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77

Author: AuthorRuby
last update publish date: 2026-03-21 00:04:04

Underneath the grief and the guilt and the constant low ache of Levi’s absence, I felt it. Warm and tentative and real.

I reached across the table. My hand covered his.

He turned his hand over and held mine, his thumb moving across my knuckles in the slow, absentminded rhythm of someone who doesn’t realize they’re doing it. Muscle memory. Something his body did without consulting the part of him still keeping score.

I looked at our hands and let myself feel that too, the grief and this, both
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  • CRAVING THE WRONG BLACKTHORNE BROTHER   80

    We stood completely still and listened.The footsteps on the stairs were unhurried, domestic, the particular rhythm of someone who had somewhere to be but was in no rush to get there. A member of staff. One of the housekeepers who did the upper floor rooms before nine. I knew the sounds of this house by heart now, had learned them the way you learn a language you never meant to study, and I counted the steps and tracked them down the corridor and breathed.They passed the door.Continued on.Faded.Levi exhaled slowly against my hair. His arms had gone tight around me the moment we heard them and they stayed that way a beat longer than necessary before he loosened his hold and stepped back, putting a careful foot of space between us.“We have maybe forty minutes,” I said quietly. “Before the room service comes up.”“I know.” He looked toward the balcony door, assessing. “I should go before—”“Don’t.” The word came out before I could stop it.He looked at me.“Not yet,” I said. “Plea

  • CRAVING THE WRONG BLACKTHORNE BROTHER   79

    He stepped through the door and I kissed him. Not carefully, not with any of the hesitation that had lived in every moment between us for months. I closed the space before he had finished crossing the threshold and kissed him the way you kiss someone you have been trying not to think about for eleven days and failing completely, and he made a sound low in his throat and kissed me back with three hundred miles of driving through the dark behind it. His hands came to my face. Mine found the front of his jacket. We stood there in the gray morning light of the bedroom while the estate woke up around us and I stopped thinking about the east wing and the breakfast table and the steadiness in Nate’s eyes, and there was nothing except this, him, here, real. When we finally broke apart we were both breathing harder than we should have been. Levi pressed his forehead to mine. “Hi,” he said. “Hi.” His thumbs moved across my cheekbones, gentle now where the kiss hadn’t been, and he looked

  • CRAVING THE WRONG BLACKTHORNE BROTHER   78

    Ella It was the way he looked at me over breakfast that gave it away.Not with warmth, not with the careful tentative thing that had been trying to grow back between us over the past week. He looked at me the way you look at a problem you have been turning over for a long time and have finally, exhaustedly, arrived at a conclusion about. I set down my tea before he said a word.“Say it,” I said.He looked up from his plate. “Say what?”“Whatever you’ve been working up to since you woke up. I can see it.”Nate put down his fork. He was quiet for a moment, and it wasn’t the deliberating kind of quiet. The deliberating had already happened, probably before he came downstairs, probably before he slept. He had made his decision and now he was just finding the door to walk through.“I need space,” he said.The words were simple. Stripped of everything except their meaning.I looked at him across the table. “Space.”“I thought I could do this.” His eyes met mine, and the worst part was the

  • CRAVING THE WRONG BLACKTHORNE BROTHER   77

    Underneath the grief and the guilt and the constant low ache of Levi’s absence, I felt it. Warm and tentative and real. I reached across the table. My hand covered his. He turned his hand over and held mine, his thumb moving across my knuckles in the slow, absentminded rhythm of someone who doesn’t realize they’re doing it. Muscle memory. Something his body did without consulting the part of him still keeping score. I looked at our hands and let myself feel that too, the grief and this, both at once, coexisting the way they’d been coexisting in me for months without my permission. “Ella.” His thumb had gone still. “Whose baby is it.” Not a question. Seven days of building to it and it came out flat and final, and I felt it hit the soft place where the hope had just been sitting. I didn’t let go of his hand. “I don’t know,” I said. He looked at me. All the way at me, the phone forgotten, the carefully maintained distance of seven days collapsing into something raw. “You don’

  • CRAVING THE WRONG BLACKTHORNE BROTHER   76

    I kept reaching for my phone.That was the embarrassing thing, the thing I couldn’t make myself stop doing. I would be in the middle of something eating, or trying to, or standing at the window watching the grounds go about their indifferent morning business and my hand would move toward my phone with the muscle memory of someone who has a person to check on. Someone to send a message to that said are you okay or where are you or just his name, just Levi, just the proof that there was still a thread connecting wherever he was to wherever I was.Then I would remember.I had no number for him. He had left before dawn without leaving one. And even if I had it, Nate’s estate had eyes everywhere, and I had already done enough damage with the things I’d done when I thought no one was watching.So I would put the phone down.And then twenty minutes later I would reach for it again.The silence between Nate and me started three days after the morning he’d held me and said mine.Not loudly, i

  • CRAVING THE WRONG BLACKTHORNE BROTHER   75

    He stood at the window for a long time.I sat in the chair and watched his back and let the silence be what it was. I had learned, in the months of being married to this man, that there were different kinds of Nate silences. There was the silence he used as a weapon, deliberate, pressurized, designed to make the other person fill it with something they hadn't meant to say. There was the silence of him thinking, which had a particular quality of aliveness to it, like standing near something generating heat. And then there was this kind. The kind that happened to him. The kind that meant something had landed too deep for the usual machinery to process and he was simply standing inside it, waiting to find out what he thought.I did not rush him.Outside the window, the gardener had finished his pass along the lower path and moved on to somewhere else. The garden sat empty now in the flat morning light, dew still on the grass, everything very still. A perfectly ordinary Tuesday that had s

  • CRAVING THE WRONG BLACKTHORNE BROTHER   Chapter Twenty Three: The Bookstore

    I woke to find Nate sitting on the edge of my bed, holding my bandaged hands.“How did this happen?” He turned them over, examining the white gauze wrapped around my palms.My mind scrambled for the lie I’d prepared. “Broke a glass. Cleaning up.”“Multiple glasses?” His eyes met mine.“I was clumsy

    last updateLast Updated : 2026-03-20

  • CRAVING THE WRONG BLACKTHORNE BROTHER   Chapter 22

    He climbed through, glass crunching under his feet. “Long enough to hear everything.” He moved toward me but I held up a hand. “I’m fine.” “Your hands are bleeding.” “I said I’m fine.” “Ella.” His voice dropped. “Let me help.” I stared at him for a long moment, then nodded. He led me to the b

    last updateLast Updated : 2026-03-20

  • CRAVING THE WRONG BLACKTHORNE BROTHER   Chapter 21

    I woke to my bedroom door slamming open.No knock. Just the crash of wood against wall.Vivienne stood there with Isabella, Serena, and four pack guards.“Get up,” Vivienne said.I sat up slowly, my heart racing. “What…”“I said get up.” Her voice cracked like a whip.The guards moved into position

    last updateLast Updated : 2026-03-20

  • CRAVING THE WRONG BLACKTHORNE BROTHER   Chapter Twenty Four: The reconciliation

    He was quiet for so long I thought he wouldn’t answer. Then: “Brave. Stronger than you realize. Stubborn as hell.” His mouth curved slightly. “Beautiful, even when you’re screaming at my mother in front of half the territory.” My throat went tight and I had to look down at my plate. “You barely l

    last updateLast Updated : 2026-03-21
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