17. Cami #2
“I’m here.” I wrapped my arms around him, holding on just as tight. “I’m here. I’m okay.”
He pulled back. His hands cupped my face, tilting it up toward the light. His eyes went dark when he saw the bruise blooming across my cheek.
“Who the fuck did this to you?”
“Logan.”
His features went cold and deadly.
“I’ll kill him.”
“Later.” I grabbed his face, made him look at me. “Right now I just need you to hold me. Please. Just... hold me.”
He pulled me back against his chest. His heart was pounding beneath my ear, fast and hard and alive.
“I love you.” The words came out fierce. Desperate. “I should have said it sooner. Every day since you walked into my warehouse. Every moment since you looked at me and told me I wasn’t even in your top three. I love you, Camellia Brennan, and I am never letting you go.”
I pulled back. Looked at him. At this man who had destroyed me and rebuilt me and loved me through all of it.
“I love you too.”
Then I kissed him.
I tasted blood. Mine and his. I didn’t care.
“I’m not angry,” I whispered against his lips. “About the email. About any of it. I’m... I’m relieved. If you hadn’t sent it, I would have married him. I would have spent my whole life not knowing.”
His forehead pressed against mine.
“I’m still sorry.”
“I know.”
“I’ll spend every day I have left making this up to you.”
“I know that too.”
Commotion behind us. Voices. Scuffling.
Julian appeared in the doorway. “Building’s clear, boss. Two hostiles down, the rest scattered. We’ve got Logan.”
Sal’s jaw tightened. “Bring him.”
Two of Sal’s men dragged Logan through the door moments later. He was beaten. Bloody. His expensive suit torn, his face a mess of cuts and bruises. They threw him on his knees in front of us.
“Please.” Logan’s voice was a whimper. A pathetic, broken sound. “Please, I didn’t... I wasn’t going to hurt her. I just needed the money. I just needed...”
Sal stood up slowly. Walked toward Logan with a deliberate calm more terrifying than any rage.
“You kidnapped the woman I love.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please...”
“You put your hands on her.” Sal crouched down, his face inches from Logan’s. “You hit her. You tied her up. You left her in this shithole for hours.”
“I’ll do anything. I’ll give you anything. Just please...”
“I’m going to make sure you spend the rest of your life remembering this moment.” Sal’s voice was soft. Almost gentle. “Every morning when you wake up. Every night before you sleep. You will remember what you did to her, and you will know that everything that happens to you after is because of it.”
Logan was sobbing now. Tears and snot running down his face, his body shaking with terror.
“Are you going to kill me?”
Sal smiled. It was the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen.
“Death would be mercy.” He stood up. “And I don’t deal in mercy.”
He turned to Julian. “Get the fixer. I want this scene scrubbed clean. Every trace of us gone. The two bodies disposed of. Then deliver these two...” He nodded toward Logan and the unconscious Dominic.
“To the location we discussed. Make sure they’re comfortable. They’re going to be there for a while.”
“Yes, boss.”
Sal walked back to me. Held out his hand.
“Let’s go home.”
I took it.
And I didn’t look back.
***
The shaking didn’t start until we were home.
It held off through the car, through the gates, through the long walk up the stairs with his arm locked around me. It held off until his bedroom door closed behind us and the silence dropped down and there was no one left to be brave for.
Then it hit all at once.
My knees went. He caught me before I hit the floor, hauled me against his chest, and I fisted both hands in his bloodstained shirt and held on like the ground might tilt out from under me.
“I’ve got you.” His voice was rough against my hair. “I’ve got you, fiore. You’re home. You’re safe.”
“I keep seeing it.” The words tore out of me, ugly and shaking. “The trunk. The rope. I thought... I lay there and I thought I was never going to see you again.”
“I know.”
“I needed you.” I pulled back and held his face between my hands. There were tears on my cheeks and I didn’t care. “The whole time. I needed you so bad it hurt.”
His control cracked, right there behind his eyes.
Then his mouth was on mine.
It wasn’t sweet. It wasn’t the careful, reverent thing from the night in the garden. This was teeth and desperation, his hands everywhere at once, gripping my hips, my jaw, the back of my neck, needing to touch every part of me to believe I was real and whole and his.
“Need to feel you.” I was already dragging his ruined shirt up his torso, careful of the bandages, hungry for skin. “Now. Please. I need to know we’re both still here.”
“You’re sure.” He pulled back just far enough to search my face, his chest heaving. “After everything. You’re hurt, you’re...”
“I’m sure.” I bit it out. Took his hand and pressed it flat between my thighs, over the thin cotton, so he could feel exactly how sure I was. “Don’t be gentle. I don’t want gentle. I want to feel you tomorrow. I want proof you’re alive.”
He groaned, low and broken, and gave me what I asked for.
He stripped me down right there, fast and rough, his mouth chasing every inch of bared skin. My back hit the wall. His thigh shoved between mine. I rode it shamelessly, chasing friction, my nails dragging down his unbandaged side while he sucked a bruise into my throat.
Then he slowed.
Not gentle. Never gentle, not tonight. But his hands changed, going from frantic to thorough, taking slow inventory of me.
Both palms down my sides. The dip of my waist. The flare of my hips.
He cupped my breasts and rolled my nipples between his fingers until they ached, watching my face the entire time, gray eyes blown black and wrecked, cataloguing every sound I made.
Then he caught my wrist and turned it over, and his whole body went still at the raw red welt the rope had left behind.
He brought it to his mouth. Pressed a kiss there, soft enough to break me, then another, dragging his lips up the inside of my arm, kissing away every second I had spent tied up in the dark.
“Still here,” he muttered against my skin. “You’re still here. You’re real.”
“I’m here.” I dragged his head back up to mine. “Stop checking and touch me. Properly.”
His teeth caught my bottom lip. Then his hand was between my thighs, two thick fingers dragging through my slick, and we both groaned at how wet I already was for him.
“Fuck.” He pushed them into me, deep, the heel of his palm grinding against my clit, and my knees nearly gave out. “Soaked. All this because I walked back through the door?”
“All of it.” I was rocking onto his hand now, shameless, riding his fingers. “Always. Now stop teasing and give me your cock. I can’t wait. I need the real thing. I need you.”
He pulled his fingers free and brought them to his mouth, sucking them clean while he held my eyes, groaning low at the taste of me. Filthy and reverent at once. It punched the breath clean out of my lungs.
“Off.” I was already clawing at his waistband. “Get these off.”
He did. Then he lifted me, my legs wrapping around him, my back braced against the wall, the blunt head of his cock notching against my pussy, hot and hard right where I was aching and empty.
“Look at me,” he said.
I looked.
And he pushed inside me in one long, claiming stroke.
I cried out. He swallowed the sound with his mouth, holding still for half a second, both of us shaking, buried so deep I felt him in my throat.
Then he started to move. Hard. Deep. Every thrust driving the air out of me, driving the fear out of me, replacing the cold concrete and the rope and the terror with him, only him, all of him.
He fucked me like he was furious. Like he could rewrite the last day with his body if he just got deep enough, rough enough, close enough.
The wall bit into my spine. His hands gripped my ass and hauled me down to meet every drive of his hips, the wet slap of skin filling the dark room.
I took all of it. Wanted all of it. Wanted the soreness he was promising, every brutal inch of proof that we had both walked out of that place alive.
“Mine,” he growled against my mouth. “You’re mine. They don’t get to touch you. No one gets to touch you.”
“Yours.” I was sobbing it now, half pleasure half something deeper. “Yours, Sal, only yours.”
“I love you.” He said it with his cock buried to the hilt, his forehead pressed to mine, his eyes wide open and wrecked and fixed on mine. “I love you. I almost lost you and I will never survive losing you, do you hear me. I love you, Camellia.”
The words cracked the last of my defenses.
“I love you too.” I clung to him, met every thrust, took everything he gave. “God, I love you. Don’t stop. Don’t ever stop.”
He didn’t.
He drove into me until the wall shook, until my voice went hoarse, until the pressure coiled tight and white behind my eyes.
Then he got a hand between us, his thumb finding my clit, rough and merciless, circling it in time with the snap of his hips.
That was all it took. I came apart with his name ripping out of me, my pussy clamping down around his cock, the orgasm tearing through me so hard I saw stars.
He followed a heartbeat later, buried as deep as he could go, my name a broken prayer against my throat, both of us trembling and tangled and alive.
After, he carried me to the bed. Laid me down. Curled his battered body around mine and pulled the covers over us both.
I pressed my palm flat over his heart. Felt it pound.
Alive. He was alive. I was alive. We were home.
I fell asleep with his heartbeat under my hand and didn’t dream of trunks or rope or anything at all.