Country Kisses (3:AM Kisses Book #8)(61)
“I knew it!” I break free from his hold on me. “I knew you were just fishing for some excuse to wrangle out of this. Well, I’ll spare you of it! Go ahead and take off and don’t ever come back!” My words ricochet down the alleyway. “I get it.” My voice breaks as I struggle to keep it together. “I have had a lifetime of rejection. You’re perfect, Cade.” It comes out less than a whisper. “You don’t need this mess in your life.” My finger darts to my face. “I’m just the girl to keep on the side for kicks—a six-pack they called me in high school. Well, I understood it then, and I get it now. I’m still a six-pack, and you know why?” I give him a hard shove to the chest. “Because that’s how stupid and shallow this world is. It’s not concerned with how smart or intelligent you are, or if you’ve got a heart of f*cking gold!” I’m back to shouting. “All people care about is how young and beautiful you are. You have one scar eating up the side of your face, and suddenly, opportunities disappear, people feel sorry for you, hate you, make fun of you—be you for Halloween! Well, I’m sick of it!”
“Cassidy.” Cade tries to wrap his arms around me, but I’m hysterical, delirious with mind-numbing pain. I’ve waited fifteen long years to vent my fury, and I’m not letting up anytime soon. “I see you!” he riots into my face, his panting matching my own. “I see you—the real you.” His voice softens a bit as he presses me close by the small of my back. Our hips connect, and I would swear on my momma’s soul that sparks just lit up the night sky. There has always been something electric about Cade’s touch. He touches his finger to my chin and sears his gaze over mine. “When I said I love you, I meant it. I love the inside, the outside, and I especially love your heart of f*cking gold.”
We both engage in a quiet laugh.
“I’m here because I want to be.” Tears glisten in his eyes, and the breath gets sucked right out of my lungs at the sight of those glittery beacons. “I’m here for you, for us—for everything we can be.” He swallows hard. His jaw clenches. That slightly swollen cheek is starting to take color. “Do you think you can open your heart to me?”
In this one moment, this tiny slice of time, Cade James looks every bit the little boy I saw in him that first night at the Black Bear. There was something adorable about the innocent way he looked up at the world from under his lashes. It was just a glint of a moment, a flash that was here one second and gone the next, but this right here brings it all back.
“Yes.” It comes out hoarse, weak. “Hell yes,” I say it again with a little more bite. “I have my whole heart, my whole world opened up for you.”
“Come here.” Cade pulls me in so tight, embracing me with such fervor the way you would someone you thought had been lost at sea. I hold on just as tight if not with ten times more desperation. “God, I missed you.” He pulls back and brushes the hair from my forehead. “You’re beautiful.” His eyes roam freely over my features, and I feel his gaze warming over my scar—not with judgment or disdain but with love. “Can I kiss you?”
“Now that’s one question I don’t ever want you to ask again.”
A broad smile comes to him, the first time all night, as he crashes hard over my lips. I open my mouth as he falls in, hot and wet, loving me with strength and power, and best of all—every last bit of his affection. Cade and I kiss like tomorrow may never come. It feels as if hours pass, weeks, as his hands roam up and down my body, my hips pressed tight over his. These are desperate, hungry kisses. Cade and I are so very starved for affection we simply cannot get enough. I try my best to swallow him down, to pull him into me, to just breathe Cade.
This moment right here is pure and right.
Cade and I are right.
But if we’re so right, why haven’t I worked up the nerve to let him know how I feel yet?
Cade drives us down long stretches of Hollow Brook highway until we come up on the university. He cuts a quick glance my way as the turn lane splices up ahead.
“Say you’ll come home with me.”
“That’s a funny way of asking.”
That devilish grin perks on his lips. “That’s a funny way of accepting.”
“That’s a funny way of assuming to know what I’m thinking.”
The car slows down as we come upon a fork in the road. “I know what I would like for you to be thinking, but I want to do what makes you happy. Tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.” A beat of silence ticks by. “Please come home with me.”
“Please take me to your home.”
And he does.
Cade parks in the driveway and jumps over to help me out. That swollen patch on his cheek has taken on a powder blue.
“Cade.” Now it’s my turn to swallow hard. “Before we go inside, there’s something I have to say.”
His features cloud over. “Anything.” He circles my waist with his warm arms, his sad gaze searing to mine.
“There’s a reason I’m having such a hard time sharing my feelings with you.” An ache as deep and wide as the ocean twists my heart in half.
He nods, wordlessly begging me to go on.
“Cade—outside a handful of people, and I can list them all on one hand, I haven’t exactly been…” For the life of me, I can’t find the word. “Wanted?” A line of pain opens from my heart to my stomach like a clean incision, and it’s as if the ick I’ve carried around with me all these years spills right out. “I guess that’s the word.” I close my eyes, and Cade brushes a kiss over each of my eyelids.