“Okay, here it is,” Sam said, something lingering in his tone that hadn’t been there when he’d shown me the rest of the house.

Though calling his sprawling estate a house was a slight understatement.

I walked into the room and was stunned silent for a little bit. Okay, a lotta bit.

Not that I hadn’t been stunned during the entire tour of the mansion that Sam shared with Wyatt in a gated community in Calabasas.

You could fit six of my houses into theirs.

About four more in their sprawling backyard, complete with a basketball court.

It was sprawling, spanning over three levels. It had a pool, a gym, and a fricking cinema. Plus a bowling alley.

A bowling alley.

“Seriously?” I’d asked when Sam walked led me into the narrow room.

He shrugged. “We never even use it. I was a dumb kid, thought it’d be cool.” He grinned. “I was totally right.”

It was that, the classic Sam humor, that stopped me from being incredibly overwhelmed and running back to the safety of my little home. Even then it was tempting. To say it was beyond intimidating being presented with this amount of sheer wealth was an understatement.

Despite my mother’s aspirations, I’d never wanted this. Riches or fancy sofas or bearskin rugs—and Sam actually had one of those. I just wanted what I had. Well, maybe a little more of that. And somewhere a little more out of the way. By a lake perhaps, with a huge library spanning half the house overlooking a beautiful vista.

But not what Sam had.

Not marble floors and twelve hundred bathrooms and a collection of cars. It was a lot.

A lot.

It winded me. It didn’t make me question who Sam was. He didn’t define himself by what he had. In fact, he had all this stuff to distract him from having to define himself, but still, I didn’t know how I’d fit into… this.

Plus, the place screamed “bachelor pad.” It might have not been littered with empty pizza boxes and beer bottles—it was spotless, I assumed cleaned by an army of people who were paid to do so—it was decorated in masculine grays and blacks, with a lot of weird-looking art and expensive-looking electronics and not much else. There were framed album covers on the walls, framed magazine covers, and pictures of the four of them scattered on a few surfaces, but that was it. Despite the muggy California air, it was cold. It wasn’t a home. It was a place where they entertained girls, or passed out after partying too much.

But the room we were in now was different.

Much different. It wasn’t cold or impersonal or for anyone but Sam.

“This is the one place in the house where no one is allowed,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

“Sam,” I breathed, my eyes devouring the floor-to-ceiling shelves. Filled not with books but with records. The room was large. Cavernous, really. Every inch of it decorated with music memorabilia.

With Sam.

The walls were covered haphazardly with framed album covers, golden records, photos. The floor was littered with signed guitars resting on stands, a couple of drum sets and a big record player in the middle. It should’ve been chaotic, but somehow it wasn’t. Somehow the room leaked serenity. Quiet. It was made to be loud, but it worked in the opposite direction.

“See, you’ve got a little library. Your escape. Your shelves,” he said, clutching my hips so he could yank me back into his chest. “These are mine.” His breath tickled my ears and he pressed a soft kiss to my lobe. “This is where I put it all.” He squeezed me a second longer, taking an inhale of my hair.

Such a gesture should’ve made me uncomfortable and mentally calculate when my last shower was to determine whether my hair smelled like strawberries or sweat. It didn’t. It was natural, like everything else with Sam was becoming. It was scary. How I felt less self-aware, less self-conscious. It was danger.

But I didn’t let myself think such thoughts as Sam kissed my head and then let me go so he could approach the shelves, the heels of his boots clicking on the hardwood floors.

He yanked a slim sleeve out of place, seemingly at random. His tattooed hands ran over the cover, reverently glancing up at me as he did so. “This got me through the beginnings of this monster called fame. When I was living harder than I was now. Drinking too much whiskey, doing too much coke… just doing too much period. It reminded me what all this shit was about.”

Though I yearned to stare at Sam, to do something else other than hear the pain in his voice, I looked at what was in his hands. It was thin, but the way he held it betrayed the true weight of it. The image was a pure white brick wall, black script scribbled over the front: Pink Floyd – The Wall.

He paused, sliding it back into its place before he strolled down farther and reached up to grab another.

I watched the fabric of his shirt ride up as he did so, exposing the inked and defined muscles of his back.

It took me a second to focus back on him, on the way he looked at the newest record in his hand. He stared at it much longer than the other one, his eyes faraway, demons dancing in them.

He glanced up at me and I flinched, thinking the glimmering in his eyes must’ve been a trick of the light. It had to be. Because the tears I thought I saw were blinked out of existence in the next second.

He cleared his throat. “This one I nearly played till it melted,” he said, voice raspy. “I locked myself in here for hours, just with this and a bottle of Jameson. Or four.” He didn’t break his gaze from mine. “When I thought I was going to lose my best friend. I was still covered in blood from watching her die in front of me. I couldn’t do anything. I didn’t know what to do. How to act. How to be. So I let these guys tell me. Or at least distract me from the pain it took to keep inhaling and exhaling.”

The pain in his voice was so real, so fresh, I could taste it. It stabbed through me like I could feel it.

I kept forgetting that Sam felt so deep because he spent so much time trying to convince everyone he was shallow.

I didn’t want to look at his face, see the utter pain I knew would be there. So I looked down at the cover: two townhouses side by side, identical and taken in black and white.

“Led Zepplin,” he whispered. “In My Time of Dying, to be more specific.” He put the record back and then came to stand in front of me, tilting my chin up so I could see his face. “It used to be all of this to get me through, help me cope with this crazy little thing called life. Now I’m staring at it. What’s gonna get me through.”

I stared at him for a long time, and then it suddenly didn’t matter. All of those metaphorical mountains I knew I didn’t have the skill or the emotion to climb all collapsed. Melted into the sea.

“The thing that’s getting me through, that’s you, just in case you didn’t get that,” Sam clarified after I’d lapsed into silence for too long.

There it was. Another imperfect moment within a perfect one, making everything exactly how it should be.

I smiled and leaned in to kiss him long and hard. “Yeah, I get it,” I whispered.

And I did. I finally did.

Until I didn’t.

* * *

I heard the crash. It was hard not to. People back in Hampton Springs would’ve heard it. I was sure if we hadn’t been in such a sprawling, expansive and therefore very well-built mansion, the walls might’ve shaken.

Though it might have been in my head. The entire landscape of my mind had been continuously tremoring the moment I saw it. Read it.

Sam’s fury, responsible for the crash, which I now realized was the slamming of the front door, entered the room.

I referred to it as being separate to him, because it was.

What rippled around him was more than emotion.

I saw it everywhere.

Tasted it.

You heard thunder and that was the warning for an oncoming storm.

The crash of the door slamming and then subsequently smashing was the thunder.

Sam was the storm.

The expression on his face couldn’t be explained. Like that magnificent but terrifying splash of lightning across the sky, words couldn’t define it, constrain it. It could only be felt.

If I hadn’t seen him put on the ripped tank top that exposed the sides of his tattooed ribs and equally ripped black denim jeans that very morning, I might not have recognized him. The sheer fury on his face had contorted his beautiful features that much.

I’d always toyed with the idea that under his surface, way down deep, in the highest peak of the lowest dungeon, lurked his Balrog—monster, for those who didn’t read Lord of the Rings.

That was usually the way with the happiest of people, and forgive the Hulk reference, but you wouldn’t want to see him when he was angry.

And Sam was angry.

Nothing like I’ve ever seen from him before.

He was little more than a blur as he stomped across the room, snatching the magazine out of my hands when he reached me.

Maybe he only seemed to blur because he was moving, liquid quicksilver, and I was frozen. Solid.

And had been that way for some time.

Since I’d walked past the magazines at the drugstore and seen the cover.

And the caption.

And the look on everyone’s faces in the Walgreens the second my eyes made contact with the offending material.

Why did I buy it?

Why didn’t I just slink away back to the haven that Sam offered and not let myself touch, let alone purchase this… thing?

Because I was human. And humans were good at many things.

Extraordinary people wrote books, songs, cured diseases, discovered planets. But there was a universal quality we humans all had, even when we didn’t want to admit it. We all did things we knew would hurt us. Whether it was drugs, eating a whole tub of ice cream when you’re lactose intolerant and sad, or the ultimate—loving someone.

All guaranteed pain. Our triggers and soft spots and tolerances might differ, but we were all masochists deep down.

Deep down, on the highest peak of the lowest dungeon, we all craved it.

Pain.

Pain made us feel alive, didn’t it?

“You are not to look at this. Ever. Fucking. Again,” Sam growled.

Actually growled.

He was not like the rest of the men in the strange little world of beautiful outlaws and cavemen who had found love and let it swallow them whole. He wasn’t monotone and didn’t speak in grunts, nor did he order me around or tell me what to wear, what to do. He knew what that meant to me. And that wasn’t him. He was wild, and he loved me that way.

He was still alpha. Especially in the bedroom, where I let him order me around however much he liked.

But in real life, he was alpha-lite.

This was not lite.

I blinked at him, silent and still frozen.

His midnight eyes caught mine in their snare as he reached into his pocket with the hand that wasn’t clutching the magazine. While holding my gaze, he retrieved whatever his hand had been searching for.

It was only when the reflection of the flames lit up his irises that I realized what he was doing.

Lighting the magazine on fire.

I could only watch in horror as the flames licked at the image on the cover.

The one of me.

From behind.

Straight on.

In the dress I thought I’d looked so beautiful in. That Sam had ripped off me and then demanded I buy four more like it. Or more specifically told me he was buying me four more like it.

I made a mental note to borrow Sam’s lighter and burn each and every one sitting in the closet, tags still on.

“Rock god takes Shamu out for a feeding.”

That was the headline.

What grabbed you.

Apart from my gigantic ass next to Sam’s sculpted and beautiful body, of course.

There were more pictures inside. A whole lot more.

And an accompanying story, of course.

It was all flames now. Of course, just that one was in flames. There were millions of others not being turned to ash. Ones being sold. Read.

I cringed. Almost let that thought cripple me.

Then I focused on the flames once more.

“Sam!” I yelled, the fire making me momentarily forget about the millions of people leering and laughing at my expense. “You’re going to burn yourself.”

His eyes stayed glued to mine, the flames climbing fast toward his lithe and tattooed hands.

His livelihood. His life. Everything he was.

“Already burned, babe,” he clipped.

He held my eyes for a beat more, as if he was challenging the one thing in life that wouldn’t blink back—fire. Or maybe he didn’t even notice the inferno in his hands, because the one in his eyes had already consumed him. And me.

Then it must have got to him. Sense. Or more likely pain.

We all liked pain, whether we admitted it or not, but we also had a teeny sliver of self-preservation, which was why Sam strode calmly over to the sink and dropped his burning magazine into it.

The flames hissed in protest as water from the faucet rained down on them.

Fire didn’t technically emit sound, but while the flames were alive, everything had seemed so loud. Deafening.

Now, without them to focus on, everything was quiet. Well, apart from the headline that screamed at me, even from the ashes.

Sam’s chest rose and fell in exaggerated movements, as if he’d run a marathon. Or like it sometimes did after he’d finished giving me the best orgasms of my life.

Usually even the memory of such orgasms had my stomach flipping, desire running through my body like a physical thing.

But not now. For once, even Sam couldn’t chase it away.

Sam hadn’t burned it quickly enough. Not nearly. I read the words. Consumed them. Like my Twinkies, obviously. He hadn’t stopped me from reading the entire article, not catching me until the fourth read-through. I could recite it by heart if I so desired.

I didn’t desire.

But that ugly little voice that I thought I’d quieted years ago taunted me with those words. They were on a repeat reel, like Friends had been since before I could remember. As soon as it was over, it started all over again, no pause, no break. I barely knew what it was like before that.

I’d been watching them, the words, play over in my mind, so I hadn’t seen Sam circle the kitchen island and come to stand in front of me.

His hands at my neck commanded my attention.

The memories of him didn’t work to quiet the voice, but his hands did. Almost.

I glimpsed his face.

Angry, obviously. Furious. But also tortured. Guilty. As if it was somehow his fault that I’d had eating issues since I was twelve and would always be, as Bridget Jones said, ‘just a little bit fat.’ As if he’d taken the photo from an angle no woman had been photographed in, then sent it to a place wherever such hateful things are printed and wrote it himself. As if everything was on his shoulders.

“Baby, I want you to listen to me. I need you to listen to me,” he demanded, his grip flexing on my neck as he spoke. “You need to listen real good. Not because I’m only going to say this once, because I’m not. I’m going to say this every damn day, twelve hundred times a day for the rest of forever if that’s what it takes. But I want you to listen hard right now. To the truth. Not my truth—the truth. The one that trash has defiled and distorted for a quick fucking buck and fifteen seconds of attention. And I know these flimsy, empty fucking lies somehow become heavier and toxic and poison the truth when you’re staring at them. When they’re staring at you. But I’m not going to let that poison take. I can’t. I can’t have the most beautiful and pure thing on this planet tainted because of me. Because I put her in my world. I will not let that happen.”

His chest was still rising and falling rapidly, as if the intensity of his emotions was triggering a cardiovascular response.

“That”—he jerked his head violently to the smoking sink—“isn’t truth. Fuck, it’s so far from the truth it’d be funny if it didn’t hurt so fucking much. You are beautiful.” His hands moved from my neck to trace down the sides of my body. Slowly. Reverently. Purposefully.

The memory of his touch may not have created flames of my own inside my body, but the actuality of it did.

Though the poison was still there. Taking. Sinking in.

“This world, babe, it’s all about surface shit. About the appearance of beauty. So that’s why, when presented with the real thing, the rarest of all things in this world—you—it has to crush it. Destroy it. Because you show the world for what it is, Thumbelina. You rip down the two-dimensional background. You show them how fucking pathetic their existence is.” He paused. “You showed me how pathetic mine was. How empty. And I’m going to make everyone who hurt you sorry. I promise.” He kissed me long and hard on the mouth.

Then he was gone.

Presumably to exact vengeance.

Pity it was in vain.

Sam

Sam was still reeling. Pulsing. On fucking fire as he stormed through his manager’s offices.

Cindy, or Carrie, or some-fucking-thing or another stood as he approached her desk.

He didn’t miss the way her eyes lit up as she took him in. He’d always known he lit up an empty head, known that when he’d made the huge fucking mistake of sleeping with her. It was a weak moment.

Jack was involved. And Daniels.

So yeah, he’d known it then, and when he’d seen her poking a hole in the fucking condom for round two.

But with Gina, when he saw the way her whole fucking being illuminated when she looked at him, it showed him this was bullshit.

She took down the fucking background so he could see all this shit for the production that it was.

“Sam, he’s in a meeting but if you want, I can—”

He held up his hand, not even giving the bitch a glance. “No, succubus, I am talking to him. Now.”

And with that, he was done giving her the most valuable thing he had. His attention.

The door rattled on its hinges as he swung it open with enough force to detach it from the frame, had it not been specially reinforced to suit the fickle emotions of the talent.

It wasn’t the first time Sam had done such a thing before.

Or the fourth.

But it was the first time his anger had rattled through him like a fucking earthquake. He was even scaring himself a little.

But being scared is good, he reminded himself.

Mark’s eyes flickered to the door casually, not perturbed by Sam’s entrance. The woman sitting across from him was obviously a lot less versed in such things, so she jumped visibly, eyes going to Sam, first wide in probable shock and then in recognition.

“I want to sue them. Kill them. Burn their offices to the fucking ground,” he gritted out, pacing the room, picking things up on shelves and then putting them back down just so he could have something to do with his hands. “Or preferably all three.” He stopped his fidgeting and folded his arms to still the twitching of his hands.

They were always twitching. Usually it was with a need to play, have drumsticks in them. Have music pulsing through them. More recently, it was to have Gina in his arms.

Right then, it was to punch someone.

Anyone.

More specifically the anyones who were responsible for the absolute emptiness in his woman’s eyes. It was there. Defeat. All she had been through, survived, somehow retaining beautiful innocent naivety—and it was this world did that to her.

His fucking world.

Him.

It was his fault when he got down to the crux of it.

But he couldn’t very well punch himself in the face, so those fuckers would have to fucking do.

Mark hadn’t altered his facial expression, merely rotated slightly on his chair.

“Sam, perhaps we can talk about murder and arson later. Without witnesses,” he said mildly, eyes on the woman in front of his desk.

Sam glowered at him. “I do not do later,” he said. “I’m about instant gratification… in all things. Revenge specifically in this moment. So, excuse me for being rude, darlin’, but you’re gonna have to reschedule.” He directed his statement to the woman, whose eyes were darting between him and Mark, as if she was watching a tennis match that she didn’t buy a ticket to and was now expecting a rouge ball to hit her in the face at some point.

She hastily stood, unsteady on her heels.

“Ye-yeah, sure, that’s fine. Fine,” she stuttered. Her eyes darted to Mark, who stood too. “I’ll call your assistant to organize a more”—she glanced at Sam—“convenient time.”

And then she scattered. She didn’t run, but it sure was close to it.

The door closed quietly behind her as she pulled it shut so carefully, like she considered it to be China.

“Well, she scares easy,” Sam said mildly. “Back to me.”

He stomped forward to twirl the chair she had just been sitting in around and sat backward on it, resting his elbows on the back and glaring at Mark, who wasn’t glaring but had that same twitch in his eye he had when Sam accidentally on purpose leaked his sex tape.

It was his best performance pre-Gina. It would’ve been cruel not to share it with the world. Plus, it wasn’t like the chick was completely unwilling. She had been the one to try and blackmail him with it in the first place.

Instead of paying her the six figures she’d demanded, he’d released it.

Bitches didn’t trick him.

She should’ve thanked him anyway. She was on some idiotic reality TV show now, making money to inflate her tits, lips and ass.

And her ego, not that that needed any inflation.

“You can’t just burst into meetings like that, Sam,” Mark said patiently, like he was addressing a frustrating child—which was his default tone with Sam.

“Haven’t you heard? I’m famous, so I can do what the fuck I want,” Sam snapped. And for once, it wasn’t with the empty humor he usually such statements in. No, his words were full of fucking fury, just like his entire body had been the moment he’d laid eyes on that fucking travesty of a cover. “Have you seen it?” he clipped.

Mark’s eyes went stormy. His body tightened slightly. Fucker had an amazing poker face—he’d cleaned Sam out of thousands over the years, not counting his percentage—so this reaction was drastic for his cool-as-a-cucumber manager. He nodded once. “Yeah, I’ve seen it. I’m working on it. Jenna’s working on it.”

Sam stood quickly, the force of it pushing his chair from its position to slam into Mark’s desk and then fall on its side. He didn’t take any notice.

“If you were working on it, the article never would’ve been fucking published in the first place!” he roared.

“You know we can’t control this, Sam,” Mark said quietly. Calmly. “We’ve been here before with all of you. You specifically, thousands of times with thousands of other girls.”

“She isn’t other girls,” he hissed through his teeth. “She is the girl. The fucking girl you only get one shot at. And me, the lucky fuck that I am, somehow got three of them. Three shots. You don’t get any more in baseball, and I don’t get any more in life. With her. She’s once-in-a-lifetime type stuff, and she’s precious and good and pure, and this world is shitting all over that.”

The words spewed out of him in a river of emotion.

“Sam, we can’t do—”

“I don’t want to hear can’t,” he said. “I want to get the addresses of the people who wrote the article, the photographer who took the photo and the editor who okayed the story,” he demanded, his voice adopting the calm quality that Mark’s had. That was because he was forming a plan.

A fucking great one.

“Sam, I’m not giving you those. You’re adding more fire to this thing. You need to—”

“I need the addresses,” Sam interrupted him.

Mark folded his arms. “I’m not giving them to you.” Again, his tone was that of a parent dealing with a petulant and stubborn child.

And, in a way, Sam was a petulant and stubborn child.

He smiled, nodding at Mark, then saluting him. “Okay, boss.”

Then he turned on his Converse and walked out.

He fished his phone out of his pocket, eyes not even touching the space the succubus inhabited.

He put it to his ear after putting on speed dial two.

“Keltan? Hey, it’s Sam. Need a favor, bro.”

There was a pause, and Sam swore he heard a fucking grin over the phone. Not a happy one, but this hardass Kiwi motherfucker’s version of it.

“Addresses for everyone responsible for fucking with your girl?” his accented voice asked. “Yeah, I’ll get them for you within the hour. Need backup?”

Sam grinned wider. “Nah, bro. I’ve got it.”

His next call was to Noah and Wyatt.

A petulant and stubborn child he may have been. But one with a lot of money, good friends, and two fists he was not afraid of using.

* * *

Three of the four people he sought out were male. He was happy about that. Even if she was a reptile who made her living off lies and manipulation, Sam would never put his hands on a female.

Ever.

The bitch had made him wish that he was a lot less of a decent human being, though. Just for a second. But then he remembered what he was going home to. The sweet.

So he stopped wishing he was fucked enough to lay his hand on a woman, no matter how much of a cunt she was.

She had the fucking gall to hit on him. And insult Gina. Again. To his fucking face.

Yeah, her career was over.

“Why couldn’t she have been a dude?” Wyatt groaned as they’d pulled away from her condo.

Sam rubbed his knuckles. “Or why couldn’t we have had Emma here? We know that little spitfire can throw a punch. And chicks can punch chicks. It’s like the law. Plus, you would’ve finally had yourself a remedy for those blue balls. Win, win, win,” he’d said.

Wyatt’s eyes had narrowed and he’d told Sam to go fuck himself.

“No, that’s not what I’m doing. See, I got my shit together and got my woman. You’re the one who’s fucking himself currently. Both literally and figuratively.”

That had earned him a punch in the shoulder.

“Good, warm up for the next asshole. This one’s a dude, thankfully.”

They hadn’t killed him, as Sam had been very tempted to do.

“It’d be a publicity nightmare, dude,” Wyatt muttered as he’d held the swine by his polyester shirt collar.

Sam regarded the bleeding rodent. “Yeah, plus I’m too pretty for prison,” he said back.

Sam didn’t consider himself a particularly violent person. He wasn’t particularly jealous either. And he thought the two of those went hand in hand. Jealousy was insecurity, at the end of the day, and no one would accuse Sam of being insecure. Plus, he never cared enough about a chick to get jealous. Many had tried over the years. Never worked.

The only time he’d gotten violent over a girl was when his best friend was dying in front of him and he’d shot the man responsible for terrorizing and kidnapping her.

That had tasted good. Revenge. Better than any drug.

But the comedown was worse too. Especially with the reality of the blood on his hands not changing the fact that Lexie died.

Luckily she came back from the dead—not zombiefied or vampified, just Lexie.

Though he thought they all came back a little different after that. Colder. There was a part of him that knew he could and would kill someone who hurt his family.

And he wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep.

Now that feeling returned tenfold with Gina. It all started when she opened that door, her beautiful face bruised and tarnished. And he hadn’t even actualized how much she meant to him then.

But it grew when he met Officer Dickface, saw the way he looked at her.

It grew even more when he found out what Officer Dickface did to her.

There was a pocket of him in that constant state of preparation for that violence. The one he’d just unleashed. The one he’d always unleash to protect his.

He pulled up to the house, with bloody knuckles and a stained shirt, and he knew it would always live within him.

And he didn’t mind at all. As long as he kept being able to go home to sweet.

To her.

He had one destination when he got to the house.

And he flinched harder than any of the fuckers had with his hits when he saw her face.

“Hey,” she said quietly.

She spoke quietly most of the time. Little more than a whisper. Except when she was pissed off. Which she was, with him, a lot. Then she was loud. He liked both, but her murmured words, her gentle tone, hardened his dick. Every fucking time.

Not this time.

Because it wasn’t her gentle, quiet whisper, full of everything he loved. Like her eyes, this was empty. Maybe not completely, but missing something important. Something pivotal. Something that had been there when he’d left her naked and flushed in bed that morning. But something that wasn’t when he’d walked into the house hours ago and seen her with that garbage in her hands.

“Baby—” He took her head in his hands gently, intending on saying… he didn’t even know what. Something, fucking anything to put it back. What had been taken by people as deep as a fucking puddle.

She cut him off when her wide eyes took in his hands. She snatched them from the sides of her head, the nothingness receding a little as she inspected them.

“Sam,” she whispered, trailing her peaches-and-cream fingers over his bloodied, swollen and inked hands. She snapped her head up, eyes narrowing slightly, with a little more life than had been there before. “What did you do?” she demanded.

Sam left his hands there. Even though he wanted to snatch them away, make sure no more ugly tainted her pretty, he liked the gentle touch and the way her hands trailed over the bruised skin.

“Tripped,” he said easily, not taking his eyes off her.

She narrowed her eyes more, hands squeezing his in warning.

He sighed. “So someone else tripped,” he said. “Into my fist. Dumb fuck kept going and going. Didn’t learn his lesson after falling just once.” He shrugged.

She dropped his hands rapidly, folding them across her chest.

It was the motion itself that had Sam’s eyes directed to his second favorite spot. The first being her eyes, which was unusual for him in itself. He was a tits man all the way. Tits, ass, hair, face were what he noticed about a girl. In that order. But with Gina, it was her eyes. So big and fucking beautiful, like Bambi had somehow wandered out of those fictional woods and into the cruel world that did a lot worse than have a hunter shoot its mother.

They trapped him for the longest moment.

And that was in high school. Though it had taken him a decade to admit that.

He’d been trapped in them ever since, whether he’d known it or not.

But he also looked at her breasts. Often. And the style she had, the one he loved, the way she wore her clothes and did it in a way that seemed to make it different than anyone else, than even Lexie, accentuated the big and round and beautiful breasts that God gave her.

His eyes had gone to those breasts for a start. But then he realized what she was wearing.

A sweatshirt. Big. Huge enough to swallow all of her beautiful curves. When he’d come in, he’d been too busy making a beeline for her that he hadn’t even noticed she’d tucked her knees and legs into it, like she was making a cocoon. She had been sitting on the sofa, contemplating the vista with an intensity that, even on reflection, scared him.

He frowned. “What are you wearing?”

She flinched when he spoke. Actually flinched. And the look on her face when he’d uttered those words punctured him so deep he wished there was a way for him to swallow them right back up.

But they had already hit. He didn’t know what or how, but it was deep.

When he opened his mouth to say something, though no idea what, she beat him to it again.

“That’s not what’s important,” she clipped, the hurt receding as her face settled into an expression so empty it shook him.

To the core.

He’d seen a senator do blow off a stripper’s ass after said senator had paid him two hundred grand to play a drum solo that lasted three minutes.

He didn’t shake easy.

But that did it.

“What’s important is we get some ice for your hands and you tell me what happened,” she said tersely, in a voice much like Mark had used. A voice Sam guessed she reserved for her little students. Not often, mind you, as Gina was the teacher every child loved and adored and wanted to be their mother.

She got up and he was so fucking awed by her, even in that ridiculous sweater, with her hair pulled into a sloppy bun and not a lick of makeup on her beautiful face, that it took him a second to catch up with her as she padded toward the kitchen in the direction of the refrigerator. For ice, he assumed.

His hands had stopped throbbing the minute he’d seen her face, replaced with a much deeper and more profound pain. For it’s that way when you’re feeling someone else’s. Witnessing it when there’s nothing you can do. Not enough people in the world to punch to take it all away.

He snatched her by the hips, yanking her back into his chest so her warmth radiated through all the coldness he’d unleashed with violence.

He burrowed his face into her neck.

“Not so fast, buddy,” he murmured, sucking in the scent of coconut and vanilla that was imprinted on her hair.

Her natural reaction when he’d touched her was to sink into his embrace, curl into him. That had become habit once they’d gotten over the bullshit of before. Even if they were arguing or if she was pissed, the minute he touched her, everything melted away. They fit. And the mind couldn’t fuck with that.

Or at least that was what he’d thought.

“I’m getting ice for your swollen hand, buddy,” she said, her voice flat. She’d stiffened, turned to stone much like her tone had. “So if you’ll kindly let me go….”

Sam squeezed her harder, laying his mouth on her neck, slowly tasting the buttery coconut of her skin. She shivered at his touch, and Sam’s dick jerked to attention.

He knew she felt that too because she shivered again, sighing audibly.

“No, afraid that’s not possible. I don’t plan on letting you go… well, ever. And for the next few hours or so, I’m going to make sure it’s physically impossible. And then the next hundred years after that, of course.”

Without waiting for her to respond, to let her brain catch up to her body, he bent down to sweep her feet from the floor and carry her bridal-style.

She let out a surprised little squeak, and it was the cutest fucking thing Sam had ever heard. He’d thought his dick already stood full mast, but he was wrong, that little sound inflating it that much more.

“Sam,” she breathed, her eyes lazy as if she tasted his intentions. “What are you doing?”

He grinned at her, repositioning her slightly so he could walk up the stairs. “Oh, you’ll find out very fucking soon.”

She wriggled against him, something flickering in her eyes. “I’m too heavy, put me down,” she whispered.

A blade of anger shot through Sam and his hands jerked slightly. “Babe, been carrying the world on my shoulders for twenty-six years. When I met you, that weight was gone. Trust me, you’re not fucking heavy,” he rasped. Then, with coordination even he was proud of, he laid a kiss on her while he ascended the last stair.

Then he prayed he had enough in him to take all the shit she’d lifted off his, that he’d unwittingly put on her own, and burn it to the fucking ground. To find a way to show her what she looked like through his eyes.