Page 107 of Full Throttle

He nodded. “Yes, we do. But we aren’t leaving here until you let me in that gorgeous head of yours.”

I swallowed. “We don’t have the time.”

“We can fucking make it,” he bit off, his jaw jumping.

I remained silent once again.

He muttered a curse and looked out the window.

A thick, heavy silence settled over us, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. He dropped his hand from me and took a step back, looking to the floor. I didn’t move an inch, paralyzed with the inevitable heartbreak he was about to cause.

“Cain, we have to eat and go,” I told him.

He shook his head once, shadows falling over his features. “We’re going to have a conversation, Nik.”

My bottom lip trembled, and his eyes dropped to it before snapping up to mine. I watched, my eyes stinging as he nodded slightly, pushing off. “Right,” he muttered as he took a step back.

I let out a shuddering breath. “We don’t have to do this,” I whispered. “We can just go back to the way things were—”

“What the fuck just happened?” he quipped, his voice hard. He pointed to the tattoo on his chest. “Because I just had the best fucking four hours of my life, Nik. I got to finally be connected to the one person I thought I could never have, the strongest woman I’ve ever known, a woman who takes my goddamn breath away every single time I see her. I got to fuck her, then make love to her. For the first time in my life, I thought that everything I’d been through was worth it.”

Knives formed in my throat, stabbing my voice box.

Pain slashed across his handsome features as his hand slowly fell away. “I know I’m not good enough for you, baby. I know I’m trash. I don’t deserve you or your fucking light. I didn’t deserve it when we were kids, and I sure as fuck don’t deserve it now. Not with the shit I’ve done, the people I’ve hurt,” he pushed out, his voice cracking.

I began shaking my head, but he rocked me to my core.

“I know all of that, and yet, I’m not fucking leaving.”

“You sure about that?” I shot back. “Because Mina says otherwise.”

He was leaving—tonight. That’s what the meeting at Oasis is about. Cain was leaving St. Louis and there was no telling when he was coming back.

“What?”

The dam broke.

I broke—again.

“You don’t think I just had the best time of my life? You don’t think that the second you entered me, I finally felt complete?”

He stiffened, his eyes flashing.

I began shaking my head. “It’s always been you, Cain! There’s no one else for me. There’s never been. You grew up in home of harsh words and punches.” I pointed to my chest. “I grew up in a home with silent venom.”

Confusion slammed into him. “What? What are you—”

“Your mom beat you; my mom poisoned me!” I shouted. My hands shot into my hair as I pushed off the fridge, pacing the length of the kitchen. “We moved to Detroit because Dad lost his job. He promised my mom the world and, before we moved, she was everything. She was kind, gentle, warm, and she loved me. She was the best mother a little girl could ask for. When Dad lost his job, she resented him and me.” I turned to him, my hand dropping to my sides. “She hated me for having breath in my lungs and a mouth she needed to feed. Mom came from luxury, and when she fell in love with my dad…she took a chance.”

“Dominique…”

“She stopped looking at me in the eye the day we moved into the house. She stopped touching me a few weeks later. She stopped touching Dad. She stopped talking to me when I started school. She ignored me, acted like I didn’t fucking exist. She drowned her fucking problems in cheap wine that she would make Dad buy. After I would go to bed, she would scream at him and throw shit. I heard everything. She said she hated me, him, and the house. I know your mom was a piece of shit, Cain, I know she was. You have no idea how much I wanted to be your hero and save you.”

He flinched.

I swallowed the knives and pushed out, “But at least your mom looked at you. At least she acknowledged your existence.” I shook my head, cursing myself. “I didn’t—I didn’t mean it like that. What you and Xander went through was hell, there’s no doubting that, babe…but I was in hell, too.” I sob left me. “Then, you started talking to me one Christmas, and honest to God, Cain, that was the best present I’d ever been given.”

Cain moved then, coming around the island, and a second later, my head was in his hands, his lips crashing down onto mine. A rough sound left him as he kissed me hard, forcing my mouth open with his tongue before he plunged inside. My hands came to his sides, his skin hot. A second later, he dropped a hand, his arm banding around my waist, holding me to him as his opposite hand snaked into my hair.

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