Missing Dixie(69)

Wrapping her legs around my waist, she angles her hips upward and presses against me. I groan loudly and force myself to pull back before I give in to the urge to f*ck her harder. Much harder.

Her whimper of protest makes my dick throb in response.

“I’m suddenly feeling extremely hungry,” I say, working hard to keep my voice even.

“O-kay,” she says, eyeing me warily like I’ve lost my mind. “Can it wait?”

“Hmm.” I let my eyes map every exposed inch of her body. “No, I’m afraid it can’t. I’m starving, babe.”

Before she can argue or say a single word in protest, I lower my head and lick a path up her inner right thigh. And then repeat the process on the left.

“Gavin, please,” she cries out, begging and trembling beneath me. The noises she makes when I swirl the tip of my tongue around her delicate folds makes me want to beat on my chest and shout from the rooftops. She is mine, dammit. Mine and only mine. No one else will ever touch her, taste her, the way I am allowed to.

The louder her moaning gets, the weaker my self-restraint becomes. I finally lean over to reach for a condom, and she stops me.

“It’s okay. Um, I’m on the pill,” she informs me.

“I know this.” I tear open the foil packet and sheath myself, growing even harder because she is watching so closely. The streetlights peeking in from the half-open blinds light her up like she is made of something other than skin. Something shiny and beautiful. And mine. “I’m still going to be careful with you. Always. Until . . . until you don’t want to be careful anymore.”

A slow smile spreads across her lips. “You’re always looking out for me,” she whispers as I lower myself back inside her, bracing myself above her by lacing our fingers together as I did before.

“Always.”

Tangled together, telling truths and swearing never again to keep secrets, we bond in a way I never knew was possible.

Dixie Lark is as much a part of me as my past. Because she is my future.

I don’t know why it took me so long to see, why I got caught up in the short term and failed to see how powerful what we had was, or the kind of future our love is capable of providing.

Something about her song, about the way she trusts me so implicitly, to hold her, to kiss her, to be inside her—I finally understand what an honor and privilege that is now. She bared her soul and I decided to finally bare mine right back.

“There’s nothing I wouldn’t trade to make your dreams come true,” I tell her in bed the morning of the Phi Kap show. “You know that, right?”

“This is my dream come true,” she tells me, looking up at me with those endless blue pools. “This and the band finally making it.”

“Working on that last one,” I say as I take her hand in mine and kiss the back of it softly.

“And . . . I want Liam to be safe. I can’t stop thinking about him.” Her voice lowers. “He’s so much like you, Gav. And I learned so much more about you by getting to know him.”

“You do have a thing for us troubled black sheep, don’t you?”

“What if they give him back to his dad? What if—”

“Don’t think like that. Sheila is working on it and Ashley might own us for the rest of our lives but she’s going to do what she can, too.”

“She will never own you,” Dixie growls like an angry kitten. “I mean it, Gavin.”

I chuckle lightly. “I know, Bluebird. The only one that owns me is you.”

“You’d do well to remember that, Garrison.” She pins me with a glare before pouncing on my chest and covering me with kisses.

“Yes, ma’am.”

She collapses on my chest, both of us still too tired for more lovemaking. I think we’ve set some records in the past twenty-four hours. “So you never told me about your mom or what happened with the charges filed against you. I was going to ask yesterday after rehearsal, but . . .”

But we didn’t exactly use words to communicate yesterday.

“Ashley was able to get Carl to drop the charges by threatening him with Mrs. Lawson’s eyewitness testimony that he assaulted Liam first. I let the trailer get hauled away since my mom had stopped coming home anyway.”

“About time,” Dixie huffs.

“I know. I guess I felt I owed her since she bailed me out the night of the accident.”

Dixie stiffens in my arms.

“I would never hurt you or Dallas intentionally. You know that, don’t you? Believe me, I would rather break every bone in my own body with a crowbar than cause either one of you an ounce of pain.”

She nods against my skin. “I know.” Her voice is so soft I can barely hear her.

I tilt her chin to face me. “Bluebird, you are now and will always be the most important thing to me. I won’t let anything jeopardize what we have, even my own stupid self.”

“Promise?” She is so open, her expressive eyes pleading with me to give her everything that I am. Beautiful and perfect even though they say no one is perfect. My girl is, though. Perfect for me anyway.

“I promise. From here on out, it’s you and me against the world.”





27 | Dixie

THE PHI KAP gig was a piece of cake. We played to hundreds of drunken frat boys and their dates and the majority of the crowd was too drunk to know if we were decent or if we sucked. A few of them recognized Dallas, girls mostly, but only a handful made a pass at him. Afterward we got brinner at a nearby diner, where Robyn joined us and we had more fun than we’d had in a long time. We’re a family now, the four, soon to be five, of us. It made me smile, but there was still a nagging thought in the back of my mind. I wished Liam could’ve been there. I could hardly eat my waffles. I didn’t touch my hash browns.