Her head left its resting place below my chin. Staring at me with a deeper vulnerability than I realized she had, she said, “For the exact same reason.”
And there it was. I hadn’t even needed to hear the words. They were etched in every line of her face, in the way the curtain lifted from her eyes and I saw, for the first time, need and affection and possession in them when she looked at me. I saw the reciprocation I’d been certain wasn’t there. I couldn’t have been more wrong. She’d been hiding it, for whatever reason I didn’t know, and right now, it didn’t matter. One thing on my mind.
“I’m going to kiss you now,” I said, settling my hands over her face. “And I’m not planning on stopping for awhile.”
She smiled, the real one—the good one—but there was something else peaking it a little higher at one side. Something I wanted to see more of.
“It’s about time,” she said, crossing that last half-step separating us.
And then we were one. Bodies melding into one another, lips colliding together like they had minds all their own. Her kiss was sweet, but not particularly gentle. So, basically, it was perfect. I wasn’t sure what I’d been wasting my time kissing in the past, but being lip-locked with Emma Scarlett kind of made my kissing girls from all around the world seem frivolous, amateur at best, when kissing could be this good.
It wasn’t like a first kiss because we knew each other too intimately for that. And it wasn’t like a last kiss because we’d only just begun. It was the kiss you spend your whole life waiting for. The kiss you wish would swallow you whole so you’d always be living it. This was the kiss of a lifetime, shared with a woman I’d spent a few lifetimes waiting for.
Only when her breathing became erratic from loss of oxygen did I pull myself back. It was a feat of willpower Tibetan monks would have given the thumbs up to.
“Wow,” she said, working to regulate her breathing. “Now that I know you’re a kissing god, let me apologize for the disappointment. I’m a bit out of practice,” she said, her cheeks burning beneath the rain trailing down them. “Kissing Ty was like making out with a snake—all tongue and no lips,” she said, doing an exaggerated shudder while I worked at keeping the flash of rage caged. “I tried to avoid it at all costs.”
“I have an easy solution for getting you back in practice, you know,” I said, sliding the sheets of wet hair behind her shoulders. I understood why those romantic comedy directors dug the kissing in the rain scene. It was tough to beat.
She tried giving me a stern look that ended up being too playful for me not to give her an example. So I showed her.
“Practice,” I whispered in the space between our mouths, rivers of rain polishing our lips.
And I showed her again.
“Tireless days and nights of practice,” I said a minute later, and this time my own breath was hitching in a way I’d never felt before. Another very Mortal, non-Immortal paramount—shortness of breath.
“I like the way you think,” she said, sucking a drop of rain from my bottom lip. I lost the feeling in my lower half, it was that paralyzing of a sensation. I wanted to rinse and repeat that feeling a couple dozen times a day.
And this time, she showed me. It didn’t seem like she needed much practice to get her “back-in-practice,” but I suppose since everyone passing by was giving us a good ten second rubber-neck, we were accelerating her through an intensive course.
A couple passed us and, even though they were no threat and a few car lengths away, I couldn’t shut my survival instincts off even though the woman in front of me was kissing the living daylights out of me. Now that I had something priceless, all my own, to love and protect, I wasn’t about to put the indestructible killer running through me up on a shelf.
“Isn’t that the guy who got his ass beat by that chick’s boyfriend?” one said to the other, like it was common knowledge.
“Yep,” the other replied. “Looks like he’s going to take another beating too.”
That conversation got me thinking about something other than the way Emma’s mouth felt against mine.
“Call him and end it,” I said, running my hands down her neck. “I don’t want any piece of him between us for another minute. End it.” It was a plea, not a demand, but it was also a need, not a want.
Fear, raw and rugged, coated her eyes before she threw that curtain over them. “I’ve been avoiding him all week,” she said in a small voice. “I think he’s got the picture.”
“Make it official.” I slid the phone out of my dripping suit pocket, holding it out for her. “Tell him I’m your man. Tell him I’m yours and you’re mine and if he comes within a football field of you, I won’t hesitate to send him back to hell with the rest of his demon brethren.”
She bit her lip, looking down.
“Be free of him for good.” I held my finger at the ready, only needing the numbers. I’d call him for her if that’s what she needed. Hell, it would have been a pleasure.
“Okay,” she breathed, nodding her head. “I’ll tell him tonight. Now,” she clarified, picking up her backpack to leave.
“If you think I’m letting you out of my buff, lonely, desperate arms any time tonight, you’re gravely mistaken,” I teased, pulling her back to me. “You can break up with him right here. No hands required.” I adjusted the phone beside her ear, and smiled.
She took a heavy breath, attempting to draw in something she was short on. “After six years of cowering to him, I’m going to face him now. For the first time, I’m going to stand up to him so the last thing he’ll remember of me was that I wasn’t afraid of him anymore.”
“Okay, Em, you’re freaking me out a bit here,” I said, rubbing slow circles into her arms. “All this talk about cowering and being afraid and standing up is painting a picture of Ty keeping you locked in a dungeon or something.”
I laughed an uneasy one, waiting for her to join in. When she didn’t, I went blank faced. “He didn’t. Did he?”
“No,” she answered, hugging me to her and, while I would never be one to put up a fight when Emma wanted me close, I got the distinct feeling this was an attempt to keep me from seeing what was happening on her face. “Of course not. This is just something I have to do in person. On my own,” she added, guessing what I was going to say next.
I clutched her to me, tucking her head beneath my chin. The girl had guts, but she was crazy if she thought I was going to let that happen.
“You must think Ty knocked something loose if you believe I’m going to let you go to that sadist alone. Hell to the absolute no. Over my dead body.”
Or, at least my dead
dead
body. I was bouncing on the balls of my feet at the thought, the tension was that intense. I wanted to outlet it into Ty’s snake kissing face.
Her tiny hands molded around my neck. “I need you to trust me on this,” she said, sounding calm, but looking anything but. “I don’t need to trade one possessive boyfriend for another.”
There it was, the nuke that decimated my resolve. How could I argue around that point? As much as I didn’t want to see it, as much as I wanted to excuse my alpha dominance on the situation, she was right. I was acting possessive, throwing around ultimatums and orders like I was the director of the scene of her life. Like I’d said, I didn’t want to conquer her. I wanted to conquer life with her at my side.
“Fine,” I said before I could change my mind. “But you keep your finger on my speed dial, and if he comes within a two foot radius of you, you call me. If that’s good with you,” I muttered when her eyebrow peaked.
“Quite good with me,” she replied, shouldering her bag and kissing the corner of my mouth as she turned to leave.
“Dammit, dammit, dammit,” I said under my breath, kicking the sidewalk because none of this felt right. Her walking away from me towards Ty, a man I wouldn’t trust if the world’s fate depended on it, to tell him she was breaking it off. Ty didn’t strike me as the kind of guy that took being dumped very well.
She spun around, continuing to walk away. “I heard that,” she said, wagging a finger at me. “Meet me back at my dorm in a couple hours. We’ll celebrate me cheating on my soon-to-be ex-boyfriend whose heart I’m off to break.”
“I’ll bring the champagne,” I hollered, pretending I’d nail-gunned my feet in a dozen different places to the sidewalk so I wouldn’t chase after her. So I wouldn’t become that possessive boyfriend she didn’t want. So I wouldn’t be there to protect her if she needed it.
My stomach turned, and then turned again. My instincts, my gut, was firing on all cylinders, ordering me to go with her. Screaming at me that something wasn’t right. However, I was no longer a one man operation, able to submit to whatever I was feeling at the time I was a half of a whole and, as novice as I was at relationships, I knew the quickest way to find yourself out of one was to go in the opposite direction of the other half. No matter how strong the bond was, it could only hold so long when its halves were fighting in the opposite directions.
I watched her go, having no faith in the decision I’d made to stay behind.
The first hour I didn’t move from my sentinel over the sidewalk. I bent my head into the rain, shielding the dry spot her body had formed against mine. But then the storm picked up, and the wind swept the rain from every angle, and no amount of shielding from me could keep her spot protected from the storm.
The second hour, I wound up sprinting around the courtyard, burning off nerves with high knees, jumps, and side-shuffling. To any passersby, I knew I looked like the man they’d heard referred to as the one who’d gone off the deep end, my suit plastered to my body, running football meets cross country drills in the middle of campus. At ten o’clock at night. In a rain storm.
I was on my fifty-seventh set of push-ups when my phone shrieked. Scrambling to get to it, I was on my feet and jogging towards Emma’s dorm.
“Emma?” I answered, feeling a fresh dose of nerves.
“Patrick,”—it was Julia, and Julia like I’d never heard her, terrified—“get yourself the hell over here. As fast as you can.” Her voice was shaking on the other side. “It’s Emma.”
That was all I needed to hear, my jog accelerated until the buildings were blurring sheets of dark brown and black as I swept by them. Rain drops hit me like pebbles from the inertia, the ground beneath me gave at every footstep, and the wind cut my face until, if I’d been any less Immortal, it would have stung.
I was outside her dorm in thirty seconds, ready to rip the door from its hinges when I found it locked.
Taking a quick surveillance of the surrounding area, finding it free of people as far as my preoccupied mind could tell, I chanced it.
“Damn it all to hell,” I said, going from banging at the front door of the building to banging on Emma and Julia’s door.
A couple students milling out of the bathrooms took a double take, but I really didn’t give a rat’s arse if they saw me appear from nowhere. Even in their most wild of dreams wouldn’t they devise the truth.
“Julia!” I shouted, hammering on the door. “Emma? Let me in.” I was about to take this door from its hinges too when I heard someone scurry across the floor as the lock turned over.
I threw the door open and took in the scene like I’d found myself in my own personal nightmare. The worst kind of one. The one your parents told you wasn’t real and was just a figment of your imagination. I wanted to believe that now, that this wasn’t real. That this was a figment of my imagination.
But blood had never run with such precision down someone’s face in my nightmares the way it was on Emma’s.
“What the hell happened?” I whispered, my words barely choking their way out. Shutting the door, I rushed to Emma. She was draped in a white sheet, curled in a ball on top of her bed. Julia’s hands appeared between us, tucking the sheet tighter around her.
“I don’t know,” she answered, her body trembling like her voice was. “She just showed up here like this a couple minutes ago. She wouldn’t tell me what happened. I wanted to call the cops or 911 or something, but the only thing she said to me was to call you.” Julia grabbed the black comforter from her bed and parachuted it over Emma. “That’s all I know.”
“Emma?” I whispered, lowering my head until my eyes were at her level. But her eyes didn’t resemble eyes anymore. Both were so swollen shut they looked like they were plums about to explode. Bright red bruises were splattered over her face like a road map. Blood, both fresh and dried, matted the entirety of her hair, along with the majority of her neck and face. And this was just the damage sustained from neck-up.
I didn’t have the heart to pull the sheet back to inspect the rest of it yet. Although I knew I had to. It was now my job to do so.
“Emma?” I whispered again, having to bite my hand so I didn’t burst into tears or bust open the room.
One corner of her mouth lifted before sagging back into place. “Hi, handsome,” she replied, her voice a ragged whisper.
I bit my hand harder, but it didn’t stop a tear from leaking its way free. I pressed a soft kiss into her mouth, my salty tear mixing with her metallic blood. I had to share this gentle peace with her before I asked my next question. Before I turned into a merciless angel of death.
“Ty?” I said, sneering the word like it was poison.
Her head made the smallest recognition. “Ty,” she answered.
Running one hand down her face, my hand came away coated in red. I could have made an impression on paper of my handprint dipped in Emma’s blood.
Red was what I was coated in, red was what I saw, red was what I felt.
Rage was what I became.
“I’m going to kill him,” I said, my eyes falling on just the thing I needed. Grabbing the baseball bat from beneath Julia’s bed, I spun it in the air, catching it in the other hand. “He’s a dead man.”
A rapping came at the door as I was preparing to twist it open with only one thing on my mind. Revenge.
A trio of Scarlett brothers smashed in the doorway, their faces ranging from concerned to disturbed.
“Someone told us they saw Emma stumbling into the building looking like she’d been hit by a car,” Tex said, studying me in my enraged stupor, white knuckles gripping a baseball bat with both hands.
Stepping aside, I made room for them to pass. “Take a look at what your best buddy is capable of!” I shouted, aiming some of my anger at them for letting a monster like Ty slip under their radar.
They stood like a trio of statues beside Emma’s bed, looking like they were trying to confirm the battered woman in front of them was their little sister.
“Did any of you know about this? Did any of you know he was capable of this?” My voice shook with my rage.
“Excuse me?” Dallas said, getting in my face. “What did you say there, Babe Ruth?” He shoved his chest against mine, his anger jacking up to my level. “How do we know it wasn’t you who beat our sister all to hell with the butt end of your Louisville Slugger?”
That wasn’t the smartest thing to say to a man who was a hair away from snapping. I shoved him back into his brothers to give my arm some leverage to land a powerful punch. At the same time a black velvet covered pair of arms wrestled around me, two pairs of brother arms wrapped around Dallas.
“Patrick, knock it off,” Julia yelled, trying to hold a ticking time bomb back. “Come on, Emma doesn’t need this shit right now.”
“Stop, you guys,” Emma’s hoarse voice carried above the chaos of the room. “Don’t fight.”
I squeezed my eyes closed, trying to let her words and my better judgment restore my willpower to refrain from throwing Dallas out the window.
“Shame on you,” I said, wondering if my nostrils were billowing smoke. “Shame on you,” I repeated, figuring if once made him grimace, twice would really bring the point home.
I was not the enemy. Their childhood friend, their teammate, their drinking buddy, the monster they’d unknowingly sacrificed their sister to was the enemy. “And the bat is going to come in handy when I get close enough to Ty to bash his brains out his ear.”
The fight left Dallas when Emma’s blood caked hand weaved into his. “It’s all right, Dal.”
“Like hell it’s all right,” I spat, about to untangle Julia’s arms from me if she didn’t soon. My fight with Dallas was done, my fight with Ty would be done once I ensured he’d never be able to lift a hand to another woman again.
“What happened, Em?” Dallas asked, covering her hand with both of his as he kneeled beside her bed.
“Ty happened,” she answered, her shoulder lifting like it was just another day. And that’s when a proverbial light switch clicked on.
“He’s done this before,” I stated, wishing I could have asked it with an inflection, but I already knew.
Emma only nodded her head.
I wanted to dry heave into the closest garbage can. I wanted to scream until I shattered the windows. I wanted to have a moment of weakness, but Emma needed me to be strong. That was the only thing that kept me from tearing myself apart.
“How many times?” Austin asked, unable to look at Emma, and I guessed it had a lot to do with him being the closest brother to Ty.
“So many times I lost count,” Emma said, glancing at me. Looking at me like she was waiting for me to run away. Looking at me like she expected me to see a different person bleeding before me on her bed.
The only person I saw was the girl I loved, and the girl I’d failed to protect. Something I was about to rectify shortly. In fact, I couldn’t stay in this room another second with the broken girl in front of me until I broke the body of the one who’d done the breaking.
“You guys get her to the hospital to get checked out,” I ordered, shoving them aside as I made for the door. “I’ve got some unfinished business with a dead man.”
Tex’s hand curled around the end of the bat. “Sorry, boy, but that beating is going to be ours. He beat our sister. He betrayed us. The blood on that bat belongs to us.”
Tex had remained scary calm the entire time, and I now understood why. His calculating calm had formulated a plan while Dallas and Austin were letting their anger and betrayal drive them.
“This is my fight,” I said, gripping the bat tightly.
“This one isn’t. Emma’s been our sister for twenty years, she’s been your girl for twenty seconds,” Tex argued in his scary calm voice.
“Patrick,” Emma called out, her hand slipping from Dallas’s in my direction, “stay with me. Don’t do this. Don’t repay blood with blood.”
I stared at her outstretched hand for a solid ten seconds, and then I looked at the cold metal my hands were wound around. What were they still doing there when her warm hand was waiting for me?
“Fine,” I said, relinquishing the bat to Tex. “Take a swing at his balls compliments of me.” My hand found Emma’s and, somehow, everything felt right in the midst of everything being wrong.
“I’ll take two,” Tex said, shouldering the bat. “One for you and one for Emma.” Opening the door, he paused, looking behind him. “Anytime you girls are ready. We’ve got some ass to kick.”
Dallas pressed a kiss into Emma’s forehead, leaving an imprint of lips in the drying blood.
“Don’t go,” Emma said, wincing as she tried to prop herself up on an elbow. “It’s not worth it.”
“Yes,
you
”—Tex looked her hard in the eye—“are worth it. I didn’t watch a sorry excuse for a dad beat our mom to stand by and do nothing when the same thing happened to my little sister.”
“Don’t,” Emma whispered.
“Sorry, Em,” Tex said, shuffling the other two out the door. “I’m not the forgive and forget kind of guy. I’m the eye for an eye kind of guy,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “And it’s time Ty Steel felt my wrath.”
The door slammed closed, locking an overwhelmed Julia, an anxious Emma, and me—and my bloody array of emotions that were so extreme they had yet to be named—away. “They’re going to ruin everything,” Emma said, looking at the door. “Their scholarships, their spots on the football team, their whole futures.”
“No, they’re not,” I replied, trying to help her as she rolled back down onto the mattress. “They’re going to ruin Ty. Their futures and everything else will be waiting for them tomorrow morning.” Her split open brows moved into a familiar arch. “Trust me,” I added.
Her head bobbed once. I took that as an affirmation she believed me.
“Okay, Em, we need to get you checked out to see if you need any stitches or see if anything’s broken.” In my opinion, heralding from a multitude of doctors, a couple gashes above her eyebrows needed at least a few stitches, and I’d still been too scared to look below the neck. “Can you move or should I call an ambulance?”
“No,” she said, trying to sit up again.
I held her down until I realized the significance of the gesture. Removing my hands braced over her shoulders, I realized how delicate I’d have to be about these kinds of situations. How much more sensitive a woman who’d seen the backside of a man’s hand would be to any shows of dominance, physical or emotional. Delicacy was something I wasn’t trained in, but I was certain it was something I could learn.
She stayed down though, managing to form a smile of acknowledgment with her swollen lips. The lips I’d kissed like there was no tomorrow were now doubled in size on the top and tripled on the bottom, where a gaping wound split it down the center.
I had to curl my fingers deep into her mattress to keep from punching a hole in the wall.
“I don’t want to go to a hospital. I don’t want to go anywhere,” she said, closing her eyes. “My night’s been eventful enough without adding a trip to the emergency room to it.”
I shook my head, not able to cave to her when it was her life we were talking about.
“Please,” she said, her voice a whimper. “I can’t go there. I can’t roll in that place looking the same way my mom did the last time I visited the ER.”
I silently cursed. What could I say to that? Even if she was bleeding from every pore, I’d have a tough time forcing her to go when she threw that at me.
“You need to get checked out, Em,” was all I could manage, but if she said no again, I was up a creek.
“Jules?” Emma croaked at her friend, who was still staring at the door like she was expecting it to burst open again. “Do you think your dad would be willing to make a home—
dorm
—visit?”
Looking relieved to be given something to do, Julia snatched her phone off the desk, biting her mangled nails as the phone rang.
“Dad?” she said. “I need you to get out of bed and get to my dorm ASAP. Emma’s hurt and she won’t go to a hospital. Will you come?” Julia said, sounding like a formality because she knew he would. That’s what a father was meant to be, someone his daughter would never have to wonder if he was going to come when she needed him.
Julia nodded. “See you soon. Love you, too,” she added, glancing our way as she tossed the phone back across the desk. “He’ll be here as soon as he can, but he’s way up in San Fran, so it will take him awhile to get here.”