All I Ever Need Is You (The Sullivans #14)(22)

She sighed again. “I just feel really embarrassed about everything tonight and how it all turned out.”

“There’s nothing at all embarrassing about being there for your family and helping them when times are rough. Trust me, we’ve all been there.” He moved closer and put his hand on her cheek. “On both sides.”

For a moment, she closed her eyes and leaned into his touch. He loved the feel of her soft skin against his palm, her eyelashes brushing over him. He also loved knowing that she felt she could rely on him for a little while.

When she finally drew back, she leaned against the kitchen counter, her expression bleak. “My sister thought the world revolved around her boyfriend. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do or give to him. But then it turned out he was lying and cheating and stealing from her. Pretty much everything you can imagine. And she just fell apart after that. I keep hoping she’ll stop treating herself like dirt over it, but...” She sighed again. “Maybe tonight will be the wake-up call she needs.”

Adam hoped it would be, too, although the way Colleen had behaved tonight didn’t have him holding his breath. Something told him her sister was still a ways from actually hitting bottom, no matter how bad tonight had been.

“How long has this been going on?” he asked.

Kerry scrunched up her nose, so cute and uninhibited that he found himself not only wanting her more, but liking her more, too.

“About three months.”

“You’ve been heading into dangerous neighborhoods to bring her home for three months?” He couldn’t mask the alarm in his voice, and he could see her shoulders stiffen as she reacted to it.

“I’ve been careful.”

He forced himself to bite his tongue, a very difficult task when he was worried as all hell for her. “I’m sure you have, but the next time she calls you for a late-night bar pickup, I’d really appreciate it if you’d call me to come with you.”

Kerry raised an eyebrow at that. “Thanks for the offer, but I don’t think you’d appreciate me calling in the middle of one of your dates to ask you to drop everything for Colleen.”

Not for Colleen, for Kerry. And not only was no one other woman on his horizon right now, but at this point he couldn’t honestly imagine being interested in anyone but Kerry.

“No,” he clarified, “what I wouldn’t appreciate is finding out you went back into one of those dangerous hellholes without me.”

He couldn’t quite read her expression as she said, “You’re stubborn.”

“So are you. But there’s a big difference between stubborn and foolish. And we both know you and Colleen have been lucky so far to get out of those places unscathed. I’d like to keep things that way.” He’d heard her ask her sister for a promise to be safe earlier that night. Now he decided to ask Kerry for the same thing. “Promise me you’ll call me if you ever feel that you need to.”

He watched her battle silently with herself, clearly caught between her belief that she needed to be self-sufficient at all times and the knowledge that she really had been lucky to get out of those neighborhoods in one piece so many times over the past three months.

“Okay,” she finally said. “I promise to call. But hopefully I won’t have to, because Colleen will decide it’s time to turn over a new leaf.” Kerry looked more than a little uncomfortable as she added, “Please don’t say anything about this to Rafe and Brooke. I’d hate for them to think I’m not one hundred percent there for them and their wedding, when I am.”

“They know you are,” he said softly. “And I can’t imagine anything would ever make them think differently. But what happened tonight is just between you and me.”

“All of it?” she confirmed.

“That’s what we agreed on, isn’t it?”

When Kerry nodded, though it should have been a relief to know that they were on the same page about having secret hot hookups with absolutely no relationship pressure, strangely, it wasn’t. Instead, he found that the idea of keeping the night they’d spent together a secret grated on him. Big time.

“Thank you again, Adam. Not just for helping me with Colleen, but for—”

He stopped her by threading his hands through her hair and pulling her close for a kiss. She didn’t need to thank him for anything, and he figured the best way to make her stop trying was to do what he’d been wanting to do ever since she’d walked into the kitchen sweet and fresh from the shower.

Kerry didn’t resist his kiss, but slicked her tongue out across his instead, as if she was still just as hungry for him as he still was for her. They’d been kissing when her sister called—kissing in a way that he’d never kissed another woman, a way that was so good it seemed to have no beginning and no end. Now, it was so tempting to continue where they’d left off. He could so easily lift her into his arms, carry her into her bedroom, strip her bare again, and drown in her sweet scent, her moans of pleasure, run his hands over every inch of her soft skin before finally giving them the release they both craved.

But moving things to her house hadn’t been in their original plan. And even more than he wanted to be with her again, he needed to know that she’d come through tonight’s ordeal in one piece.

Forcing himself to drag his mouth away from hers, he asked, “Do you need me to stay?”