Angelic (Book 2)

Twenty-Five

“Don’t cry,” he whispered, voice scratchy from sleep. “If you cry, I’ll never leave, and that will doom us all.”

“Not us all,” I answered shakily. “Just me.”

“That’s worse.”

Maybe. It depended on how you looked at the situation.

Time continued to tick by. The wind still whipped, pelting flakes of snow against the window. I should have been tired, considering I’d gotten maybe two hours of sleep last night. But everything about August made me feel alive.

Energized.

Awake.

He hooked a hand behind my knee, rolling onto his back and taking me with him, so I draped across his chest. Heat pounded against my stomach. All I wanted to do was absorb into his skin, fall into him; never leave.

“How are you feeling?” he asked, running his nails up and down my back in slow circles.

“Fine.”

“Does it hurt?”

“A little,” I admitted, peering down into his exotic blue eyes. “But it’s good pain.”

He smiled. It was broken and full of sadness. I probably looked much the same way. “My flight is at four.”

I nodded, face echoing the reluctance in his voice. “Okay.”

His eyes searched mine, and I guessed because he didn’t know what else to say, he pulled my head down and kissed me. His long fingers wrapped around my neck, the other arm snaking around my waist, cinching me against him. He groaned, a lost and defeated sound. I buried my fingers in his hair and reciprocated with all the intensity and need he poured into me through the night. This endless, aching need for everything about him.

August rolled us over, never breaking contact, crushing me in sensual heat that hitched my breathing, over-stimulated my senses, and overloaded my capacity for these new sensations, but I didn’t care.

I didn’t care.

It ended up being another hour before we left the bed.

And even after that, we shoved the blankets off our bodies, holding tight to one another, falling into the stream of the shower.

 Let me tell you what it was like kissing August in the shower.

Tasting the water on his lips.

Feeling the cool tile pressed against my back.

Breathing hard through the steam and pounding pressure.

I grabbed each of these feelings and locked them away in my mind.

When we finally separated, and I was suddenly alone in his room while the sounds of breakfast sizzled from downstairs, I quietly freaked out. The clock flashed 8:30. I pulled on jeans and one of August’s Def Leppard shirts, because I wanted to be wrapped in him even if he wasn’t present. I ordered myself not to cry. To be strong, because that was what he needed. And to tell myself that he was coming back. He had to, with something to return for.

I had to believe I was enough.

The kitchen was still a mess, but he stood at the stove cooking bacon and eggs and pancakes, like everything was in perfect order. There was no more kitchen table to speak of. The lopsided boards of wood over the window still allowed a chill inside, but I didn’t move passed the doorway, watching August work. I just wanted to watch him. Every flex of his shoulder, every ripple of his back when he moved, every flash of skin that I now knew to the deepest corner of my soul.