Total pages in book: 141
Estimated words: 142783 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 714(@200wpm)___ 571(@250wpm)___ 476(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 142783 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 714(@200wpm)___ 571(@250wpm)___ 476(@300wpm)
In confusion.
In regret.
In that old, magical awe that had once made me believe that I could be the type of man who could deserve the kind of girl I’d once believed her to be.
It was the same look that’d had me on my knees then, too.
“What are you sorry for, Logan?” I didn’t know if it was rejection or a plea.
Hesitation held the words before they left me like a twisted admission. “That nothing turned out the way it was supposed to. That I didn’t fight harder. I promise that won’t happen this time.”
The last was gravel. The coarse scraping of determination that infiltrated body and mind.
Her eyes dropped closed for the barest moment, and she sucked for cleansing air before she opened them again. Torment rained down, a misery that flooded a drought-stricken desert.
“Would you have changed it if you could have? If you knew it then, would you have stopped it? If you could go back and know everything, would you still have done it?”
Vulnerability trembled through the words.
The woman laying herself bare and asking me to do the same.
A rock got lodged in my throat.
Buying time, I focused on cleaning the dried blood from her abrasion and the line down to her knee. Meticulously, I applied the bandage, my movements careful.
Then I stood, keeping my eyes on her face as I eased my T-shirt over her head and dragged it over her beautiful body.
Then I fisted the hem in my hand and jerked her my direction.
Aster gasped as she jolted forward, and her fingers drove into my dress shirt like she might never let go.
My mouth found that sweet spot at her jaw, right where it curved up to meet the lobe of her ear. “I would go back and change everything. Losing you. Losing Nathan. I was blind. A fool.”
Grief clamped around my heart.
“Was it worth it?” she pressed, like she didn’t know how to believe me.
“You already know it wasn’t. I would have given up everything. I would have burned the world down to get to you.”
“Why didn’t you?” The question trembled from her mouth.
My hand found her face, my thumb tracing the angle of her cheek. “I did. I burned it all to the fucking ground, Aster, and you already know what happened when I got there. You were no longer mine.”
Those eyes found me in the whispering night. “I thought you said I’ve always belonged to you?”
It was a challenge.
My hands slipped low, gliding down her sides and molding to her hips. I yanked her so close every inch of her was pressed against me. “Is that what I should have done? Taken what was mine?”
One hand curled into her hip while the other slipped up her spine until I had a fistful of her hair. I angled her head to the side, and my lips grazed the length of her jaw.
Inhaling her sweet, exotic scent.
Potent.
Powerful in a way I shouldn’t let it be.
But she had always been my weakness.
She looked up at me with torment in those agate eyes. She barely shook her head. “I was already ash.”
There was a confession in it.
It didn’t matter.
I already would have been too late.
Rage tightened my chest, and I struggled to draw her close, to erase all distance.
Every mistake.
Every wound that had been inflicted.
“Tell me what happened while I was gone.”
When the only objective I’d had was finding my way back to her, when I’d found her, and in one moment, my world had been decimated.
“I hate you, Logan Lawson, and I don’t want to ever see you again.”
Her fingers sank beyond my shirt, burrowing into soul and flesh. “I can’t.”
My arms wrapped around her. Tight. Like I could forever lock her to me.
Aster whimpered, pressed her face to my shirt, and exhaled. A ragged breath of surrender.
Moonlight streamed into the bedroom.
My little, fallen star.
One that’d burned out.
Slipped through my fingers.
I swayed her, danced with the girl that used to be mine.
Thirty days.
We stayed like that, in the silence for the longest time, before I whispered, “Was it real?”
She pressed her lips to my sternum, like it was her spirit’s way to my thrashing heart. “It was the only real thing I’ve ever known.”
So, I held her the way I used to do. Under the cover of night. In a place where no one knew.
She let me as our souls shifted.
As we sank deeper.
Against my chest and under my skin.
As a promise changed.
Time passed, minutes, hours, I didn’t know. But Aster sagged, and she let me hold her weight.
Her burden.
She drifted, like for the first time in years, her trouble had gone light.
So, I took it.
I swept her from her feet and into my arms. She sighed as she curled hers around my neck, and I carried her out into the sleeping house and into her room where I laid her in the center of her bed.