Nix. (Den of Mercenaries Book 3)(59)

Not what she had done to Lawrence, but what she hadn’t done for Cat. She should have tried to go after her sooner.

Her throat feeling tight all of a sudden, Luna shook her head. “It doesn’t feel like it.”

Kit sighed, his lips falling to her forehead a moment. “Then let me help you forget that feeling.”

She didn’t know how long it would last, the reprieve he offered her, but she would take it.

For just a while, she wanted to forget.





Part Two





Chapter Fifteen





Present Day …



When she took a breath, Kit was jerked from his own memory of that night and the visceral reaction her words created. It didn’t matter that they were sitting in an office being observed, he was too focused on the way her breath caught—the way she reacted to the stimuli that her thoughts provided.

She was angry with him, sure, but she missed him whether she was willing to admit that or not.

Her gaze found his, open and vulnerable, making him wonder if he reached for her, would she allow him to touch her?

But it wasn’t just her body he wanted—he wanted her. And if she wasn’t willing to give everything, he wanted nothing at all, even if it meant his cock was going to be disappointed.

Trying to tamp down the lust he felt, his mind seized on everything she’d said, focusing his attention on something other than the reminder of how he’d f*cked her that night. “There was nothing you could have done,” he said. “Your friend—Cat, wasn’t it?—even if it hadn’t been at Lawrence’s hand, it might have been by another’s.”

Luna blamed herself, but he wasn’t lying when he said nothing could have been done.

And he never did like the distant look she got in her eyes when she spoke of something particularly painful, as though disassociating herself from the memory.

Never in his life had he wanted to fix something the way he felt with Luna. It drove him in a way that he hadn’t realized until one day he had woken up and felt at peace while she slept on soundly beside him.

He had fallen in love with her without even trying.

Luna rubbed her finger where her wedding ring used to sit, a tattoo resting in its place. A part of him hated that bare finger, especially when he felt the weight of her ring in his pocket—but he was soothed, somewhat, because of the skull she’d had placed there.

It was enough—for now.

“I waited too late,” she said. “I should have done something sooner.”

Kit shook his head. “It could have been you in her place, or another girl, but the blame shouldn’t rest with you. You tried, and if that’s no solace, take comfort in the knowledge that you avenged her.”

Most first assignments were fairly easy—at least Kit’s had been when he’d joined the Lotus Society. Truthfully, most of the work he’d done for them was relatively clean and simple, the deaths meant to look like accidents.

But there was nothing about what Luna had done to Lawrence that was clean. He’d been a mess of cuts and bruises, blood pouring from wounds that even he thought had to be painful.

And Luna, his precious Luna, hadn’t batted an eye at the horrific sight of a man bleeding out in front of her. No, she had been too lost in her rage to see what she had done.

Shrugging as she folded her arms across her chest,a defensive move he’d learned to recognize, Luna said, “Maybe.”

“Not maybe,” Kit said gently. “You fulfilled your promise to her when you went back. That’s what matters. You kept your word.”

“I would like to pause here,” Donna said setting her pen down. “It seems you two were at a precipice that night.”

Luna’s lips twitched, her grief forgotten for a moment as she fought a smile. “If that’s how you want to look at it.”

Even as it was hard to accept some of the things she was saying as she recounted their past, he thrilled in seeing her smiles as she recalled days when everything was good between them.

Donna asked, “How would you look at it, Luna?”

“It was the day everything changed,” she explained. “Kit always treated me like a fragile little bird that he couldn’t touch because he thought he would break me.”

“Whether you believe it or not,” Kit cut in, “you were fragile.”

“Not since that night in your dungeon,” she said, brown eyes steady on him.

His gift, the first of many.

It was never that her strength was lacking, only that he’d wanted to ensure that she wanted what was between them and not because she thought of him as some kind of savior.

“Is that the point where your relationship changed?” Donna asked looking between them, letting the question hang between them.

“No,” Luna said, “if anything that’s when our relationship started.”

Kit had stopped fighting the draw to her—or rather, he had finally pushed the images of her when she’d first arrived in his home out of his mind and focused on the present.

Once he saw her—really saw her—that was it for him.

Luna smiled absently, as though remembering that time. “Those were the good years, I think. Everything was simple—just the two of us. I loved you and you loved me, and that was all that mattered.”