Skeletons of Us (Unquiet Mind Book 2) (46 page)

Killian found purchase on his motor skills the moment she spoke. Not his voice, that was still swallowed with the depth of emotion that gesture meant to him. Not that he needed his voice to fuck his girl into next year. He left the boots on too.

“Can I take the blindfold off yet?” Lexie whined, jerking him out of the past. The memory had his cock hard as a rock.

His hand brushed against the spot where his name was as he jostled her in order to open a door.

“Patience is a virtue, freckles,” he murmured against her hair.

“So is chastity, and you don’t seem to be too keen on helping me to achieve that,” she shot back.

Killian chuckled and kissed her head. He ascended some steps then set her carefully on the wooden floor. He paused a moment to take her in—her curls tumbling down her back, her face flushed with annoyance, and her rosebud lips pursed in frustration. The sprinkling of freckles across her nose were more prominent with the sunlight dancing off them.

“You’re the most beautiful thing in the world, baby,” he murmured, untying the blindfold obscuring her eyes from him.

“Compliments will not mute my annoyance,” she snapped, blinking rapidly as she got her vision back.

Then she froze. Her eyes widened and she took in where they were, the view in front of her. Silently, she turned around, taking in the room.

Killian had finally gotten their house done, not letting Lexie know anything about it. He thought she’d be pissed about this; chicks were weird about decorating and all that shit.

Not his Lexie.

She’d smiled at him and kissed him lightly when he’d told her she was having no part in it. “It doesn’t matter what’s around me. As long as you’re beside me, I’ll be happy.”

Plus, she’d been too busy to even get down to Amber the past year. They’d only just gotten back from the world tour a couple of months ago, and she went straight into recording from there. Their life was full to the brim.

So this was the first time she was back in Amber in a year. The first time she was standing in the home he had built for them on their spot overlooking the ocean. They were in the living room, the biggest room in the house. It was sunken and they were standing on a platform he’d had made especially. Floor-to-ceiling windows showed the ocean beyond and the sun creeping closer to the horizon. There was a huge bookcase on one side of the alcove and a plush chair beside the bookcase facing the sunlight. On the other side was a record player, a guitar, and stacks of records. A first edition Bob Dylan record was front and center.

This was Lexie’s place.

The rest of the house had a lot of input from Mia. Most of the aesthetic shit spoke to Lexie’s hippy taste. The space was covered with bright rugs and cushions, and photos of them decorated every surface. This was the most important part of the entire house—second to the master bedroom of course, which had the same floor-to-ceiling windows and a bed facing the waves.

“Kill,” Lexie choked out, tears tumbling down her face.

Killian couldn’t stop himself. He yanked her flush to his body, brushing the tears from her freckled cheeks. “I know I said I didn’t need four walls to make a sanctuary. Only you,” he murmured. “That’s still true, will be till the day I die, but I want these four walls to be your sanctuary. To be our home. To be our roots. You can still have your wings and your roots. You can have it all, baby. I’ll make sure of that.”

I blinked at Killian’s words, at the pure beauty in front of me. Not the amazing house he’d built for us—that was wonderful, sure—but the beauty was what was in his eyes. What I’d give every single one of my possessions for. What was worth everything.

I sucked in a breath.

“Our first concert—not our first gig, our first concert—it was like some kind of circus nightmare. It seemed like the whole night was a series of fluorescent images that were just a little too bright. A little too gritty. Not glamorous enough.” I paused. “It wasn’t glamorous. Sure, we were playing an iconic venue, opening for a famous band, but it wasn’t like the movies. It was chaos.” I thought back to stumbling out of a dressing room that I was pretty sure was a repurposed broom closet. I had almost taken a header when a person carrying a jumble of equipment sent me flying. I caught myself just in time to hurtle into an argument between the main singer and the headlining band about cocaine. I had quickly hurried away and watched as another member of another band causally got a blow job in a semi-dark corner. I had hoisted my guitar up and, thankfully, ran into my boys.

“Wyatt was vomiting in the men’s room. Sam was pacing at the edge of the stage, muttering to himself about not remembering how to hold drumsticks properly. Noah had this wild look in his eyes and downed three beers in about one minute. It was frantic. Loud. Deafening. Not just literally, but figuratively. The expectation. The fear. This was our dream coming true. Our shot. And we all knew it could go one of two ways.”

Killian’s eyes twinkled. “With you as the lead singer, only one way it could have gone.” He didn’t seem worried at the fact this conversation come out of nowhere.

I shook my head. “When you’re handed your dream on a platter, do you take it with confidence or juggle it in shaking hands while you think of ways you can shatter it?”

The twinkling was gone and Killian stiffened.

I disregarded this. “That’s what was happening. I saw it all. I heard it all. I honestly thought my skull might explode with the noise, both outside and inside it. The doubt.” I paused, and of its own volition, my body stepped closer to him. “You know what I did?” My voice was little more than a whisper now. “How I chased away the noise? I broke the one rule, that before and after, that I never broke. I thought of you.”

Killian froze.

“I thought of you turning up on my doorstep the day I was freaking out about my gig. About how you made me laugh. About your unwavering belief in me. About the way you somehow made me believe in myself. And that was it. I got silence. I could take that platter of dreams on steady hands.”

“Lexie—” Killian started to say.

I held up a hand to communicate that I wasn’t finished. “That’s what I thought my dream was. That’s the only dream I thought I could have. Living a life for my music and nothing else.” I stroked Killian’s face. “Even though I didn’t know it at the time, you gave me my dream, sacrificed everything to give me that. Now, right here, you’ve given me my dream. My sanctuary. It’s you. Always,” I whispered.

Killian let out a growl then claimed my mouth.

He’d already claimed my soul when I was sixteen.

TWO MONTHS LATER

“This is payback, isn’t it?” Killian asked, amused.

I directed his large body with difficulty; his muscles just kept growing. Even though he wasn’t fighting anymore, thank God, he trained every single freaking day. He also trained in the ring with me, though that rapidly turned from training to something else entirely. Luckily, we hired out the entire gym for these “training” sessions. Killian said it was because he didn’t want “any fucker to see my girl in those outfits that would make a priest’s dick hard.” I thought it was because he wanted to fuck me in the ring.

Not that I complained.

“This may or may not be inspired by the way you revealed our home to me,” I answered, directing him into the room in that very home, one I’d been working on for two days straight while he was in L.A. doing club stuff. I was home, hanging out with Mom and my brothers, writing, and taking a break from L.A. It was still home base for now, though we spent as much time as we could in our Amber house. It was more peaceful here, and we could just be. The last two days had been the longest we’d spent apart. Killian had already pounced on me as soon as he’d walked through the door, fucking me against the front door before I could even say hello.

Again, not that I complained.

But I had a plan, so after that furious lovemaking and then another round in bed, I dragged him up, making him put sweats on so I wouldn’t be distracted, and blindfolded him. The sweats didn’t help at all. They were slung low on his hips and he was shirtless, his entire muscled torso on display. Covered in ink and pure male goodness, he was a work of art. It took effort not to drool over my husband, but I managed it.

“You gonna take it off anytime soon?” he asked, yanking me to him. “’Cause I haven’t seen my wife in two days, and I’m not a fan of not being able to feast my eyes on her.”

I smiled and reached up, running my hands through his shoulder-length hair. Then I reached to untie the blindfold. It fell to the floor at our feet.

Killian’s mouth was turned up in a grin, and his ice blue eyes twinkled with amusement and heat for the first second. Then they took in the surrounding room and they changed. Deepened. His entire body froze.

He sank to his knees, his head resting on my belly. “You’re fuckin’ pregnant with my kid?” he growled.

I rested my hands in his hair and nodded.

I found out two days ago, and even though it was most likely way too early for this, I went a little crazy. Correction, my mother went a little crazy and demanded we do a big gesture to announce my condition to Killian—that being hiring an army of decorators to convert our spare bedroom into a nursery. As we didn’t know the sex, it was decorated in earth tones and gender neutral.

“Yeah, I’m having a baby. Yours. Of course,” I teased.

Killian didn’t smile, just stared at my still-flat belly in awe. He pushed my tee up and kissed the tattoo with his name on it. Very slowly, he stood.

I might have lost my footing with the look in his eyes, had his hands not been firmly resting on my hips.

“Don’t know what to do with this life, the one that keeps givin’ me the most beautiful gifts a man could ever hold in his hands,” he growled. “You just made me the happiest motherfucker on the planet earth, freckles. Live the rest of my life tasting the sweetness of this moment.”

And then he kissed me, and I got to taste the sweetness too.

Suffice to say, it was pretty darn sweet.

Seven months later, when Ava Laurie Decesare was born, it got even sweeter.