Page 37 of Own

“Fine, so we’re all at fault.” I didn’t think that was wholly true, but if he wanted to jump under the bus with me, I wouldn’t let him take all the blame.

“Better.” He nodded, then tapped my lower lip with his thumb. “Here’s the thing though, you haven’t fallen apart. You haven’t asked anyone to save you?—”

When I would have protested that, he pressed his thumb to my lips again. At my sigh, he nodded.

“You want to find your sister. That’s what you asked for. You wanted help finding her. You wanted help getting to her. You aren’t asking for you…”

Oh.

“I used to ask for things,” I said slowly. “I used to want a lot of things.” Sometimes, I still did. “I used to think that becoming a model and making it—making a lot of money, it would pay for all the things Amorette and I wanted when we were kids. I wanted to do things for our mother—buy her all the things she had to do without because our father was such a dick.”

It was the first time I’d admitted that out loud. At least to someone who wasn’t Amorette. I’d never felt so far away from her as I did right now. It was also the first time I didn’t want to abandon where I was to go to her.

I cleared my throat. “I wanted to do all those things. I used to plan it in my head. This is even before I got my first job modeling. But the modeling seemed to be an answer to that original dream. ButMamandied and then it was just me and Amorette. She would never have let me spoil her the way I would have wanted.”

A half-laugh escaped me and Alphabet brushed his knuckles to my cheek. I hadn’t even realized I was crying.

“Sorry.” I downed the rest of the chocolate like it was a shot. “I didn’t mean to just dump all that.” I wasn’t even sure where it all came from.

“You have nothing to be sorry for Gracie.” He took the empty cup from my hand and set it aside before he turned to face me fully. There was nowhere to go to escape the depth of emotion in his blue eyes.

The intensity pinned me in place. The warmth in his hands penetrated the ice that had seemed to coat me.

“Can I?”

His question pierced through the fog and I tilted my head. The action had me rubbing my cheek against his palms, but I wasn’t trying to pull away.

“Can you—what?”

A slow smile curved his lips. “Can I kiss you?”

Could he— “Yes.” The answer just burst out of me with a smile of my own. “Of cour?—”

He didn’t let me finish the thought, he just kissed me. Not a storm or a tempest. Not a raging fire. But a firm, slow, deep kiss that held promise and hope. He teased my lips apart with asteady application of pressure. With tiny licks of his tongue, he sampled and invited me to do the same.

The thunder erupted in my pulse as it seemed to crash in my ears. I leaned into the kiss, straining to give even as I took. Missing him had taken on texture and weight, all of it seemed to disintegrate almost effortlessly under his kiss.

When we broke apart, he didn’t leave but merely pressed his forehead to mine.

“You don’t know it yet,” he said, the soft whisper as much a soothing caress for my senses as his kiss had been for my heart. “I’m going to be someone you can count on, you can trust. We all will be. But I’m telling you right now, you can depend on us, Gracie. We’re not going to let you down.”

That was the thing.

I did know it.

Maybe he didn’t understand how I knew. But I did. I was going to be someone they could trust too. I covered his hand on my cheek and closed my eyes as we existed there.

Together.

It wasclose to five when Alphabet and Goblin went back up to bed. As tempting as it was to go up with him, he really needed the sleep.

And I…

I needed to think.

Standing at the sink, I stared out the window into the quiet dark of the French countryside. The drag of a step alerted me to someone else coming down. It hadn’t been that long since Alphabet went up.

“Gunning for my job?” Lunchbox asked as he padded into the kitchen.

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