Twice in two days?
Because I knew we’d somehow slept the day and a night through.
That was how exhausted we were. How much we’d needed the rest.
“I love you, Mav.”
His face burrowed into my nape, and he released a sigh that sent hot air blowing over my throat. It was uncomfortable considering how warm I already was, but I wouldn’t swap it for the world.
I turned slightly in his arms, moving so I was half facing him. It took some wiggling, but I managed to hook one leg over his, opening myself up to him in a way I knew he wouldn’t register. He wouldn’t know how big a deal that was, but I did.
A woman in my position made moves like that on command. Not by choice.
But I gave Mav that choice, and I appreciated that he didn’t even know it.
I didn’t want him to remember me for what I was—dirty. Used.
I wanted him to want me, not be disgusted by my past.
Cautiously, but needing more than just the words to reassure me that this was real, I pressed my lips to his. We’d kissed before, dry humped each other in the past, but I craved a different kind of connection. One I prayed would bind us together.
Even as I longed for that, inwardly I felt like ice.
Questions rolled over each other in my head—would I be able to do it? Could I really go through with it? Did I truly want him? Was I only doing this to bind him to me?
But as my lips brushed his, they started to fade. As did all other background noise.
I’d learned that before… funny how I’d forgotten it though. Strange how I hadn’t recalled that, in the crowded attic of before, with the pounding music from the bar below, he’d kissed me and we’d drifted into silence. Into a haven of our own making.
But he welcomed me back by parting his lips and softly returning the kiss. He embraced me into that silent paradise by holding me, by letting me relax into his tender touch.
Maverick wasn’t a gentleman.
I knew that.
Just because he was my protector, that didn’t mean he was perfect.
He wouldn’t be happy with gentle kisses and soft touches forever, but that he gave me that now had me hoping I’d be able to handle more in the future.
Sex meant pain to me. In my mind, that was all I knew it as. I’d been a virgin when I’d been sold, and my hymen had been torn away, ripped into shreds as much as my hope for a brighter future in America with my sister had been.
But I had hope again.
I had a future where I hadn’t before because of this man, because of his family.
I wasn’t a victim.
I wasn’t a ghost.
I was Alessa, and it was time I took back what was mine—my identity. My sexuality. My personality. Me.
It was time I owned me again.
With that desire bolstering me, I slipped my arms around Maverick’s neck and tugged him closer to me. I didn’t realize the ferocity of my hold until we were plastered against each other, and I felt his response to my being here.
An erection.
One he didn’t bother to shield.
It was…
Pizda.
Could I do this?
Could I?
I truly didn’t know.
Penises represented so much—all of it bad… and then, he rubbed his lips over mine, pulling back so he could look at me, stare into my eyes like he could see all my secrets, and wanted to know each of them.
He stared at me as if I was his Ghost again.
I wasn’t a stranger.
I was his.
The tension that had been inherent in his frame since the clubhouse’s collapse had dissipated. He was lax in bed, and that made me wonder if he’d stop suffering with so much pain because such internal stress couldn’t have been good for him.
“We don’t have to do anything—” he started to say, but I moved so I could press a finger to his lips.
“Maverick?”
“Yes,” he rumbled around my pointer finger.
“Why did you stop having sex?”
His brows rose at the question, and slowly, I moved my hand away so he could talk without any encumbrance.
“It wasn’t physical,” I pointed out, knowing it wasn’t because today wasn’t the first time I’d felt his dick harden in response to what we were doing.
“No, it wasn’t,” he agreed, his eyes darkening. “Have you been in love before, Ghost?”
My nose crinkled. “Alessa.”
His lips twitched. “Sorry. That’s going to take some getting used to.”
“I know. And the answer is no. Not before you.”
He lowered his head. “Before Nic, I’d loved people, but I hadn’t been in love. He made me realize the difference. I-I figure you know who he is now?”
I wanted to scoff at that—know him? He’d been haunting us for weeks!
But I didn’t.
How could I?
It wasn’t Maverick’s fault.
“I do,” was all I said, and I kept my gaze on his lips because I didn’t want him to see and misunderstand my resentment.
“Well, before him, sex was easy come and easy go. After Lodestar and I broke up, I slept around a lot,” he admitted. “I was single, had a dangerous vocation, and could die at any given moment when I was deployed, and I was deployed more often than I wasn’t back then. I fucked around whenever I could. Man, woman. I didn’t give a damn.
“Then I met Nic, and he made me realize what sex was.”
“What is it?” I whispered, curious now that I heard the dreamy quality in his voice.
“I’ve never told anyone this,” he admitted sheepishly, a hint of self-deprecatory laughter gleaming in his eyes.
“I can keep a secret.”
“I know you can,” he said immediately. “But it’s not something guys admit to. At least, not often.” He released a deep breath. “I realized that sex with someone you didn’t give a damn about was as unsatisfying as jacking off, so when Nic died, I just…stopped.”
My eyes bugged out at that, because Maverick was a beautiful man. In fact, he was so handsome he could have been in a movie. The tiniest indent in his chin, the stubble that was the same gilt color as his shorn hair, the most stubborn jaw imaginable… he was gorgeous. And somehow, when he looked at me, I felt like I was just as beautiful to him in his eyes.
“You mean to tell me you haven’t had sex in ten years?” I whispered, utterly agog.
“Well, off and on. Probably five. Before the accident anyway. My body wasn’t broken,” he muttered, “my head was.” He tapped his temple with his finger. “And I don’t mean this CTE crap. I just mean I couldn’t get over Nic.” He shrugged. “Before Lodestar, who fucked her CO in our goddamn bed, there was Lesley.
“She was my high school sweetheart, and she screwed me over during my first deployment, slept around like crazy and just broke my fucking heart in the process… so I kinda treated women like shit for a while, fell in with guys, and it just rolled on with that. Carried on fucking everything that moved, and then Nic came along.
“He was the only person, until now, who ever got me where it mattered. In all honesty, it wasn’t—”
When he broke off, his unease clear, I murmured, “It’s okay, Maverick. I’d prefer to understand. My feelings aren’t hurt.”
“I think they are, and I think they have every right to be,” he countered, his eyes darkening to pewter. “I know I must have treated you like shit these past couple of weeks.”
“You did,” I told him, deciding it was best to be honest. “But you weren’t you. It’s not like I could blame you.”
“I’d have blamed me,” he said bitterly. “I blame me now.” When I just sighed, he winced, but reached up to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear, and murmured, “I loved Lodestar. Even loved Lesley. But I recognized that what I felt for Nic was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of love.”
The pain of his words was like a knife to the throat. I could feel
my lifeblood spilling from me, only he didn’t notice. His gaze was lost to the past again. That thousand-yard stare I’d come to loathe overtaking him, so I knew he wasn’t lying here with me, but back then again.
“I lost hope,” he whispered. “I lost all sense of self. I poured myself into my work. I dedicated myself to causes that Nic thought were worthy of our fight. And then I got tangled in something I didn’t even understand. Not until Lodestar found me again three years ago. That shit she was talking about today—”
Because he didn’t know I was lying in a pool of blood from my shattered heart, I just whispered, “The Sparrows?”
He hummed. “Yeah, well, she’s been spouting it for a long time. I never believed the crap about the cabal, but by that point, I didn’t give much of a damn about anything. She cared enough to try, so I figured laying low was for the best.” He winced. “Between Kembesh and the IED blast that took me out of the game, those six years weren’t great for me. I had a death wish. Went wherever I was sent, did as I was ordered—no questions asked. Got a rep for doing the jobs few would.
“I’m not proud of what I did,” he muttered with a sigh. “But someone had to do the dirty work, and that was me for too long. When the IED…” He grunted. “Well, after, I hoped it’d kill me but it didn’t. Only the good die fucking young, don’t they?” He reached up and rubbed his eyes. “When I was shipped into the U.S. again, I was stuck in Bethesda for over a year. Couldn’t seem to get any desire to live, didn’t have much reason to get out of bed on a morning.
“My brothers, fuck, they tried, but I was a stubborn cunt. Until Lodestar sneaked into my room one night and told me to hurry the hell up and get better. She said I needed to get out of there because I was in danger, and I needed to disappear. She worked hard to make certain people think I was dead…and maybe I believed that, because for a long time, I felt it.”
“Why were you in danger?”
“By that point, I had half the Middle East baying for my blood. This time, my A-team was involved in a mission in Benghazi that went wrong. Another one.” He grunted. “It put us in contact with some people who we should have never met. I was the only one who got out of there alive. The IED explosion I was involved in” —he pressed his hand to his chest where there were scars on his torso, mostly on his lower abdomen and sides— “it was supposed to kill us all.”
A sharp breath escaped me. “Khuy na ne!”
“I don’t know what that means, but” —he smirked— “yeah, khuy na ne!”
My nose crinkled at his accent.
“So, there I was, supposed to be dead, feeling like the living dead, then I heard about you and what you’d been through. Then I went into that goddamn bunkhouse, and I sat in your bedroom and saw you struggling to live, but somehow staying strong enough to not let go… and I just—” His eyes flared wide. “It was like I came back to life too. Watching you grow stronger, watching you get better, making you eat, encouraging you to drink those shakes, winning a smile from you… Every day that you improved, I seemed to improve too. Slept a little deeper, could breathe a little easier.
“Until, all of a sudden, my day felt incomplete without seeing you.” My shattered heart began to pulse with hope as he met my gaze once more. “Until, out of nowhere, I had to feel your hand in mine. Needed to feel your lips grace my cheek. I had to be closer to you—had to for my own selfish needs.” He shook his head. “You brought me back to life, Alessa. You did. I was a dead man, dying even as I was living. Then you came along and you made me realize what it was to feel again.” He licked his lips. “I’m not sure what I’ve done in my life to deserve two loves like this, and it terrifies me. You terrify me—”
“Me?” I burst out, unable to comprehend that.
“Yeah, you,” he said with a soft laugh. “Ghos—I mean, Alessa, you have the power to decimate me.” The simplicity of his statement resonated with me like nothing else could. “I-I somehow survived losing Nic. I had a purpose back then, and though the Sinners gave me a reason to get up in the morning, that wasn’t enough to make me feel like living again. It wasn’t enough to make me leave that fucking chair, to lead a regular life. You did that. You. And there’s no one out there like you, so…” His jaw tensed, and I sensed he was gritting his teeth. “Alessa, you can’t leave me. Please,” he whispered, but it went deeper than that.
It was a plea.
He was begging me.
“Please, Alessa, don’t leave me.” His lips quivered as he pressed his mouth to mine, just resting there, not letting me speak, just holding me in place as he slipped his arms over my waist, tangling me up in him.
“I won’t, Maverick, I won’t,” I mumbled against him, then annoyed, I jerked my head back so I could speak unheeded. “I didn’t let go when you weren’t mine. So I won’t let go now that you are.”
He swallowed. “What if it happens again?”
“It’s likely.” I bit the inside of my cheek to stop the prickling onset of tears. “There’s no cure, but there’s treatment—treatment you refused.” He winced. “I had no hope of you coming back to me, but you did. So I’m going to take every day that comes, I’m going to hold you for as long as you’ll let me, and if I lose you to Nic again, I’m going to pray you’ll come back to me. I’m going to pray that God, or whoever it was that brought us together, will keep on doing that.”
“If there was a God, he wouldn’t tear us apart,” he rasped, his lips turning down at the corners.
“I don’t want to think of it that way. If I gave you a reason to live, kokhanyy, then it’s the same way for me.” My smile was shaky as I reached up to press my fingers to his unhappy mouth. “We’ve been given a gift. Sometimes, the path to enjoying that gift isn’t smooth, but nothing about this life is smooth, and in the interim, we need to make sure that we enjoy every day we’re blessed with.”
His eyes fluttered to a close. “If I was a good man, I’d make you leave me.” My brow puckered at his words, then that shattered heart of mine, the one he liked to fracture so frequently, finally merged back together for good when he rasped, “I-I can’t leave you. I’m not strong enough to do that. Not good enough or selfless enough, but I could make you leave me.”
Because that was foolish talk, I whispered, “You forgot me, Maverick. I didn’t leave you. Lily offered me a bank account swollen with money, and I didn’t go anywhere. I won’t. You’re stuck with me. Forever.
“Whether you forget me again or not, I won’t ever forget you.
“That’s a promise, kokhanyy.
“My vow to you.”
And then, because he had a habit of putting his foot in things, I pressed my lips to his to shut him up.
That was, I reasoned, the safest thing to do.
Thirty
Maverick
My heart hurt. It hurt. Not just because of how much I felt for this crazy woman but for what I’d put her through, for what I could put her through again in the future.
There was pain ahead of us, none of it physical, but she was still so strong. Still a thousand times stronger than I was, because she wasn’t going to leave me.
I saw it in the resolve in her eyes.
Saw it in the shadows of hurt I’d etched into her soul.
I’d done what Lancaster and all her previous owners hadn’t.
I’d left marks there.
That was the power of what she felt for me.
That was the depth of it.
That was the level of the feelings I inspired in her.
I was lucky.
I was selfish.
I wasn’t going to let her go, but more importantly, I saw she wasn’t going to let me go, and that meant more to me than she could know.
She’d cling to me as hard as I clung to her, and that liberated me. To love like I did wasn’t fashionable. To love with your whole being was to welcome a world of hurt, and after Nic had passed, I hadn’t thought I was capable of it again—in all honesty, hadn’t wanted to be capable of it. Yet s
he’d proved me wrong, but more than that, she accepted this.
She accepted what she could see I felt.
She wasn’t scared, not like Lodestar had been. Lodestar who’d only ever seen a fraction of the love I felt for Alessa from me. She’d run away, had run scared. Alessa, with all she’d been through, was strong enough to take what I had to give, to return it.
This woman, this soul who’d been sold, who’d been betrayed, who’d been used like no one should ever have to be, who’d endured acts of torture that I, a trained soldier, probably wouldn’t have been able to endure, was whole enough to accept all I had to give.
And that was like letting the floodgates open.
Before the blast, I’d contained myself. Gifted her with chaste kisses that I imbued with my feelings. Held her until she slept, finding solace in her presence.
But now, the truth was out.
She knew what I felt for Nic.
If I didn’t allow her to see what I felt for her, she’d forever feel as if she was second best.
But she wasn’t second anything.
My heart had never belonged to me.
The two halves had always been meant for two people.
Nic—who’d made me into the man I was. Who allowed me to see that to love like I did, just as my mother had, wasn’t wrong. That someone could accept that love and live with it and love me back.
And Alessa—who accepted my flaws, accepted I was broken, accepted I could never be fixed and who wanted me anyway. Who took my love into her keeping, and cherished it as much as I’d cherish her.
My mouth trembled at the thought, and I found myself with no alternative other than to press mine to hers to stop that tremor.
She sighed into my kiss, sighed enough to part her lips, to slip her tongue into mine, to graze ours together. She sampled me, tasted me, doing what she hadn’t really done before—explored me. She was hesitant, naturally, because this was a kiss imbued with love. With her feelings for me. And I basked in it.
I wanted to gift her with the same, but I couldn’t.
Her past wouldn’t let me.
Maverick: A Dark MC Romance (A Dark & Dirty Sinners' MC Series Book 6) Page 24
