“I’m so in love with you, Amber Moretti,” he says against my skin, his sincerity causing me to shudder. A swell of hope crashes over me as he cradles the back of my head, bringing my face to his. “So fucking in love with you, I don’t think you’ll ever understand it.” A deep kiss, his lips nourishment to my starving soul as he slides his hand up under my T-shirt, exposing my breast. A flick of his tongue against my nipple and I’m drowning, lost to his pleasure, my back bowed, arching into him as the heat coming from the running vehicle beneath me, and Ryder’s heat from above, surround me, keeping me warm. “I thought I was dying the last few weeks,” he snarls, his mouth revisiting mine in a ravenous kiss filled with greed and, almost imperceptibly, hostility. “Not seeing your beautiful face, not hearing your sweet voice. Christ. I wasn’t gonna be able to hold off another day without breaking, without coming to get you. I tried to drink you away, snort you away, and sleep you away, but none of it worked.” Another kiss, this one softening its angry rhythm, but still potent, destructive to my heart as he whispers, “I was losing it without you near me, momma. You’re stuck in my head like a memory, everything about you making up every stained, dark piece of who I am. Again, you’re . . . mine.”
“Wait a second.” I rear up, confusion riffling through my brain as I push a willpower-forced hand against his chest. “You tried to drink me away, snort me away, and sleep me away, but you never called me, didn’t answer a fucking text?” Pissed as hell, I gather myself and head into the middle of the street to hail a cab, ignoring Ryder’s pleas for me to stop.
He snags me by my elbow, but I cut him off, my hand darting up to smack his beautiful face for the very last time. Whack! “You claim to love me, swear I make up every piece of who you are, but you—for reasons I better know within the next ten seconds, or else I’m aiming for your football this time—decided, out of nowhere, to just up and clear yourself from my life? I’m not a chalkboard, Ryder! You can’t just erase your stamp from my skin.” Tears, pure in everything broken within me, scurry down my face, humiliation eating away at my insides as I flag down an approaching cab. “And don’t even get me started on the girls? What number did Hailey’s twin make for you? Five, ten, a hundred?!”
“Zero!” he bellows, curling an ironclad arm around the small of my back. Pressed chest to chest, our hearts thumping in furious unison, his words drop from his mouth like an atom bomb. “Yes, I picked up girls! Picked up tons of them! Hell, I brought every single one of them back to my place, dead set on fucking the living shit outta them! But I never went through with any of it! Couldn’t because how much I love and need you in my life, Amber!” Turning from Hyde straight into Jekyll, his eyes soften with an apology, his voice dimming to a whisper as the same sincerity from earlier oils his tone. “Like it or not, you own every mangled piece of this pussy-whipped maniac, peach.” He touches his lips to mine, soft, teasing, as he brings my hand to his chest, splaying it across his heart. “I can’t blink, eat, sleep, or breathe without thinking of you, without thinking of us and what we were meant to be from the start.”
My breath evaporates into a chilled puff of smoke as I temper down, trying with everything in me to weed through the confusion continuing to layer my skin. “Then why run away from me, Ryder?” I whisper, hoping to understand his reasoning. “I’m lost. Why . . . hurt me the way you have?”
“It’s hard to explain,” he mumbles, waving the cabbie away as his vehicle all but crashes into the curb.
“Enlighten me.” I whip around, shaking my head at, none other than the terrorist driver from earlier. “No, you stay! I don’t know if I’m going home with this one yet.”
Bin Laden smirks and mirrors the patriotic, departing salute I’d left him with a few hours ago, a chuckle blaring from his mouth as he speeds off down the road.
Ryder’s attention hones in on the cab’s fading lights as it disappears around the corner. “What the hell was that about?”
“Don’t worry.” I grab hold of his jaw, my eyes narrowed as I direct his attention back to me. “I don’t care how hard it is to explain. Explain everything to me . . . now.”
“Brock,” he rumbles through gritted teeth, his jaw hardened. Shoulders squared slabs of concrete, he starts for his car, leaving me alone, beyond confused, and pissed off in the middle of the street. “Fuuuuck!” He swings his fists through the air, curse after curse tumbling from his mouth as he picks up an empty bottle of champagne from the ground, rocketing it against the exterior brick wall of the pub. The thing explodes into dust, tiny green particles glittering like diamonds in the wind as it mixes with the slowing beads of snow.
I jump, his sudden anger flashing across my chilled bones. Scared but growing angrier, I follow after him, determined to find out what the hell’s going on. None of this makes any sense. Brock—though not as amped by the idea as he was when he first brought it up—said he’s cool with the three of us giving it another go. As I jerk open the passenger-side door—Ryder’s eyes capturing mine the second I slip into the seat—nothing can prepare me for what he says.
“Brock told me to stay away from you,” he admits through a shame-filled whisper, regret surfacing over his face as he stares at me, defeated.
I stare back, equally defeated, my emotions one huge, tangled ball of hurt and confusion as his confession sinks its lethal fangs into my heart, obliterating what’s left of it. Silence wraps itself around us, a moment of calm before Ryder loses it, punching the steering wheel. He hisses in pain, blood seeping from his knuckles as he guns the engine and pulls out of the parking lot. “And I fucking listened to the dick, agreed to hurt you in whatever way necessary as long as it meant never seeing you again, never . . . feeling you again.”