Page 35 of Insidious Heart
“You’re not going to rush out of here now, are you?”
Slowly, I lift my head and meet her glassy, lust-filled eyes with a frown.
She bites her lip. “I mean, if you have to go… I get that, but, I…”
“You what?”
“I don’t really want you to.”
My brows shoot up my forehead as I blink. “You don’t want me to go?”
Stevie shakes her head.
“Because I have to clean all this up or…”
Christ, I didn’t realize I hadn’t seen her truly smile until right now because the one she’s giving me, though small, is fucking stunning.
“No, not really. I don’t know how I’m going to do that, but it’s not why I want you to stay.”
“Then why?”
Her smile grows and her arms tighten around my neck as Stevie leans toward me and brushes her lips against mine. “I just do.”
I may be grinning when I kiss my girl back, but she just sealed my fate. I am totally fucked over Stevie Williams, but I’ll be damned if I’m at all upset about it. I just know nothing good will come of it for either of us.
* * *
Stevie fell asleep almost immediatelyafter I fixed her bed.
I righted the mattress, anyway, and that’s more than I planned on doing to it after we fucked.
Well, let me rephrase.
It wasn’t what Iexpectedto be doing after we fucked.
She’s mine now, mine for always whether she realizes it or not, and the way Stevie looked at me while she asked me to stay after the hottest, most depraved sex of my life—that she was totally into—only solidified that.
So, naturally I expected to give her a minute before we fucked again.
I was ready. Fuck, I was so ready, and even though my cock had softened, looking at the mess I made of Stevie, the mess I made of her room, it had my dick stirring to life once again pretty quickly. But then my girl yawned and something else took over.
Protectiveness, I guess?
It’s not something I’m familiar with anymore but it’s the only way to describe thesomething elsethat put my instincts on autopilot.
I fixed her mattress and stripped the sheets because that piece of shit Joker touched them, then turned to find clean ones. But by the time I needed to ask her where they were, Stevie was curled up and passed out on her bed.
It took a minute for me to grasp why she was so tired, I won’t lie about that.
The sex was phenomenal and addictive, and I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t buzzing with energy like me.
Then my knowledge of the human body kicked in.
Stevie had been attacked. She was literally fighting for her life when I climbed through that window, and between that and watching me kill Joker before banging our brains out, she most likely had an extremely epic adrenaline crash.
The fear, the shock. The pain. The orgasms. All of it made for a lethal cocktail, and once she felt safe enough, my girl drifted to sleep.
And no, I won’t address the shit that happened in my chest over knowing some psychotic killer like me made Stevie feel safe.
