Page 100 of Chad's Chase
When he jacked up a brow at me, I took his free hand and slowly eased it down in my front pocket.
I felt his fingers curl around the keys, and then his hips suddenly drove forward and pinned me back against the car.
Releasing his hold, he reached up and around to grab my ponytail, painfully tugging my head back so our noses aligned. “What thefuckwas that in there, Jhay?”
Tilting my pelvis upward, I braced my mound against his hard-on, wishing he would just forget the world and everyone in it, and fuck me right there on his sleek LFA. “It was nothing. He was hitting on me with clichéd, frat boy lines so I decided to mess with him, that’s all.”
“Did you not understand when I said I hate you?”
“I understood,” I breathed, my hips rocking now.
“Then stop trying so hard to make me love you!” he barked in my face. “I hate you. I hate you so insanely bad, Jhay, and Icravethe way hating you makes me feel. Please don’t let me love you. Please.”
“Okay,” I whispered, “I’ll behave.”
“Will you?” He snorted, like he knew better than to believe that crockshit.
I shrugged.
He shook his head, not knowing what to do with me, and having no other options left but to fuse his lips with mine. I would be the death of him, or him the death of me. We were each other’s disgustingly dark and deadly destiny, and there was no dancing around that.
Hips rolling, he dug his erection into me, making deep, primal noises in his throat. I drifted my hands down to the bottom of his T-shirt and slipped them underneath it, gliding my palms up over his defined abs, then up to his firm chest, smoothing over his pectorals, circling the center of my palms over his nipples.
Chad broke off as though things were getting too heated, releasing my ponytail and stepping back so my hands fell from under his shirt. He did the steady inhale, exhale thing, then, “You need to apologize to your brother and his wife.”
I sagged against the car. “I know.”
Eyebrows shooting to the heavens, Chad seemed stunned by my easy acquiescence. He’d decidedly been expecting a fight from me on this.
“I’m not a monster, Chad,” I snapped, feeling the need to defend my person. “Trying to kill an unbornisa monstrous thing to do, but I’m not a monster…I was just…pissed off that he had nothing at all to say to me after twelve fucking years. How could he be soselfish?”
Chad took both my hands in his and kissed my knuckles. “He’s not as tough as you, Jhay. He’s not a fighter. Half the time he’s scared and paranoid more than anything. He wants normalcy, not all this—the killing, the running. And learning his little sister is an assassin, seeing you, I think he’s just having a hard time processing it all.”
I wrenched my hands away from him. “Hold up, he thinks Iwantedthis life? He thinks I like killing people and being on the run?”
Chad combed his fingers back through his hair. “He doesn’t know your whole story, babe. Hell, I just found out forty-eight hours ago. You two need to sit down and talk.”
I sighed, nodding. “Do you think Clementine’s going to forgive me?”
Broad, masculine shoulders jerked up in a shrug. “I don’t know. She’s pretty shaken up. I think we should give them a little time to recover. Let them sleep it off.”
“We’re going back home, then?”
A face-splitting, white grin broke through the darkness.
“What?” I asked, smacking his chest, grinning too, even though I hadn’t a clue what he was grinning about. That’s how infectious his grin was.
“I like how you just referred to my place ashome,” he said. “I like that. I like that very much.”
“If we survive Rafail, I would love for it to be my permanent home,” I said soberly. “Would that be okay?”
Hands circling my waist, he whispered, “If we survive my father, everything I own will also be yours, Jhay. Because I hate you more than I’ve ever hated anyone or anything. You’ve suffered because of me, so I want to give you the best of everything life has to offer. I want to wipe those memories clean and supplant them with fresh ones. I want to bring you to a point where the bright green in your eyes never dims, your smile never fades, and you never stop dancing and singing. I want you to know happiness like I never will.”
“I’ll not be enough to make you happy?”
He squeezed me closer to him. “You are more than enough, Jhay. But I’m half-dead, half-alive. My soul is sold and I’m far beyond redeemable. I’m only half a man, so how can I ever know complete happiness?”
I pressed my face to his chest, the sound of my heart ripping, echoing through the night. “That can’t possibly be true. Because youcompleteme, Chad. You fill the soul-suctioning hole within me. You make me hope, you make me trust. You make me want to live, and love. It is not possible for a half-assed man to have that kind of impact on another human being. Only one who is complete, knows himself, knows who he is and what he is worth, the bad that he’s capable of, and also the unfailingly good. Only a man who is balanced, controlled, larger than life, smarter and stronger than the Devil, andcannot—andwill notallow himself to— be defeated.”
