I lifted my hand and sucked my fingers into my mouth.
All fucking woman on the tip of my tongue.
“One last taste.” It was a warning and a growl, and Grace was watching me as the shock of what I’d just done to her came crashing down.
She tried to gather herself, drawing in a bunch of breaths as she quickly fumbled to readjust her clothes. “I . . . I . . .” She stuttered, looking everywhere, maybe for an escape. “I need—”
I grabbed her by the chin, running the thumb I’d just had on her body across her lip.
She emitted a tiny groan when I dipped it inside and pressed it to her tongue.
“Shh,” I told her. “I won’t do that again. I just . . . needed to touch you one last time.”
She could barely nod, but those eyes went soft in a sad sort of surrender, the words choked when they floated out in the inch of space that separated us. “You could wreck me, Ian Jacobs.”
I brushed my fingers through her hair. “Too late, Angel Girl. I think it’s you who’s already wrecked me.”
Twenty-Two
Grace
“Jammies!” Sophie grinned her sweet, sweet smile as I pulled her nightgown over her head, her snow-white hair sticking up with static electricity as I situated it over her tiny body. She pressed her hands to her chubby belly and jumped, giggling as if it were the funniest thing in the world.
I poked her belly where she was holding it.
“Are these Sophie’s favorite pajamas?” I asked her, voice twisted in close to a song.
“Pink horsie!” She giggled again, the sweetness that rolled from her expanding my heart.
So big it sometimes made it hard to breathe.
Mallory shook her head from where she was on the floor dragging our storybook out from under her bed. “It’s not a pink horse, Silly Sophie. It’s a unicorn. Unicorns are magic and horses have no magic and you’ve got to know the difference because it’s a big one.”
Sophie giggled again and galloped around the small room. “Horsie!”
Mallory sighed and held her head in both of her hands, looking at me as if she were an adult and I would totally understand. “Hopeless.”
I tried not to laugh, but there was no stopping it. Not after I’d carried around so many uncertainties throughout the day.
My meeting with Ian had gone a direction I hadn’t anticipated.
A direction we both knew it couldn’t.
And still, it seemed as if there were no chance of stopping it. The overpowering connection that wrapped us in chains every time we were in the other’s space.
The man felt so vitally important. As if my heart remembered how to fully beat when he was there, his touch safety and sanctuary and fire, the feelings he evoked in me too conflicted and at odds for my mind to make sense of it all.
The only thing I knew was that we needed him.
All of us.
My children most.
I knew he’d been put in my world for a reason. For a purpose. And that wasn’t for me to fall in love with him, even though I could feel pieces of myself continuing to slip, slivers carved away and given to him with every moment that passed.
Thomas came into the room, dressed in sweat pants and his hair wet from his shower.
“Did you brush your teeth?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes.
At least there was that.
“I’m not a baby, Mom.”
“I know you aren’t a baby. But you’re my child, so that means I’m going to ask you if you brushed your teeth.”
He huffed an irritated sound as he went to sit at the edge of his twin bed. “You’ll probably still be asking me when I’m thirteen.”
“Thirteen,” I gasped, as if what he said was an atrocity. From where I’d been on the floor, I scrambled for him on my hands and knees. I started tickling his sides. “Thirteen? I’ll be asking you if you brushed your teeth when you’re thirty!”
He tried not to laugh, but then he rolled onto his back on his bed, trying to fight me and cracking up at the same time. “Stop it, Mom. You’re crazy. I’m . . . I’m going to move away and change my name and my number, and you can never ask me if I brushed my teeth again.”
I tickled him harder. “And I will find you. You can’t get away from me!”
Sophie and Mallory jumped up and down.
“Get him, Mommy!” Mallory shouted.
“Get him, get him!” Sophie parroted, clapping her little hands and laughing more.
“You’ll never catch me,” Thomas shouted, wiggling and laughing.
“You’re the crazy one, Thomas! We got the magic and we will find you.” Mallory climbed onto his bed, shouting it at his face where she was on her knees looking down at him from over his head.
It was almost too much.
The way love and adoration and devotion poured free.
Taking everything over.
My voice softened to wistfulness, and I stopped tickling my son so I could run a hand over his damp hair. “I will always find you. No matter where you go. All of you.”
It was a promise.
A promise that we would all be together. No matter what that took.
Thomas sobered, and Mallory climbed off his bed and opened our picture book, wanting to continue our story the way we did each night.
“What’s this?” Mallory asked, waving a piece of paper in the air that she’d found pressed between the pages.
The smile I was wearing slid off my face, horror taking its place.
Heart crumbling.
Spirit failing.
Oh God.
My trembling fingers ran over it.
It was a crude image of the maze near the castle.
But that was where the similarities of our story ended.
Because the prince and princesses and the handmaiden had been slain, the king standing over them holding a knife that dripped with blood.
A lump locked in my throat. I looked at my son who was now hunched over on the side of his bed, hanging his head in shame.
“Thomas,” I whispered, touching his knee and urging him to look at me. “What is this?”
Tears filled his eyes. “What if there isn’t really magic? What if this is the way our story ends?”
“I won’t ever let anyone hurt you. Do you think—”
He shook his head, and frustration bled out in his voice. “What if we don’t get to leave? What if we have to stay there forever?”
And I realized this drawing was his own metaphor. The idea that Reed held the ultimate power.
“Nuh-uh, no way, we got a hero now and we don’t have nothing to worry about because he’s going to save us and we’re going to get free and fly away on our unicorns. Ian-Zian the Great to the rescue!”
Mallory was pointing at the picture she’d had me help her draw last night after Ian had left. When he’d walked out of our house and left it brimming with hope.
I should have known it would be my worrying little man who would have all the questions. The one who’d toss in his sleep and contemplate the way everything could go bad.
I took his hand and pulled him off his bed. I didn’t care that he was nine, and he thought he needed to be a man. I tucked him close to my chest, held him even harder. Sophie hopped over and climbed into my other arm, and Mallory threw herself onto my back, wrapping her thin arms around all of us.
I drew them all as close as I could get them, the words emphatic as I let the promises permeate the room. “I won’t let you go. I won’t let any of you go. You are my babies. You are my life. You are the reason I live. The reason I breathe. And I will live every breath that I have for you.”
It didn’t matter what the circumstances were or how powerful Reed might be.
I had to have faith that everything would turn out right.
We belonged together, and there was no power in this world that could change that.
Especially when we had our hero fighting for us.
Twenty-Three
Ian
“What the fuck is this?” Lawrence tossed the newspaper onto his desk.
I wanted to tell him that no one still unwrapped a newspaper and read that shit, but the fact this was splashed all over the online news media and was getting special broadcast time on about every news channel in the state made the point moot.