Page 43 of Broken

That was my thinking as I slid my tongue out, finding his and inviting it to play. He groans in my mouth and as I swallow the sound down, I can’t think of anything in my life that felt better than that.Not one blessed thing.None of the times with Dom—which had been magical the first couple of times, but died after he began giving other women what was supposed to be mine. Not with T—which had been selfish on my side, sweet on his, but not anything close to emotional. The plain, simple truth is that nothing compares to just kissing King and swallowing down the sound of his pleasure.Not. A. Damn. Thing.

Of their own free will, my hands slide under his T-shirt, needing to touch him. The heat from his body seeps into my bones, and now it’s me who moans. The kiss deepens and I lose myself in the touch, the feel, thetasteof him.

Then, it happens.

His hand comes up, roughly grabbing my neck as he growls into my mouth. Logically, I know that he’s losing himself to the beauty that we are creating. I even want more of what he’s doing. But just the feel of him holding the side and back of my neck in his strong hand—a hand that could kill easily because he’s so much bigger than me—and my mind plays flashbacks of that pig behind me, his hand around my throat, choking me, making it so no one could hear me scream, as he forced me to take his cock. I felt it all again in that instant. The ripping of my flesh, thetearing away of pieces of me I would never get back, the fear as the world was going black around me. It all lands on me like a grenade, obliterating me all over again, as I tear my mouth away from King.

“Can’t breathe,” I gasp, pushing against his stomach, my body trembling.

“Fuck, I’m sorry, Gabby,” King groans, immediately rolling away from me.

He gets up off the bed and is gone. Over the roar of my heartbeat slamming erratically against my chest and drumming in my ears, I hear him jogging through the hall. With shaky hands, I reach over and turn on the bedside light. I stare at it, thinking it’s the ugliest light I’ve ever seen. Dani brought it with the nightstands. It’s a hideous orange color and not even that cool retro-vibe orange. This looks like a rusty type of orange. Still, it was sleek, had a nice base you could charge your phone on without an extra plug. It is designed so that the bulb is recessed inside the metal umbrella and that is connected to a long black arm, so that you can angle the light in any direction. I am going to buy some spray paint and paint the both of them—there is a matching one on the other nightstand—a glossy charcoal gray or maybe black.

I pull my attention away from the lamps—as well as trying to gain control of my momentary panic—because King is back with a bottle of water. He looks a mixture of guilt and regret, but over all of that is concern.Concern for me.He’s so good. Much too good for the likes of me. I don’t understand any of what’s going on, but I do know I can’t stand to see that look on his face.

“Here, Sunshine. Take a drink,” he says, twisting the cap off the bottle and handing me both. What he doesn’t do is sit on the bed. King’s on the opposite side of me, standing and bending down to hand me the water. He’s not standing beside me. He’s not getting back in bed. He’s awkwardly looking across the bedat me, rubbing the back of his neck, and looking as close to panicked as King will probably ever look in his life.

“I’m okay,” I whisper after taking the bottle and sipping from it.

“I’m sorry,” he says, like he has anything to apologize for.

“I’m okay,” I tell him again. Maybe if I say it enough, one of us will start to believe it.

“Shit, Gabby. I meant to go slow. I fucked up.”

“King.”

“Christ, I fucked up,” he mutters again under his breath.

“King, stop.”

He turns to look at me and his words are so earnest, the emotion so thick that it’s coming off him in waves and it guts me. I gave him this pain, this look. I warned him, but he didn’t listen and now, I’m hurting him.The last person in the world I’d ever want to hurt.

“Gabby, you’re safe with me. I would cut off my arm before I’d?—”

I don’t think. I just can’t stand the pain anymore. I somehow manage to put the water on the nightstand and then I move to King, going up on my knees on the mattress, pressing my hands against his stomach where he stands. “Stop. I know you will never hurt me. Iknowthat. That’s not what happened.”

“I know, but I should have been gentler. I should have let you lead.Fuck!I should stop pushing you when you need time to adjust.”

“King, I asked you to kiss me. That wasn’t you pushing me,” I whisper softly.

“Sunshine—”

“It wasn’t the kiss,” I confess before he can blame himself for more of my idiocy.

“What?” he asks, understandably confused.

“It wasn’t the kiss. I was enjoying the kiss. I wanted more of that kiss because it was so spectacular. You know everything there is about me, King. You know about Dom and my fucked-up decisions to try to tie him to me, despite him starting a life with Thea. You know how I hurt and used T. You even know how I let a prospect get off watching me. I laid everything bare for you and I did it wanting you—needingyou to look at me with the same disgust as everyone else. I wanted you to hate me, like I hated myself. Yet, early that morning before the sun had really begun to rise, after I had already bared my soul once, and you let me have a safe place to give you more. I told you about Trick, my dad, my feelings that I was never good enough—that there was something in me lacking. I gave you everything. Instead of doing what I wanted, you held me. You kissed my forehead and told me to learn to forgive myself and give myself grace to be the woman I wanted to be. When I made the decision to keep my child, I did it knowing that jellybean was my first right step into becoming the woman that I wanted to be.”

“Gabby …”

“I’m telling you that, because you need to know I trust you. I … care about you enough to know that you deserve better than filth like me.”

“Shut up.”

“King—”

“I’m not going to listen to it anymore. I will not allow you to keep trying to die on a damn sword. They call it a past because it’s not in thenow. We all have a fucking past, Gabby. We all do. It doesn’t have to define us. We shove it behind us, and we move forward. That’s what I’m doing. I’m pushing away the mistakes I made for seeing a woman and making her in my head what I wanted and needed, marrying her, and getting shredded in the process. That’s what I’m doing by realizing my plan of vengeance I wasted half my life on amounted to my own fucking motherbeing an addict and lying her ass off and me also wanting to kill a man who is a little twisted, but a good man. A man who may have made a good father to me but will never get that chance. So, that’s part of my past, too. But do you know what is not in my past, Gabby?”

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