Semua Bab CRAVING MY FORBIDDEN STEPBROTHER: Bab 121 - Bab 130

The hospital releases me at eleven in the morning with two cracked ribs, fourteen stitches in my hairline, a bruised orbital bone, and a prescription for painkillers I’ll probably never fill.Cain hasn’t let go of my hand since the loading dock.He held it in the ambulance while the paramedic cleaned my face. He held it in the ER while they x-rayed my ribs and stitched the cut above my eye. He held it while I gave my statement to two federal agents in suits who asked me questions for forty minutes with a recorder on the table between us. He held it while I answered everything, every detail, every day, every room, every name, and his thumb traced circles on my knuckles the entire time and he didn’t flinch at any of it even though I could feel his pulse getting faster with every sentence.He held my hand and he didn’t let go and I didn’t ask him to.The nurse brings discharge papers. I sign them with my free hand because he still has the other one and I don’t want it back.“There are pe

Jace's hospital room is on the third floor and I stand outside the door for two full minutes before I go in.Cain offered to come. I told him no. This is a conversation that belongs to just the two of us, the girl who was carried into a building and the boy who carried her out of it. Whatever we say to each other in that room doesn't need a witness.I push the door open.He's sitting up in bed. His left arm is in a sling, wrapped thick with bandages from his shoulder to his elbow, and the IV line runs from his right hand to the bag on the stand beside him. He looks smaller in a hospital gown. Younger. The expensive jacket is gone, the bravado stripped off, and what's left is a nineteen-year-old with dark circles under his eyes and a bullet wound and a face that changes when he sees me walk in."Hey," he says."Hey."I sit in the chair beside his bed. He watches me do it. His eyes move over my face, the stitches, the fading bruise around my eye, and something tightens in his jaw."You

Zara's apartment smells like heat tools and perfume and the particular chaos of a woman who has four hours and a vision and absolutely no intention of letting me interfere with either."Sit," she says, pointing at the bathroom stool."Can you at least tell me...""Sit, Layla."I sit.She plugs in the diffuser. Not a flat iron. The diffuser, the one I left at her apartment weeks ago, and when she sees my face she rolls her eyes."I would never." She holds up the diffuser like a sacred object. "The curls are coming back and they're coming back right."She washes my hair in her sink. Conditions it with something that smells like coconut and vanilla. Works the product through strand by strand with her fingers, scrunching, coaxing, and I sit there with my eyes closed and feel my hair start to remember itself."He's been planning this for weeks," she says. Not looking at me. Focused on a curl near my temple."Planning what.""I'm not telling you.""Zara.""I am physically incapable of telli

Lain is asleep on the reading nook.Curled into a ball on the cushion, her white paws tucked under her chin, her tiny body rising and falling with each breath. Cain put a blanket around her like she was a human baby and I didn’t say anything because watching a man in a black suit tuck a kitten into a reading nook is not something you interrupt.He’s in the bedroom. I can hear him through the door. Belt unbuckling. Shoes hitting the floor. Talking to me through the wood like the door isn’t there.“I can’t believe she bit me,” he says. “On the dock. In front of the candles. First night as a family and our kid assaults me.”“She was showing affection.”“She drew blood.”“A tiny scratch.”“I’m going to need a tetanus shot.”“You’re being dramatic.”“I’m being practical. She has teeth, Layla. Tiny razor teeth. I watched her chew through the box in the car.”I’m standing in the bathroom with the door closed and Zara’s second gift in my hands.She slipped it to me in the car. A small bag, ti

“Yes.”The word comes out broken and wet and I say it again because once isn’t enough.“Yes. Forever. Yes, forever and ever, yes.”He’s kneeling on the floor of our bedroom, naked, his mother’s ring in his hand, and the sound that comes out of him when I say it is not a word. It’s closer to a release, the exhale of a man who has been holding his breath since he was sixteen years old and just felt his lungs fill for the first time.A tear slides down his face. One. He doesn’t wipe it. He lets it run from the corner of his eye down his cheekbone to his jaw and drop onto the ring box in his hand and I watch it land and I think, that’s what it looks like when Cain Russo lets go of something he’s been carrying for years.His hands are shaking when he slides the ring onto my finger. It fits the way his mother knew it would, like she left it in that drawer waiting for the right hand to find it. The diamond catches the lamplight. The tiny red stones on either side glow warm. The gold is old a