“I love you more than anything,” she murmured back, letting those fingers trace his face, nothing but fire to his body.
He slipped the little straps of her dress from her shoulders, kissed her softly.
Carefully.
As carefully as he loved her.
They slowly undressed each other. Like both of them were memorizing every second.
He watched her through the shadows as her eyes went wide and her lips parted. As she whimpered his name and he groaned hers.
He loved her in the shadows.
With the howl of the ghosts whipping around them. With the promise of what this place might be one day.
After, he held her tenderly, Faith snuggled up in the crook of his arm, her head on his shoulder as she played her fingers across his bare stomach. “Are you goin’ to marry me, Jace?”
“The second you’ll let me.”
He could feel the force of her smile against the thrumming beat of his heart.
“How many babies are we goin’ to have?” she all but whispered, her mind racing into the future. He wanted to be right there, catch up, pray he could maybe be the father he’d never had.
“How many do you want?”
“Two,” she immediately said. “A boy and girl. Bailey and Benton.”
Jace laughed lightly, leaning up to kiss the top of her head. “You just want to add them to all those B’s.”
She was grinning wide when she looked up at him. “Oh, come on, Jace, this has to happen,” she teased so quietly, with so much love, parroting his words from the beginning of the summer.
Somehow that seemed so long ago.
“It does have to happen,” he whispered.
Like his own prayer.
He had to find a way to make this happen. Find a way to get himself out of the scary shit he’d somehow fallen into.
They stayed like that for the longest time, Jace just holding her and not wanting to let go before he finally sighed. “We should get you home.”
“I want to stay right here. Forever.”
“Me, too. Someday. Someday,” he promised.
They dressed and he stuffed the blanket back into his pack, held tight to her hand as he led her down the stairs and back to the window where they’d slipped inside.
He stepped out first, reaching back into help Faith through, when a streak of light hit him on the side of the face.
The blinding glare of a flashlight. “Freeze, right there.”
Jace froze, every inch of him going cold.
Jace sat at the cold metal chair at the cold metal table, cold cuffs around his wrists. He pressed his palms to his face, shook his head again. “I told you, it’s not mine.”
The sheriff frowned in disbelief. “Really? It was in the bottom of your bag.”
Jace pressed his eyes tighter, trying to believe. To believe that he could somehow get out of this. “It’s not mine,” he begged.
He’d already gotten rid of everything Steven had forced on him earlier that day.
Three goddamned stops where his heart had been in his throat, dread coating his skin in a slick of sweat as he’d slinked into three rotten apartments.
“Then who’s is it?”
Ian’s or Joseph’s. Ian’s or Joseph’s.
It’d had to be.
Somehow . . . somehow one of them had gotten wrapped up in this mess, too.
Besides, Steven had been giving him large, wrapped bundles. What they’d found in his backpack were little packets of coke already ready to sell on the street.
“I don’t know,” he said.
The sheriff laughed. As cold as the rest of the room. “Seems to me that you’ve got a problem. You had enough coke in there that we have you on intent to distribute. Not to mention the breaking and entering with that girl.”
That girl.
That girl.
She was the only thing he cared about right then. Her and his brother and Joseph.
Oh, God.
What was he going to do?
The problem was that Jace knew there was no getting himself out of this.
Not without getting his brother or cousin in trouble.
That, or he could give Steven’s name, which would more than likely do nothing but get Jace killed.
Either him or Ian and Joseph.
That was not a result he could contemplate.
And there was no chance he could talk his way out of the breaking and entering.
There was no way he was letting Faith take the fall for that, and he knew she was in the next room over, trying to do exactly that.
Convince them that it was her fault.
Her idea.
Jace swallowed hard, searched inside himself for courage, for the determination to do whatever it took to protect his brother and his cousin.
To protect Faith.
He lifted his head and looked the officer head on. “I’ll plead whatever you want. I just need two things from you.”
“I need to talk to you.”
Joseph immediately shot to his feet when Jace banged into the trailer.
Jace had sent Ian to run an errand for their mother, telling him he needed him to do him the favor. Really, he’d just wanted Ian out of the house so he could talk with Joseph in private.
Guilt was written across Joseph like it was written in a book, all mixed up with the hostility that continued to bleed from him.
Jace wanted to take it out on him. Demand a confession. Make Joseph give him confirmation that either he or Ian had been the ones who’d stuffed those drugs in Jace’s backpack, surely finding the quickest place to hide it when Jace had come out of his room.
He’d bet a million bucks Steven had shown up and coerced one of them into it, just the same as he’d done to Jace. The threat too great to resist.
How could Jace blame either Ian or Joseph for the same thing that he’d cowarded to? It wasn’t as if it was a negligible risk.
No question, Steven would stand on his word.
None of these guys were to be toyed with.
So instead of railing on Joseph, Jace swallowed down all his anger that he felt toward the world, and he made a plea. “I know things have been weird between us lately, and I know you’re younger than Ian, but I need you to step up. Take care of him the way I’ve been taking care of you.”
Jace sucked in the heated air. Feeling as if he were being consumed.
Incinerated.
Then he begged, “I don’t know what either of you have gotten into, but I need you to promise me, Joseph, promise me, whatever it is, it ends now. Or you’re going to end up just like me. Maybe worse.”
Joseph stared at him. Appearing dumbfounded. Maybe shocked. “You want me to take care of your brother?”
Grief clawed at his throat. “And Faith. Watch out for Faith. You and Ian have to promise not to tell her that I’m getting sent away. She’ll be devastated. Riddled with guilt. Let her think I left her. That’s all I’m asking of you. Here’s the key to the little safe I have under my bed. It’s all the money I’ve saved working at the store. Can I trust you to do this?”
Joseph took the key and rolled it around his fingers. “Of course, you can trust me.”
Rays of blinding light streaked through the moss-covered branches that stretched across the old dirt road like a living canopy.
It was a road they’d walked together what seemed a thousand times.
Their secret spot.
Their sacred spot.
He stared at her from where he stood five feet away.
His hands stuffed in the pockets of his ripped jeans, rocking with the guilt and the grief, trying to keep from rushing her. Holding her.
“I don’t care what anyone thinks.”
The pleas poured from her mouth, every single one like a knife driven right into his heart.
“I don’t know what kind of trouble we’re in. The only thing that matters to me is that you’re standing right here, in front of me.”
Sadness rippled through her features. The only thing he wanted was to reach out. Take it away. Promise her that it would all be okay.
But it wouldn’t be.
He had to embrace his circumstances.
He was going to prison.
He had to cut himself off from her. He couldn’t ask her to wait. He knew she would.
By doing it this way, he was giving her a choice.
Like a caged bird, he was letting her go.