Breath We Take (Cuffed By Love Duet Book 1)

by Amanda Kaitlyn

  I was sure I read somewhere that when someone talks about their demons, their past, the last thing you should do is touch them. It could cause the person to lash out, to get spooked or shut down emotionally.

  The thought was fleeting that I should have kept my distance and let her say the rest before pulling her close.

  That didn’t stop me from reaching between us to take hold of her beautiful yet saddened face, hands shaking, the roar of rage that begun building up inside of me in that hospital bathroom stall becoming a living, breathing thing, an instinctual determination clouding my brain and erasing everything but one simple truth.

  I would protect her with my life.

  Her haunted gaze dropped from mine and her eyes closed as I pulled her small, body impossibly closer, until her face was pressed to my neck and her knees hooked over my waist, not even a breath between us.

  Even that was too much for me to handle.

  “I’m so fucking sorry, Em. Breathe now, it’s okay, baby. It’s okay, now. You’re okay.”

  The feeling of her shuttering breath on my throat had my anger growing and it’s not only for Brad.

  Fuck, no. It’s for her father, for being the monster that he was and I’m sure he still is. People like that don’t change.

  Seen enough bad men in my line of work to know that. She’d been just a child. A little girl. She didn’t deserve his hate.

  No one deserved that.

  When I felt her hands, frantic, pulling at the fabric of my shirt, her fingernails scratching at the collar, it took me a solid minute to realize what she needed.

  Her body had gone ice cold.

  She needed to get warm.

  Shit!

  Adrenaline flooded me as I quickly reached a hand behind my neck and gently pried her free from my chest just long enough to slip the shirt over my head before gently pulling her body back into my arms, easing her down onto the bed with me where she nestled her head on my chest, the shivers racking her body lessening the tighter I held her.

  “How old were you when it started?”

  I murmured the question into her ear, not wanting to push her for more information than she was ready to divulge and was thankful when she tipped her face towards mine and met my stare.

  “Probably six? I remember it was after I begun school. My mom used to walk me to the bus stop in the mornings. But after it started, she didn’t do that anymore.”

  “Because she couldn’t leave the house.”

  She hadn’t said the words, but I read between the lines.

  Her father had hurt her mother so badly that she couldn’t make the small walk to the bus stop with her daughter. Never laid my eyes on the man but hell, I hated him, too.

  “Did he hurt you, Darlin’?”

  My Em didn’t look at me when she answered but her nod told me all I needed to know.

  “I stood up to him. It was stupid and naive to think I could stand up to him, make him see reason, but I needed to try. For my moms sake. He would hit me with his belt or slap me around. Eventually, I stopped fighting back.”

  Her words were so shallow, so weakened by the darkness that smothered her and I was a helpless man, because I didn’t know how to fix it.

  This beautiful, kind, amazing woman deserved the fucking world.

  She deserved so much more than the pain and abuse she’d had to endure and for so long, she’d endured it alone.

  Taking one of her hands fiercely in mine, I tipped my mouth over her pale fingertips in a silent acknowledgment that she wasn’t alone, anymore.

  She would never walk alone, again.

  “It wasn’t so bad after mama passed. He hated being in the same room as me so I barely saw him after her service. I thought he was feeling guilty, I thought it would get better after that.” She huffed a heavy breath, her beautifully anguished irises sparking with anger and resentment before they dulled into a pain I’d seen so many times before in that haunted eyes of hers. The colors of her violet eyes dimmed under the weight of the darkness she was being forced to relive and I just held her small body tighter, hoping that my presence would ease it all.

  “When I was sixteen, my dad told me I needed to repay him for all of the trouble I’d given him and my mother. He didn’t give me a choice so I went to his office that summer and assisted him in any way I could. I was so stupid, Hud. I thought he’d finally be proud of me for working hard that summer, showing him I was more than the disappointment he’d always had for me.”

  Fuck.

  “Emberly, look at me.” I urged her, urgency to take away the sadness in her voice crawling through my veins.

  It took her a few minutes but when she did lift her head from my chest and those eyes of hers met mine, the emotion in them broke me.

  A lesser woman would have been broken by the hardships she had faced but not my woman, not Em. She was so fucking strong and the worst part of this was, she didn’t even know it.

  She had no idea of what she was capable of and that, to me, was a crime.

  Because she deserved to know that she wasn’t the weak, broken girl she believed herself to be. Her father may have spent years of her life engrossed in his hatred for the world, placing the weight of the world on her young shoulders instead of being a decent human being and being the father she’d needed so badly.

  She had me, now.

  “You weren’t stupid, baby. You were just a child needing her fathers love and that shit is normal. The rest is on him, alright?”

  Emberly looked up at me with wide, haunted eyes for countless seconds before she nodded slowly, understanding washing over her face. I watched, rapt, as the softness of her elegant features returned and a sudden, overwhelming warmth covered the shadows I saw in her eyes only a moment before. Her hands covered mine on either side of her face sending sparks of awareness across my skin and I looked down at her, shaking my head in renewed astonishment that she was actually mine.

  All mine.

  Didn’t seem possible to me, but that didn’t mean I would let her go.

  I’d done that once and it almost got her killed.

  It only took a few meager minutes of me taking my eyes off of her and Em had been hurt, right under my nose.

  I could have lost her yesterday.

  I could have lost her and that shit didn’t sit well with me.

  I wasn’t about to take my eyes off of her anytime soon.

  That was for damn sure.

  “There’s more.” She whispered and instantly the muscles in my upper body locked up tight, as if I was readying for the fight of my life.

  There was more than her abusive father and her horrible childhood?

  How much more had this girl gone through before I found her?

  Shit.

  “There was this man that worked with my father. He was one of the lawyers on his team in a big case he was working on the last summer I worked for him. He was… he scared me. He would corner me wherever I was, whether I was in the supply closet, my fathers office, the lunch room… it didn’t matter where I was, he’d find me. He tried to force himself on me, he would t-touch me, I swear I tried to fight him off every time. But eventually I just let it happen. It didn’t matter what I wanted anyways, no one cared back then. I was just the boss’s daughter. I was fair game to him, I guess.”

  The broken tone of her voice had my chest clenching in a mixture of abrupt pain and wild, untamed anger- an extreme of emotions I’d never experienced before. Fisting my hands at my sides, I let my beautiful girl continue knowing that if I stopped her, she would keep the pain inside of her longer than she already had and I couldn’t let that happen. She needed to let it all go and I would take care of it.

  I’d go to the ends of the earth to free her from her darkness.

  I would have done any-fucking-thing for this girl and she needed to know that. As she went on to tell me about the sick fuck that dared to put his hands on her, unease crawled its way up my throat and left a bitter taste in my mouth. My mind
was spinning with the new information and I was constantly shifting between staying present, here, with her and making a connection to the danger she was in after the attack and the loom of the unknown stalker we’d thought was the source of the threats that started all of this.

  Her wide, assessing gaze moved from mine to my chest where she linked her fingers through the gold chained cross I always wore around my neck. It was one of the only items I had left of my grandfather and it was a reminder.

  A reminder to protect those I loved above all else.

  It was a reminder of the reason I’d decided to become a cop in the first place.

  Protect and serve.

  “I… I didn’t know it was him. I don’t know how he found me…”

  “What are you talking about?” Kissing the side of her head, I gently ran my thumb over the crease under each of her eyes, collecting her tears and kissing each one of them away, my only way of healing her pain and taking away the darkness in her eyes. When she smiled at me, a soft, barely there one, I soaked it up like it would be the last time. Her smiles were everything to me. “It’s Brad. All along, it was Brad.” The words didn’t make sense at first. If what she was telling me was right, it was way more than a mans jealousy or a rivalry between criminal and cop. It was more than that. Brad’s part in all of this had to be much larger than any of us had thought. He was the one targeting Emberly. He was the one I should have been looking for all along. I was just too blinded by the aura of a stalker to see it until right now. Fuck!

  What if it all had been a lie?

  What if Brad had gone after her after I’d taken an interest in her?

  What if it was all my fault?

  Did I cause this?

  The what ifs continued to plague my thoughts as I felt Em’s petite body shift in my arms and felt the warm sensation of her small hands on my jaw, whispering touches of her fingertips on my skin pulled me from my self loathing thoughts and toward her.

  “You still here with me?”

  “Yeah, Darlin’. I’m always here.”

  “I didn’t know it was him, Hudson. If I had…” I dropped my head to hers and silenced her with a chaste kiss, dragging my lips over hers in what I hoped was a reassurance of what we had, of what I felt for her. When her hands came up to my neck and her slim fingers dove to the back of my head, I knew she felt it.

  I love you.

  I embedded the words into every hungered sweep of my tongue between her pillow soft lips and sung them between the breaths I couldn’t catch when we kissed. And just as every other time before, breath wasn’t a necessity because kissing her was all I could focus on. You make me breathless. I would have said it if she hadn’t stolen my breath with her perfect fucking mouth so I did the next best thing.

  I kissed her again.

  “Hudson?”

  Her voice was so quiet I barely heard her. I pulled away from her lush, perfect lips and used my thumb and forefinger to tip her chin up until her saddened eyes met mine.

  “Make me forget.”

  How the fuck could I say no to that?

  Chapter Twenty- Three

  Emberly

  THE BACKS OF my knees met the end of the bed and I fall back, gasping for breath against the ardent mouth that’s captured mine in a searing, burning kiss. The kind of kiss dreams are made of. It reminds me of our first kiss, the requisite lust and famished devotion making my knees weaken from beneath me and my heart raced so rapidly that it felt as if my chest would collapse from the force of it.

  Taking hold of the warm, taut skin of his hard, muscled back, I held on tightly, not wanting to be anywhere but right here, right then.

  Our first kiss was blazing, surprising, earth shattering. But, this one was a reclaiming, a reaffirmation of a connection that’s hummed between us from the beginning. The strength of it used to scare me, terrify me, actually.

  How could something so sudden and so powerful last?

  I wasn’t sure it could. Even if it was fleeting and would be gone someday, I needed to take hold of it.

  It was everything.

  “Do you know, Emberly?”

  His rough, gritty voice was next to my ear, warm, mint laced breath wafting over my face and I hummed, anticipation curling in my stomach and attraction pebbling over my heated skin like the first sparks before an explosion.

  Moving my eyes from the mass of tanned skin that stretched over Hudson’s chest, I looked up, not surprised when I found that the intensity of his gaze was already trained on me. He took his time placing a series of blistering, open mouthed kisses along the slope of my throat toward the sweet spot behind my ear. A harsh moan fell from my parted lips when he nipped into the sensitized skin and I tightened my hold on his shoulders, lost in him, already.

  “Do I know what?”

  “Do you know how much I love you, Darlin’? Shit, this I’ve never had this. Never wanted it. Never needed it. Had my badge and shield, my family, a few close friends. What else would I need?” He shook his head at himself, as if he was crazy for saying the words but I heard the truth in them. He may not have been alone in the traditional sense of the word, but he hadn’t let love into his heart. Hudson was so many things and I was learning more about him every day.

  He believed that love and marriage would come later in life and that in order to succeed as a police officer, he had to push everything else in his life aside.

  But this man, this strong, protective, sensitive and astonishing man, deserved love.

  Happiness.

  Joy.

  Fulfillment.

  I hated to think of the man he would have been before we’d met.

  Jaded.

  Alone.

  Throwing himself into his work day after day instead of stopping to truly live in the moment, like he was now.

  His nose skimmed up the length of my neck, causing a shiver to rise up my spine, the heady awareness my body hummed with taking me over.

  “Wasn’t expecting you. Didn’t know you were in store. Didn’t know how not to claim you. Look at you, how could I not?”

  Suddenly, his mouth was crushing mine, my name a grunt of approval when our tongues met and his taste engulfed my senses. I felt him grab for the bottom of my shirt, wasting no time in tearing the fabric over my head. I gasped in a shuddering, much needed breath of air before the rush of his rough, callused hands heated my skin and I was dizzy.

  His touch.

  The fervor in which he kissed me.

  It was both overwhelming and unsatisfying and I reached for the buckle of his low slung jeans, needing so much more.

  “I need you, Hud.”

  My words were hushed, just a mere whisper over the pounding of my heartbeat in my chest and the heat in my core telling me where I wanted his touch, the most.

  He didn’t say anything.

  He didn’t need to.

  His blue, so blue, eyes said all I wanted to hear.

  He loved me.

  I wanted to say something, to tell him the gravity of my feelings but suddenly words didn’t seem like enough. They were inadequate compared to the emotion that welled up inside of me, the stinging, joyful tears spilling over when strong, sure hands took hold of my curved hips, fingers pressing into my skin before the round, head of his cock was at my entrance. Precum was already seeping from the bulbous head as it pressed between my swollen folds, teasing me for long, torturous seconds before I was shown some mercy when Hudson groaned, thrusting inside of me with one, harsh movement and I was claimed, all over again.

  He begun a slow, steady rhythm and it was just what I needed.

  I blinked up at him, not knowing how to express the feelings that pulled through my chest and tugged at my heavy, heart.

  It was beyond love. Beyond need. Beyond longing.

  It was this desperate craving to cement our connection in the realest of ways because if the last twenty forty eight hours taught me anything, it was that life was way too short to waste time being scared.


  I’d let my fear of being hurt stop me from giving in to us for too long.

  When Hudson swiveled his hips and dragged the large head of his cock along the swollen bundle of nerves of my labia, I instantly bore down on his length, clamping my walls around him to keep him doing just that. And he chuckled in my ear, that irresistible smile bursting over his hard edged features, making him look boyish, carefree.

  I let my gaze linger over his face, needing to memorize every expression that passed in his eyes because it could all be gone in a second.

  Tristan’s accident was teaching me that.

  It had opened my eyes to what I’d been doing, pushing my feelings for Hudson away anytime we got close.

  I was done with that.

  I loved him.

  But right now, I needed him.

  More than air.

  It was crazy and it was powerful and it was perfect.

  “Oh my god, baby.” I cried out, panting for breath when he hit a spot inside of me I hadn’t known existed. The sparks of pleasure that soared through my body had me quivering, the cusp of the point of no return only a touch away. I tightly, clinched my legs over his lean waist, gasping in surprise when in a swift move, he flipped us over. Suddenly I was on top of him, my weakened knees holding me up as the evidence of my arousal leaked down my thighs and I blushed deeply, closing my eyes as he groaned a harsh breath, rocking up into me, hitting a nerve inside of me that had me trembling all over.

  “Fuck, you like that, don’t you?”

  I couldn’t answer when dots of white light sparked beneath my eyelids, only nodding my head in affirmation of his hoarsely spoken question.

  “You’re so sexy, baby. You have no idea… Shit…”