Wicked Sexy (Wicked Games #2)(75)

“Mmhmm.” Nibble. Nibble.

Enjoying the feeling of his lips on my skin, I close my eyes. “My dad used to drink a lot.”

Connor abruptly stops nibbling. I feel him looking at me but don’t open my eyes.

“It wasn’t tragic, he didn’t beat us or break things in drunken rages, but he just…anesthetized himself. That’s how he dealt with stress. He’d come home from teaching and pour himself a big glass of gin and sit in front of the TV until the gin was gone, and then he’d pour himself another. And another. It made my mother really sad that he was so distant. I don’t know what the problems were in their marriage. They never fought in front of me. But I remember very clearly him drinking gin every night until he quietly passed out, and my mother being lonely and depressed. So I decided when I was six years old that I’d never drink because I’d rather feel everything, no matter how painful, than nothing at all.”

The pause that follows when I stop talking is what you’d call pregnant. Third-trimester pregnant. It makes me edgy.

“Don’t feel sorry for me!”

Connor props his head on his hand and stares down at my face. Heat begins to suffuse my cheeks.

“You’ve been alone your entire life, haven’t you?” he murmurs. “Even when your parents were alive, you were alone.”

Awash in some weird half-breed emotion that’s part regret, part shame, part longing for something I’ve never had, I laugh. Even to my own ears, it’s ugly.

“That’s why it was so easy for S?ren to manipulate me. I wanted so badly—”

I stop abruptly. When I make a move to rise, Connor throws his leg over me and pins me down.

“No way,” he says softly. “You’re not running away from me, Tabby. Not anymore.”

I close my eyes and turn my head.

“Don’t hide from me,” he urges, squeezing me. “Tell me what you wanted.”

I’m breathing fast and hard, choking on so many feelings, it’s hard to decide which one is worst. And maybe because I know in a few hours it’s possible that this chapter of my life will finally be closed, or because I’ve been slowly revealing myself to Connor, one crumb at a time, tiny truth-chunks that he’s always gobbled up, but I don’t want to hide from him anymore. At least, not right now.

Right now, I want there to be no walls between us.

For this one wild moment, I want to let him in.

I look at him. I let him see everything. All the pain and confusion, all the hope and tenderness and absolute terror of getting too close. In a raw, shaking voice, I say, “I just wanted to belong to someone.”

Connor’s face goes through a dozen expressions before it settles on adoration. He breathes, “And now you do.”

He kisses me so passionately, I’m stunned.

I flatten my hands on his chest and push him away.

We break apart and stare at each other in throbbing silence, both of us breathing raggedly. Finally, I whisper, “What did you say?”

Connor’s Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. “You heard me.”

“Say it again.”

Connor wraps his hands around my wrists. He carefully peels my hands from his chest, lowers them to the pillow above my head so he’s on top of me, his chest pressed to mine, his nose inches from mine. Staring into my eyes, he says firmly, “You belong to me. You belong with me. You’re mine, and I’m never letting you go.”

There’s a long, tense silence.

Then I burst into tears.

“Goddammit!” I sob. “You *! Look what you did!”

Connor kisses me all over my red, wet face, murmuring soothing words that I only catch snippets of because I’m bawling like a damn baby. He releases my wrists, and I fling my arms around his broad shoulders and bury my face in his neck.

“Love your tears, princess, ’cause I know you’d never give them to anyone but me,” he murmurs into my ear. For once, I don’t mind that he used that forbidden four-letter word.

I let him hold me and listen to his sweet, beautiful words, wondering through my tears and hiccupping breaths if this is what religion is like for some people, all this awe and mystery and the feeling of having found your way home.

Sometime shortly after my tears slow to sniffles, we fall asleep in each other’s arms.

And sometime after that, I wake up sweating, with a pounding heart and an awful premonition that something is terribly wrong.

On the table beside the bed, Connor’s cell phone rings. He’s awake instantly, snatching it up.

“Talk to me,” he commands.

He listens. After a moment, he wordlessly ends the call. When he looks at me, I know. I already know.

“S?ren,” I whisper, my heart in my throat.

Connor’s body is completely still. In the shadows, his eyes shine with a strange, deadly light. “The team in Miami that went in to get him…” He hesitates. “It was an abandoned house. The place was rigged with explosives.”

Horrified, I gasp. I bolt upright and clutch his arm. “Oh my God. How many were hurt?”

“Nine agents went in.”

“How many came out?”

Connor says simply, “None.”





Twenty-Seven