With a sudden vivid recollection, I remember every amazing memory, and I seize on one. “You wanted to take me to Paris.”
“That’s a bad thing?”
“And make love to me in an elevator.”
“Did I?”
“And to have me in my pink pants,” I thickly admit, and an unexpected warmth climbs up my cheeks.
He keeps staring at me, his face taut in an unreadable mask. His arms are crossed tight as if he’s holding his raging emotions in. I’m shaking because I can’t determine if the look in his eyes is love, or hate. It is simply consuming. Consuming me.
“You forgot the part where we played each other a song,” he tells me in a quiet murmur, and the realization that he probably remembers the tender way he made love to me after that causes a burning emotion in my chest to quickly spread up my throat.
I hold my breath in silent shock when he reaches for my hand and takes it in his dry, firm grasp, lifting my fingers to his lips.
My heart speeds up as I stay in my seat, watching in delicious agony as he turns my hand in his grip. He stares down at the center of my palm before he bends to flatten his tongue over my skin and gently licks me. Need explodes in my tummy.
“That picture made me very angry, Brooke,” he rasps into my skin, as he drags his tongue wetly across the sensitive nerves at the center of my palm. “When you belong to someone … you don’t kiss anyone else. You don’t kiss his enemy. You don’t lie to him. Betray him.”
My systems roar back to life as his teeth graze the heel of my palm.
My voice shudders out of me. “I’m sorry. I wanted to protect you, like you protect me. I won’t ever go behind your back again, Remy. I didn’t leave because you were manic, I just didn’t want you to get manic or low because of me.”
He gives me a dark nod as he rakes a quick, thirsty look over me, and he lowers my hand back to my lap. “There’s something I might have missed then. Because I still can’t understand why, the f**k, you would leave me when I f**king needed you!”
The pain in his voice strikes a chord within me, and instantly my eyes sting.
“Remy, I’m sorry!” I cry wretchedly.
He groans, agitated, then he pulls out the letter I wrote from the pocket of the jeans draped haphazardly on a chair by the corner. The paper is crumpled and broken in the middle from so many reads. “Did you mean what you wrote to me?” Hearing his dense, distressed voice causes the little hairs on my body to jump.
“Which part?”
He grabs the paper, and yanks it open, ramming a thick finger to the words:
I love you, Remy.
Then, he crumples it in his fist again, watching me in anger and despair. My heart constricts as I realize he can’t even say the word out loud to me.
Who has ever told him that they love him?
I have.
In a letter.
In a thousand songs.
But not out loud.
Even his parents only wanted money. They never accepted him or gave him the love he deserved. And me? Oh, god, I left him. Just like everyone else. Throat thick, I nod up and down really fast, and his jaw clamps as hard as rock, as if he’s holding some wild feeling back. “Say it,” he coarsely whispers.
“Why?”
“I need to hear it.”
“Why do you need to hear it?”
“Is that the reason you left after the fight?”
Burning tears fill my eyes.
There’s desperation in his question, and I think he wants to know so badly because it might be the only reason he’ll be able to get over my leaving.
Raw pain opens new in my chest as I imagine him waking up in that hospital bed, after what he did for me, to realize that I left. When I’d said I’d never get enough of him …
“Is it, Brooke? Why you left? Or because you’re ready to quit on me? I thought you had more mettle, little firecracker, I really did.”
He’s wildly searching my face, and I feel just as wild looking back at his breathtakingly handsome features, noting the slight scar above his eyebrows remains.
I touch it on impulse, and the instant my finger connects with his healing skin, the words burst out of me.
“I love you. I love you.” His breath seizes in his chest, and I continue in a rush. “More than I’ve ever thought it possible to love any other human being. I left because you broke my heart, again and again that night, with every one of your bones. I left because I couldn’t take it anymore!”
He closes his eyes, and his torment reaches me so deep, my own confession opening me, making me vulnerable. I hear his ragged exhale of breath, and I’m hurting all over at the memory of what he did for me, to rescue Nora. I drop my hand, and my voice trembles fiercely. “I don’t want you to ever let anyone hurt you deliberately again. Ever. Not even for me, Remy. Never. You are worth. Too. Much! Do you hear me?”
He lifts his hand and cups my face in fiercely trembling hands and draws me up against him, and I shudder as I absorb the feeling of his arms again. My heart pounds because I know this is the first night of the rest of my life, and I want it to be.
“I’d do it a thousand times for you.” He scents me. And I scent him. “A thousand. A million. I don’t care if I’m humiliated. I don’t care about anything. All I knew was you were willing to kiss that motherfucker’s ink for your sister, and I had to give her back to you.”
“Oh, Remy, you didn’t have to do anything.”
“I did. And I will. And I’d do it all over again. I’m only sorry only Pete could know. He stayed in a hotel room with her and one of Benny’s goonies, then helped me transfer her when I delivered the championship. I just couldn’t let you stop me, Brooke.”