Where Lightning Strikes (Bleeding Stars #3)(53)

“There’s my girl…always lookin’ like my favorite fantasy. Little red pin-up sent to drive me right outta my mind.”

My girl.

God, how I wished.

The errant thought twisted in my stomach. They’d been coming too often. Thoughts of what could be. Of how good this beautiful man was for me. And there were a few crazy, rash moments when I thought maybe I could be good for him, too. That as I let him discover me, he’d let me discover him.

How good we’d be together.

But this boy’s heart was an unstable place. Hard and dark and impenetrable. No question, broken. Fragments patched together in bitterness and shame. But it was all the goodness that kept pouring out from the cracks that swept me away.

I forced myself to latch on to his tease and nudged him back. “I aim to please.”

He helped me straighten, then reached out and tugged at my red bikini top where it peeked out from the black tank I wore over it.

The suit was a fifties throwback. Just his style.

A single finger trailed down the side of my neck and across my collarbone. He edged in closer, nose brushing mine. “And please you do.”

His tingling touch traveled all the way down until he wove his tattooed fingers through mine, all that ink dancing over rippling muscle exposed on his arms.

He gave me a firm tug. I giggled as I stumbled forward, right back into that delicious, lust-inducing body.

God, he had me so spun up.

“Need to get you out of here, or we’re never going to leave,” he said.

I slanted him a flirty smile. “That sounds like a fine enough plan to me.”

Four weeks of this had passed. Four weeks of us exploring and learning and tempting each other’s bodies. Dipping our toes in heated, boiling waters. Standing at the brink of ecstasy. But Lyrik had started to seem reluctant to take it past that.

Maybe we both were beginning to worry when we finally dove in, we were going to get burned.

“Don’t tempt me, woman. The boys will have my balls if we don’t show up.”

A single brow arched. “Fine…we wouldn’t want your balls to go missing, now would we?”

He growled and buried his face in my hair, nose running along the shell of my ear. He nipped at it. “Red. Do you know who you’re messing with?” he whispered like a threat. Hands cinching tighter at my sides, he yanked me up against all his hard. Voice raw. Dripping with seduction. “What I’m going to do to you? How I’m going to make you beg and scream, and then you’ll be begging me to do it all over again?”

Ah. There he was. That bad, bad boy. All that darkness and menace and severity. All while he held me in the security of his capable hands.

Because I knew without a doubt, the only thing in danger was my heart.

I tipped my chin up. At the look in his eyes, my breath caught in my throat. The thunder of need and lust crackled like a chemical reaction where they battled with flickers of something more.

“I already am,” I told him.

Begging.

Needing.

Surrendering.

He wove his fingers through my hair and pressed his lips to mine. Closed-mouthed and hard. He dropped his forehead to mine, before he took a step back and offered me his hand. “Not kidding around…need to get you out of here. Now.”

Accepting it, I slung the strap of my camera over my shoulder and followed him out the door to his bike waiting downstairs.

I put on my helmet while he straddled the gleaming metal.

That was a sight that could never get old. Lyrik’s tattooed hands gripping the handlebars.

Those words.

Sing my soul.

I ached a little every time the statement written across his knuckles passed through my vision. His lithe body so powerful. Frightening and foreboding. Still, an unshakable haven.

The engine rumbled to life and the ground shook beneath my feet.

With a glance, my world rocked.

Tamar King was nowhere to be found.

Trying to regain my senses, I placed my camera in the saddlebag and climbed on behind him. He tucked me closer, the way he always did, ensuring my hold was tight where I wrapped myself around his back.

He turned us in the direction of Tybee Island and rode toward the seaside mansion where Lyrik and the rest of the guys had stayed when they’d first come to Savannah a year ago.

Anthony, Sunder’s manager, owned the place, and he had come out from L.A. this weekend to check in with the band. He’d invited everyone over to his place for a BBQ and bonfire on the private beach before he went home to his family tomorrow.

I hugged Lyrik closer and breathed him in.

Four weeks left.

That hollow place inside me moaned like haunted gallows.

I didn’t know how to sustain the loss.

The inevitability of losing the first real thing I’d felt in years.

It terrified me how desperately I didn’t want it to end. But I refused to count this time as a mistake. Not when this man was slowly breathing true life back into me.

Awakening a soul I’d believed condemned.

No longer did I feel so…angry. Funny how I had to give this infuriating man credit for that.

Wind whipped his hair into chaos, and the ground was eaten up beneath us as we traveled the short twenty-minute trip to the beach house. He pulled his bike around the large, circular drive and stopped at the front. Lyrik helped me off, and I quickly removed the helmet and grabbed my camera as he killed the bike and flipped down the kickstand.