from my mouth. “I lost you once. I won’t let it happen again. I won’t let you go.”

  “I don’t want you to. Don’t ever let me go. I need you, Jace. I need you to stay.”

  My hands slid down the perfect curves of her body, landing on her waist and cinching tight. “Tell me again,” I demanded.

  She lifted her chin toward my face, her voice so devastatingly soft, and still, the loudest thing I’d ever heard. “I’m in love with you. I love you so much it hurts.”

  I was going to erase the sting.

  Eradicate the hurt.

  Touch her and please her until there was nothing but pleasure.

  Protect her in a way that she would always know she was safe.

  Softly, I brushed my fingers through her hair. “And you’re the only one who’s ever taken my pain away.”

  “I guess maybe we’ve always just been better together,” she whispered in that soft accent that she wore so well. Goodness on her tongue and trust in her eyes.

  “Together,” was my only answer, and then I was sweeping her off her feet and pulling her into my arms, cradling her like a treasure against my chest.

  I carried her through the dancing shadows of the room to the massive four-poster bed.

  The carved wood was dark and gleaming, lush in the light of the moon, the plush, sati
ny, cream-colored bedding screaming luxury in what had once been the master suite.

  Luxury was fucking right.

  There was no greater extravagance or indulgence than being inside Faith. No greater riches than holding this girl in my hands.

  And I was about to get greedy.

  Those slender arms clung to my neck as I leaned down and peeled the covers back.

  I laid her in the middle.

  Chocolate hair spilled out all around her, and that tight body arched.

  I hadn’t even touched her, and she was already quivering with need.

  Her breaths panted into the dense, dense air, stirring up the memories that were ready to stand and fight for a future.

  I’d let her go, thinking it was what was the best for her. It had been the most foolish thing I had ever done.

  No more.

  I stepped back and stared down at her where she was laid out like a vision on that bed.

  A fucking fantasy.

  The girl I’d been dreaming of for all these years. A tease in my mind and a scar on my body.

  My body that raced, muscles clenched tight, my dick begging at the seam of my jeans.

  Mine.

  Her hand fluttered up.

  A whisper.

  A plea.

  “I don’t wanna be alone. Not anymore, Jace. Take it from me . . . that place that’s been achin’ for you for all these years. It’s always belonged to you, anyway.”

  Lust roared through my veins. Pumped steadily with the devotion.

  I set a knee on the bed and climbed up over her, hands planted on either side of her head.

  I dipped down.

  Kissed her.

  Slow and tender and profound.

  Gentle sweeps of my tongue and soft bites of my teeth.

  Fuck. She tasted so good. Felt so right.

  A glimmer of a warning glowed deep inside my soul.

  She doesn’t know.

  She doesn’t know.

  I shoved it down where it belonged. Refusing it. Because it didn’t matter anymore.

  My purpose had shifted.

  My reason was her.

  I set my palm on the side of her neck. Her pulse a needy drum, drum, drum.

  Hard and fast and desperate.

  It was enough to set me off. Make me dizzy. This girl filling my lungs.