A gush of a plea whispered from my mouth, and I was pressing back, begging for more, the front of my body writhing against the wood.
“You’re so sexy. So damned sexy, Faith. Underneath all that sweetness, you are the fucking most devastating thing I’ve ever seen. Did you think of me? Did you picture me? Owning you this way?”
Oh, God, and I couldn’t take it, his words and his assault, and that feeling that was gathering tighter. Getting closer and closer.
“Please,” I whimpered, needing him to put me out of my misery.
“What do you need?”
“You. I need you, Jace.”
Instantly, my body was jerked up, my back to the strength of his straining chest, his fucks so deep as he held me up with one arm across my chest, the other winding around and touching me.
Jace watched me through the mirror. Him stroking my clit, my body stretched out across him, his hand cupping one breast, thumb flicking at that sensitive spot, too.
He was everywhere.
Driving me wild.
His expression devout.
His thrusts relentless.
Hard.
Fast.
Deep.
Taking all of me.
Giving me everything. The way he promised me he would.
Pleasure glowed, a shimmer in the periphery. He touched and flicked at that ball of need, every stroke sending me higher.
Spinning and tightening and twisting until there was no other place I could go.
Pleasure cracked wide open, brilliant in the night. The orgasm ripping through me was bigger than anything I’d ever felt.
Infiltrating, invading, stealing every part of me.
And I could feel it.
Jace weaving his way in. Deeper and stronger. Those fragile seams of healing he’d made growing thicker. Binding the pieces back together.
I was just praying Jace would sew himself right there in the middle.
Stay. Stay. Stay.
Jace increased his pace as I was crying out his name, and he was holding me tight, angling his body as he rocked into me again and again.
So big.
Pushing deeper.
Owning me.
His breaths came short, jagged and hard, and then he was trying to stifle the shout of my name as he clenched down on me so tightly I could feel every twitch and ripple of his body.
The pulse of him as he shook and poured into me.
And we were there together. Floating through that dark, dark night. Me and this beautiful boy.
My beast with the brightest heart.
So bright I wanted to reach out and hold on to him forever.
“Oh, shit . . . fuck . . . Faith. Perfect. Perfect,” he rambled at my skin.
He was gasping for breath where his mouth was pressed into my neck, my head canted to the side. Then he settled me onto my feet, steadying me when I nearly slumped to the floor.
Limbs spent.
Energy gone.
And he held me up, turning me around, and picking me up. There was no better place than the safety of Jace’s arms.
He carried me to the bed and sat me on the edge of it. Carefully, he wrapped the towel around me, every touch tender as he kept looking up at me as if he’d just broken me, glancing at me often as he pulled back on his pants.
Finally, he came to kneel in front of me.
My heart gave a nervous kick. “What’s wrong?”
His lips pursed. “I’m sorry for that. I needed to touch you one more time before this night ends.”
“Loving me like that does not require an apology. You don’t have to apologize to me for needing me.”
He brushed back the hair matted at the side of my head. “Yes, Faith, I do. I have so much to apologize for.”
I searched his face, trying to make sense of the sudden shift in his mood.
Not sudden, I realized. The man had been spun up since he’d received that phone call.
On edge.
Desperate.
It was the shift in me that I couldn’t keep up with.
The sheer bliss that had beat through every cell in my body—that heat and devotion that rushed from him with the stark intensity of what we’d just shared—and the sinking fear I could feel settling into its place.
“Is this about what Mack told you on the phone? About the lead they got?”
He gave a tight nod, and he reached out a trembling hand and toyed with the end of my hair. “They found something . . . an office downtown that Joseph owned. One that was pretty much hidden.”
He paused before he said, “It was tied to a well-known drug trafficker . . . a man who was found dead about six months before Joseph was killed. That building . . . it should be shut down. Vacant. And there’s evidence of illegal activity. People moving stuff in and out.”
I didn’t know if the news delivered relief or another punch to the gut.
“What kind of illegal activity?” I chanced, my eyes dropping toward the ground, not wanting to know.
“Drugs. Smuggling. It was coming in on the ships and being packed for the streets. Gambling on top of it.”
My spirit moaned.
Oh God.
How could he? How could he?
Why would he do something so horrible?
“Does Mack know how long he was doin’ it?”
A stir of dread and unease whipped through the room, and Jace paused before he took me by the chin, forcing me to look at him. “He’d been involved for a long, long time.”
I didn’t want to hold his eyes, but there was something in them that I couldn’t look away from.
Guilt.
Remorse.
“How long?”
“Faith,” he murmured, so carefully, with so much regret, that I felt it like a strike.
“No, Jace. Don’t do that. Tell me how long.”
“Since right after I left. Probably longer. I’ve known since I got out of prison, Faith.”
A frenzy screamed through my chest. Betrayal and hate and remnants of that love.
Confusion, too.
So much confusion.
“When I got arrested,” he hedged.
I blinked at him, the knot in my throat so big I felt as if I were being strangled.
“There was cocaine in my bag, Faith.”
Pain blossomed across my body. I might as well have been being beaten.
Blow after blow.
“No.” My head shook.
“It wasn’t mine. I thought it was Ian’s. So, I took the fall for it. I was scared that, if I denied it, Ian would end up in jail or dead, and I would rather die than see that happen to him.”
Jace scraped a palm over his face, a rigid guilt bunching up his shoulders as he looked at the floor for a beat. “I have to tell you something, Faith.”
Dread flooded my senses. “What?”
“I . . . that guy . . . Steven? Do you remember me telling you about him? The guy I got arrested for assaulting?”
My nod was shaky. “Yes. He’s the one you were protectin’ Ian from. How could I forget that?”
Jace’s expression twisted in shame. “He forced me into moving stuff for him. That night, the coke that was in my bag? It wasn’t mine. But I had been doing deliveries for him. Picking up packages at the dock, running them across town to different stash houses. I got the feeling he really didn’t need me to do it for him. He was only using it as a way to get me under his thumb. As a way to control me. I should have known right away that his intentions were to get all three of us—Ian and Joseph and myself—into that world.”
Jace reached out and grabbed me, his hold pleading.
“I didn’t want to, Faith. I swear to you, I didn’t want to. But he told me if I didn’t, what he’d done to Ian the first time would pale in comparison to what he would do. He wanted to make me obligated to him. He knew once I was, Ian and Joseph would follow.”
Disbelief whooshed through my consciousness, my heart sluggish as I tried to catch up with the information Jace was giving me.
Could I ever blame him?
Jace had told me he would do anything to protect Ian and Joseph. It wasn’t until then that I finally understood the lengths he’d actually go to in order to do it.
Anger lifted in him again, a blaze across his skin.
“I’d thought I was taking the fall for Ian . . . protecting him . . . so I’d confessed that it was mine.”
“Jace.” His name was a whisper. Torture and devotion. How was it fair that he’d gone through all of this and I’d not even known? “I thought it was because we broke into this house?”