Addicted for Now (Addicted #2)(157)

She reaches for the box, and I grab it from her. “Let me,” I say.

She holds out her hand. The ring slides effortlessly, the leftover soap on her finger probably helping. She appraises the ruby and the band for a long moment. “I love it, Lo.” Her eyes twinkle as they meet mine. “I love you more.”

After all we’ve been through. Years and years of mistakes, it feels like a dream to be here in this moment. Right now. Sober. Alive. With her.

I pull her to me, and I lean in for a kiss. Her hand instinctively raises and slides across the back of my shoulders. When we break apart, I rest my forehead to hers. Our breaths mingle and I say, “I have another proposal. Or…more like a confession.”

“Is it bad?” she whispers.

“Terrible.”

She doesn’t pull away from our closeness and her eyes flit to my lips. “I can handle it.”

“I don’t know about that.”

Her lips twitch as she recognizes the tone of my voice. Oh, how I do love teasing her.

I nudge my nose with hers before my lips find her ear. I nip it softly before I say, “I confess, that I’d very much like to make love to you.” My heart does a dance at the last words. We never say make love. We f*ck. We screw. We bang. Making love is for the soft-hearted without tar-coated pasts. Lily claims she doesn’t deserve to make love, but I’m determined to change her attitude.

“Is it different than f*cking?” she asks me with wide eyes.

“Very much so.”

Frown lines crease her forehead. “How?”

“I’ll show you.”

Her eyes brighten with possibilities, but she doesn’t insist, doesn’t ask or compel me for more. She waits for me.

Just as I asked.





BONUS MATERIALS



KISS THE SKY

PROLOGUE & CHAPTER ONE





[ prologue ]

CONNOR COBALT

“You wanna know real life, kid?” a man once told me. “You gotta know yourself first.” He drank a bottle of booze from a paper bag, sitting on the back door steps of a five-star hotel. I wandered outside on my tenth birthday, needing air. Everyone in the convention hall was thirty-five and up. Not a single kid my age.

I wore a suit that squeezed my prepubescent frame too tight, and I tried to ignore the fact that just inside my mother pattered around her business partners with a swelling stomach. Even pregnant, she commanded every single person in that room with reticence and stoicism that I could easily mimic.

“I know who I am,” I told him. I was Connor Cobalt. The kid who always did right. The kid who always knew when to shut up and when to speak. I bit my tongue until it bled.

He eyed my suit and snorted. “You’re nothin’ but a monkey, kid. You wanna be those men in there.” He nodded to the door behind him. And then he leaned in close to me, as though to confess a secret, his vodka stench almost knocking me backwards. And yet, I still anticipated his words. “Then you gotta be better than them.”

The advice of an old drunkard stayed with me longer than anything my father ever said. Two years later, my mother sat me in our family parlor to deliver news that I would parallel with that memory. That shaped me in some catalytic way.

You see, a life can be broken down to years, months, memories and undulating moments. Three moments defined mine.

One.

I was twelve. I spent holidays at Faust Boarding School for Young Boys, but on one fluke of a weekend, I decided to visit my mother’s house outside of Philadelphia.

She chose then to tell me. She didn’t set a date, plan the event, make it into something larger than she thought it was. She broke the news like she was firing an employee. Swift and construct.

“Your father and I are divorced.”

Divorced. As in past tense. Somewhere along the line, I had missed something dramatic in my own life. It had passed right under my f*cking nose because my mother believed it meant very little. She made me believe it too.

Their separation was deemed amicable. They had grown apart. Katarina Cobalt had never let me into her life one-hundred percent. She let no one see beyond what she gave them. And it was in this moment that I learned that trick. I learned how to be strong and inhuman all at once.

I lost contact with Jim Elson, my father. I had no desire to rekindle a relationship with him. The truths that I kept close were only painful if I let them be, and I convinced myself fairly well that they were just facts. And I moved on.

Two.

I was sixteen. In the dim Faust study room, smoke clouding the air, two upperclassmen appraised a line of ten guys, stopping in front of each pledge.

Joining a secret society was the equivalent of being accepted to a lacrosse team. Dressed in preparatory slacks, blazers, and ties, the lot of us were supposed to grace the halls of Harvard and Yale and repeat the same mistakes all over again.

They asked each guy the same question and each responded with a simple submissive yes and was told to drop to their knees. Then they set their sights on the next boy.

When they stopped in front of me, I stayed relatively composed. I tried mostly to hide a burgeoning, conceited smile. They looked like two apes pounding their chest and asking for a banana. The thing about me—I was not so willing to give just anyone my f*cking banana. Every benefit should outweigh the cost.

“Connor Cobalt,” the blond said, leering. “Will you suck my cock?”