I didn’t deserve that happy ever after.
“I know the truth, Ari.” Words that didn’t feel real. How could he know when I’d never told a soul? “They’ve been after me, too, in my emails. I knew they were coming. But until now, I didn’t realize they’d come for you, too. On more than one occasion.”
My mind transported me back to the night when I woke up in a hospital with a concerned nurse and doctor hanging over my bed. They helped me get a flight back to the States, helped me escape the man who’d run me off the road after cutting mybreaks, helped me slip out the back and keep my child safe until she was born.
Even then, I knew someday the label would come back for me. I just hoped that if I removed myself from their radar, they’d let me drift into a peaceful, non-threatening existence.
I should have known that none of us would ever be safe.
“The company will make sure I’m protected. I’ll get a detail outside of my building and?—”
Jun didn’t give me the chance to make false promises. His lips crashed down onto mine with a reckless heat, devouring me like he’d been starving in the desert for years, and I was an oasis. Melting under his touch wasn’t a choice. It was as inevitable as getting wet in the rain. As unavoidable as a sunburn in summertime. As instinctive as breathing.
I closed the distance between us, hating that my resolve to remove myself from his life was crumbling with a single touch, an embrace, a frantic display of desperation between two people who’d fucked up every opportunity they’d ever been given. I had all these grand ideas, this plan to fade back into the background and take my promotion. To go back to how I’d been living before he walked back into my life and turned it all upside down.
And now, I couldn’t think of a single one.
“Arista,” he breathed against my lips, “I’m tired of pretending you don’t belong in my life. I haven’t been the same since you walked away.” His hands trailed down the sides of my arms, snaking around my back to tug our bodies together so that all I could feel was him. “I know why you did it. I know what happened to you. I should have realized it sooner.” I didn’t know where one of us ended and the other began. Our heartbeats felt in sync, uniform, two beating as one. His words were just the chain that cemented the connection, that made it impossible to escape. Not that I wanted to.
He’d always been my other half, my home.
“Please, don’t run away this time, Ari.”
The last walls around my heart shattered as his voice cracked, a single tear streaming down his cheek to mingle with our entwined lips. The salty taste struck a chord in me, and with a desperate moan, I gripped his shirt and dragged him backward, never once breaking contact as I maneuvered us to my bedroom from memory alone.
My heel throbbed as I kicked the door open and backed into the room, a hand frantically searching the wall for the damned light switch. When I couldn’t find it easily, Jun leaned back, breaking the kiss, eyes searching mine as he reached out over my hand and found the fucking thing with ease.
Like he’d been here before.
Or like he belonged here.
“If we turn on the lights, are you going to run away from me?”
I didn’t have an answer for him. Turning the lights on felt like a big step, but I wanted, needed to see him. I needed to face this demon myself if I was ever going to overcome it.
“I don’t know.”
“Then leave it off.” His lips were on my neck, his hand over mine, curling our fingers together as he pulled it away from the switch. “Don’t think. Don’t focus. Justfeel.”
I swallowed back the instant urge to contradict him. To tell him I needed to see.
I didn’t, really. And that was the part that scared me more than anything.
If I let myself feel, I might not have the strength to turn him away. And he knew that.
“Okay,” I said finally, letting my head fall back as he kissed his way up the side of the column of my neck. “Okay.”
Chapter
Twenty-Two
JUN
Three things happenedat once with the whisper from her lips.
The blood rushed from every one of my extremities and pooled in my dick. My thoughts scattered to the wind like they were leaves in fall. And I blurted out the first thing that popped into the forefront of my mind.
“I’m never going to let you go again, Arista.”
