Page 113 of His Greatest Muse

“It’s fine as it is. She’s going to like it.”

His mouth lifts at the corner as he looks around the room. “Yeah, she will.”

Taking advantage of the distraction, I tug the shirt over my head and work to get my arms through the holes. My left arm goes in easily, but a searing pain makes my vision go black when I try to push my right one above my head.

“Fuck,” I grunt.

Footsteps slap the floor while my vision slowly starts to come back. Fingers prod at my side, checking the bandage for blood, most likely, while I swallow a snarl. Seemingly satisfied with the bandage, Dad releases a heavy breath and pulls at the shirt, bending my arm in a way that doesn’t pull on my stitches as he slides it through the hole.

He rubs a hand up and down my back once my shirt is all the way on. My muscles lock up at the unfamiliar yet terrifyingly comforting touch. I grit my teeth to avoid jerking away. He’s already felt my stiffening, though. His hand drops instantly.

“I’ll go check where they are,” he says softly.

“Okay.”

“Thank you, Noah. For . . . letting me do this.”

“It’s for Tinsley.” But it ridiculously means something to me.

He smiles knowingly. “She’ll love it.”

I don’t know what to say back, so I keep quiet. Thankfully, it isn’t long before my hospital room starts to fill. Mom, Adalyn, and Maddox show up first. Maddox eyes me and Dad oddly, as if looking for some sort of sign as to how things are going. He won’t get anything from me. I do wonder if he’ll try to get me alone and speak with me sometime before he goes home. Our relationship is far better than the one I have with Dad, but that doesn’t mean much.

Everyone paws over me, concerned with my injury and my feelings and if I need anything. It’s too much. I feel suffocated. Each moment that passes with me watching the door like an abandoned dog, I grow more and more desperate for her. By the time that door finally opens for the final time and she steps inside, I’m starved for her. Goddamn ravished.

I grip the blankets on either side of me in tight fists when she glances around the room and then at me, eyes wide and so fucking bright. Amazement twists her features into something magical. The look in her eyes is a hot poker of arousal in my gut. I’m suddenly grateful for the blanket over my lower half that Dad refused to let me take off.

She’s quickly abandoning everyone else in the room and rushing toward me. The moment she’s close enough, her hands are on my face, drawing me in. Our lips meet in a blast of longing and pure, unfiltered want for one another. It’s a terrifying explosion that doesn’t just linger on my mouth but wraps itself around my chest and squeezes and squeezes until I’m sure it’ll ruin me. I want it to. Would beg to be ruined by the taste and feel of her.

Time, place, company. Nothing matters but her. I’ve always put Tinsley at the forefront of my mind. It was immediate, on instinct. But she’s finally doing the same. I’m to her what she is to me. It’s fucking electrifying.

I push my fingers through her hair and breathe her in in large, greedy inhales. A flurry of satisfied noises works up my throat before I trap them down. The opinion of those around us don’t matter to me, but they do to her. I don’t particularly think she’d enjoy her family hearing how desperately I want their daughter right now.

If I could tear my eyes away from her, I’m positive I’d find Braden trying to slit my throat with his eyes for so much as kissing her in front of him.

Our audience disappears from my mind the moment her eyes open and she strokes her thumb below the bruise surrounding my eyes.

“Thank you,” she whispers.

I reply by kissing her again.

42

TINSLEY

My attention keeps driftingfrom the pile of gifts at the foot of the bed to Noah, the rock star who’s refusing to let me leave the warmth of his body. There’s a tiara on my head with the title Birthday Girl written in hot pink, glittery letters across it. I haven’t stopped grinning since I walked into Noah’s room over an hour ago. It feels wrong to be happy despite the brutal reality nipping at our heels, but I can’t help it.

This party is everything to me.

For tonight, our lives are normal. Well, almost normal. The machines that continue to pump medication into Noah’s veins are almost as hard to ignore as the cuts and bruises marking his pale skin.

The rhythmic tapping of his fingertips on my bicep tries to pull me back into the conversation taking place around me. I focus on something else, though. Noah’s tapping a beat to one of his songs, the one still without a title. He’s been singing it every night on tour, but it remains incomplete until I decide on a name.

“What did you get Tiny, Noah?” Addie asks, her blue eyes bright and bushy-tailed like always. She winks at me, and I return it, grateful for the reminder. I’ve been forced to open his last, and I know that was on purpose.

He knows he got me the best one and wanted to make sure everyone else knew it.

The biggest gift of them all is wrapped neatly in silver paper with a black bow on top. My eyes immediately find Oakley sitting across the room, sandwiched between Ava and my dad. The small chairs they got brought into the room look ridiculous beneath the massive frames of him and Dad, but they take what has to be serious discomfort like champs.

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