Leave a Trail (Signal Bend #7)(144)

He turned into her touch and kissed her palm. “I’m not goin’ anywhere.”



oOo



They stayed in bed together for another hour or so, touching and talking, renewing their memories of each other’s body, and then they joined the party that was being thrown in Isaac’s honor. He kept Lilli close for the couple of hours they stayed. Then, when she told him that she’d arranged for Gia and Bo to spend the night with Uncle Show and Aunt Shannon and Millie and Joey, Isaac kissed his children, hugged his friends, and led Lilli to his bike. They rode back to their home, Lilli wrapped as tightly around him as she could get.

He took the long way.



oOo



In the middle of the night, Lilli woke surrounded by Isaac. Her back to his chest, his thighs tucked behind hers, his arms coiled around her, his face in her hair on the pillow behind her. She opened her eyes and, in the bright light of the moon and stars beaming in through their bedroom window, saw, before anything else, his arm crossed protectively, possessively over her chest. The ink on his forearm: L’amor che muove il sole e l’altre stelle. And her name. Gia’s name. Bo’s name.

He was home.

They were whole.

She nudged her head forward and pressed her lips to the ink. At the touch, taste, smell of his skin, feeling surrounded and safe, feeling not alone for the first time in seven and a half years and overwhelmed with relief and love, Lilli began to weep. As the tears came, they came freely, a dam inside her giving way.

She pressed her face to his arm, her own hands coming up to clutch him, and she cried years-old tears.

Isaac woke as soon as her tears came, but he didn’t try to stop them. He simply tightened his grip on her, and allowed her the comfort of his body, his presence. As she began to find the bottom of the reservoir of sadness, the full expression of which she had denied herself so that she could find a way to go on without him, Lilli felt his mouth on her shoulder. He kissed a line to her neck, then up. With his lips on her ear, his whispered, “I promise.”

She moaned at that, and fresh tears started. When she flexed backward, needing to be even closer, more surrounded, needing to be connected, to be one, to be indivisible—he pushed his thigh between hers with a feral grunt, and then, when she kicked her leg over his hip, he shoved his cock, steely and ready, into her.

It was exactly what she’d needed, and she cried out even as she wept. As they flexed and thrust and surged together, he kept up a steady whisper in her ear, like an incantation, a spell of protection against any trials of the future.

I promise. I promise. I promise. IpromiseIpromiseIpromiseIpromiseIpromise.



oOo



Kodi didn’t remember Isaac, and he had not yet decided whether he approved of the giant man who was not Showdown in his house. He clearly he did not approve of said giant man in his mistress’s bedroom, or of the fact that the bedroom door had been closed between him and her all night.

Because Lilli had accepted Isaac, Kodi was torn, watchful but not overtly aggressive. Still, whenever Isaac came near, the dog growled—just low, not quite a warning, more of an assertion. Lilli could see Isaac’s hurt at the dog’s suspicion. The two had been close when Kodi was a pup—he’d been more Isaac’s dog than anyone’s. On top of that loss, Kodi was labeling him a stranger in the house Isaac had literally been born in.

So, in the morning, home again after they’d made an early, quick ride back to the clubhouse for her truck, while Isaac took a shower, Lilli took Kodi out for a short run, hoping that paying some attention to the dog and wearing him out, while leaving Isaac in the house to be there when they got back, might realign his canine thinking. He was getting old and didn’t have the stamina for long runs anymore, but he could do a couple of miles. Then he’d probably crap out and be too tired not to give Isaac a chance.

Lilli realized that she was conniving to get both her son and her dog to love the man they’d once loved fiercely, and she knew Isaac was just as keenly aware of that as she was. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like for him to rejoin a life that had moved on without him.

When they got back, Kodi dropped, exhausted, to the rug in the front hall, and Lilli went looking for Isaac. She found him in their bedroom, sitting on their bed, dressed only in jeans, his long, thick hair—still dark, but now threaded with grey, like his beard—loose and wet from his shower, spread over his bare back and hanging over his broad shoulders. He was deeply engaged in what he was doing and didn’t hear her approach. She took a couple of beats and just basked in the sight of him. Her man. Her beautiful, beautiful, strong, magnificent man.

Then she realized what had him so transfixed, and her heart fell to the floor.

He had her nightstand drawer out and on the bed, and he was reading the pages of letters she had not sent.

Seven and a half years’ worth of pain and loss and fear that had been too great and encompassing to burden him with.

“Isaac, no. Don’t.”

He raised his head at her voice and turned his stricken eyes to hers. “Lilli. God, baby. My God.”



ISAAC



I’m so lonely, Isaac. The pain of it is physical. It’s like all my muscles and organs and veins are full of rocks. Sharp, gouging rocks. I don’t know how to keep going.



and