“I’m gonna ask you some questions, and I want the truth.”

We were in the kitchen. It was either very early or very late. We’d ordered Chinese and I was storing it in the fridge, where I’d intend to eat it for leftovers but it’d just sit, spoiling for a week until the smell made me throw it out.

Simple, amazing, breathtaking, life-shattering simple was over.

Not that I wanted it. I just didn’t think I could handle one more orgasm.

And it was time for complicated, it seemed.

I eyed him. “No you don’t.”

“Rosie,” he warned.

I sighed dramatically. “Be careful what you wish for.”

“That’s a yes?”

I raised my eyebrows impatiently in response.

“Where were you? This year.”

Okay, starting with an easy one. “Venezuela. Mostly.”

He narrowed his eyes. “And how is it that you were mostly in Venezuela and there’s no record of you leaving the country?”

I narrowed my own eyes. “You’ve been sneaking into some databases you shouldn’t be. I’m impressed.”

He scowled. “I’ve got friends. Answer the question.”

I shrugged. “Used a fake passport.”

His left eye twitching was the only visual form of his surprise. “You have a fake passport?”

“I have three.” If he wanted honest, I’d give him the dirty, ugly truth. Then I’d look at the Luke-shaped hole in my door once he’d heard it all.

“Three?” he repeated.

I nodded.

“And Cade knows?”

Surprising question, but I went with it. “He knows about one, hence the need for the other two.”

“How did you get them?” It seemed to be asked more out of curiosity than need.

I grinned. “You’re not the only one with friends.”

He didn’t grin back. “What were you doing in Venezuela?”

“Escaping, mostly. Tanning. Drinking. For a start, at least. Stumbled onto something and I started to tan a lot less. Drink some more.”

He caught it, the chilling of my tone, the darkening of my eyes. His hands clenched into fists. “What did you stumble onto?”

I took a breath. “A human trafficking ring.”

He stared at me. For a long time. “Only you would ‘stumble’ onto a human trafficking ring while tanning and drinking.”

“Well, I was in Venezuela. Stumbling onto trouble was inevitable.”

“I don’t think that counts. You could stumble into trouble on a Mormon compound.”

I scowled. “Hey, that priest started it,” I protested.

He narrowed his brow. “Continue.”

I rolled my eyes. “Well, I couldn’t very well do nothing—”

“Nothing is exactly what you should’ve done, Rosie. You can’t do anything about something as huge and institutionalized except get yourself killed,” he said sharply.

It was time for a scowl of my own. “Really, Luke? This is what’s coming from you, of all people? I see human beings being abused in the worst ways imaginable and I’m to just walk away? That’s righteous Luke Crawford’s advice.”

“I’ve changed.”

“I’ve noticed.”

His eyes went hard, something flickering behind them. Hurt, maybe. Vulnerability.

“You have too,” he said, little more than a whisper. And that time it wasn’t the same as he’d said it before. I knew his mind was in my bedroom, one year back. I hadn’t visited that memory since it happened. I couldn’t.

I swallowed. “Yeah.”

He ran his hand through his hair. “Rosie, how could you be that stupid? Risking your life, no one knowing where you were. No one to save you—”

“I don’t need saving,” I interrupted, voice harsher than I intended.

Luke eyed me. “You didn’t need to come home in a body bag,” he countered. “You have family. People who love you. What the fuck do you think they would’ve done if you hadn’t come back at all? If you’d just dropped off the face of the earth, tossed in some shallow grave? How the fuck were they… how the fuck would I be able to go on with a big fuckin’ chasm in my life?”

I flinched. “You never gave me the space to take up any of your life, remember?” That time I did intend to sound harsh.

He moved forward, cupping my face. “No, Rosie. I gave you all the fucking space. That wasn’t the problem. I didn’t tell you that. That was my fucking mistake, and I’m gonna learn from it,” he promised, and I couldn’t help but think the promise was more to himself than to me. “I’m gonna learn from it and I’m gonna make sure you know just how much space you take up in my life. How without you in it, there’s nothing.”

I blinked at him. “How can we go from all we’ve ever known to this? How are nevers suddenly being turned into forevers?” I whispered.

He searched my eyes. “You know why, Rosie.”

I shook my head. “No, it can’t have been from before….” I couldn’t say it. That’s how weak I really was. I couldn’t even utter the description of the day that changed everything. I swallowed. “I loved you the wrong way, before,” I whispered instead.

His hands flexed, and his eye twitched. “There’s no wrong way to love someone.”

I blinked at him. “Yes there is. There’s blood, murder, pain, lies. To everyone we know, we care about. Lies to ourselves. To each other.”

“No, babe. I’ll admit it, that I lied to myself, but never to you. Even when I tried with my words. You knew better. I fuckin’ know you did.”

I pursed my lips. “Maybe.”

“Definitely,” he corrected.

“I can’t go from zero to a hundred, Luke.” I went for a different route. The truth. Or maybe it was another lie. I couldn’t tell the difference anymore.

“Yes you can,” he argued. “Your life is zero to a hundred.”

I stared at him. “And my life has been a consistent series of Fuck-Ups.”

He frowned. “Don’t do that. Don’t belittle everything you’ve done, everything you’ve become. It’s the furthest thing from a fuck-up I’ve ever seen.”

I chewed my lip. “It’s all about perception, Luke. You might see it differently, but it doesn’t matter. What does that I don’t want this, us, if we really do this, to be another Fuck-Up.”

“It won’t be. We won’t be,” he promised.

I swallowed, deciding to say something else, to him, to myself, instead of answering properly. “Ever since I can remember, I was a nomad,” I whispered. “Not in the sense that I didn’t have a home. The Sons of Templar have been and always will be my home, of a sort. But spiritually, I’m a nomad. Since birth, maybe. Definitely since my dad died and I was put in a world where I was in without a patch. Where I would always belong but also didn’t. Then I met you, and my spirit found a home. Or it wanted one. But it couldn’t reside there or in me, so that’s what this, my whole life, has been about after that. Trying to find a home in someone else and trying to find a home in myself.” I stepped forward so my body pressed into Luke, so my body found its home. “I’ve never, not once in my life, felt like I was exactly, precisely where I needed to be. Where I belonged. Not completely. Because I was fighting. Because I knew it was right here that I needed to be.” I stroked Luke’s chest. “And I knew I could never be here. Thought I couldn’t, at least. It’s weird, isn’t it?”

He stroked my head. “What, precisely?”

“Peace,” I whispered. “I’ve never felt it. It’s like a pair of shoes that fit exactly perfectly but you’re suspicious because no pair of shoes is that perfect.”

Luke chuckled. “I’m the pair of shoes in this analogy?”

I smirked. “We’re the pair of shoes. A pair.”

He leaned down and kissed my head. “I knew there wasn’t a lot of things in life I could give you, not when I’ve taken years from you because I was running from this for all the wrong reasons—”

“We both were.”

He took that with a hard chin. I knew he wanted to disagree, but he kept going. “Whatever it was. If there was one gift I could give my beautifully wild, wonderfully chaotic woman, it would be peace.” He gave me a look that held the whole universe. “Even if it’s fleeting, because I know my wild woman can’t entertain peace for too long and stay sane. I can be happy, content, knowing I’ve given you that.”

I fought the tears, the happy ones, welling in my eyes. “It’s not fleeting,” I choked out. “It’s you. It’s us. We are each other’s peace, aren’t we?”

He lightly kissed my lips. “Yeah, and we’re each other’s chaos.”

“But it works.”

“Oh, it more than works.”

I traced the side of his head with my hand. “Can we just keep this slow? Just for us?”

He searched my face. “Don’t want slow,” he muttered. “Also want to shout from the rooftops that you’re mine.” He sighed. “But I get what you want, why you want it, and fuck if I’ll say no.”

I grinned. “It bodes well for me, that does.”

He shook his head. “And not for me.”

* * *

Luke closed the door quietly, his hands finding the back of my neck, landing on the exact spot that had been throbbing from tension and rubbing at it.

I sank back into his touch, the warmth of his front igniting the back of my body.

“I don’t suppose you’d consider not taking the job and stopping the vigilante stuff, even if I asked real nice?” he murmured, lips on my ear.

I shivered. “Not a chance,” I whispered, failing to find any anger at his request. “One or the other. You pick, buddy.”

He kept rubbing for a long while.

It was evening, the next day. Right after our first day at work. There were no stakeouts or foot chases through the streets; as I was disappointed to find out, it was more paperwork and meetings. And meeting the team.

I totally got why Greenstone was the most popular security company in LA. You threw a rock in those offices and it would hit a hot guy.

Not that you wanted to throw a rock at these guys. They all radiated menace.

The hot kind.

“Well, let me be the first to say that I’m very happy Keltan has finally been listening to my lectures on equality in the workplace,” Matt—one of Keltan’s kiwi buddies from the army, I’d found out later—said, grinning at me wickedly. “I’m all about women’s rights. And I can’t wait to see your moves.” He winked.

I thought Luke’s head might’ve exploded at that.

He was begrudgingly sticking to our secrecy pact.

That meant professional in the workplace.

Well, he’d fucked me on his desk about five minutes after that meeting. Oh, and then he’d buried his head between my legs and gave me two orgasms in the weight room a couple of hours after that. So it wasn’t strictly professional, but it was as close as I’d get.

“I don’t want you to get hurt,” Luke said, back at my apartment. There had been no question that that’s where he was spending the night. “That is the last thing in the fucking world that I want.” He paused, sucking in a breath and looking away. Even though he was focused on my sofa, I knew he was somehow still looking at me. Just not the me standing in front of him. A past me, perhaps. Or maybe the version of me he’d made in his head. The version he could completely nurture, love. The ideal Rosie. Maybe he was looking and her and wishing he could swap us out.

“I want to protect you,” he finished, cutting off my dangerous interior game of which Rosie does Luke actually want.

I laughed, more to shake off the chill that came with those thoughts of the ideal Rosie. “Protect me?” I repeated. “From getting hurt?” I glanced down to his hip. “Well, then there’s only one thing to do if that’s what you want. Put a bullet in my temple.” He flinched, visibly and harshly at my cold words. I ignored it. “Death is the only thing that’s certain to protect humans from the horror of life. Death isn’t the bad and scary thing everyone makes it out to be. In fact, for those in the business of dying, I suspect it’s a welcome reprieve from the pain of living. After the fact, of course. Death is only bad for those left behind.”

My mind, as it always did in conversations such as this, flickered to Laurie. Even though years had passed, fresh agony ripped through my midsection with the memory of my friend being gone. I sucked in oxygen through the pain. “Pain is a recreational hazard in the job of life, Luke,” I said. “You’ll only be able to protect me from it if you’re willing to end my life.”

The words hung in the air bitterly, their truth polluting everything. Not that it was untainted. It had never been clean and fresh. Even when it began at five years old, the time in life where everyone was supposed to experience pure naivety, it was blackened, dirty. Gray. I was born into a gray world.

Luke had been holding a hard jaw while I spoke, it setting like marble the more I said.

“I know you were makin’ a point,” he gritted out, stalking toward me. “But don’t you dare make it with mention of your death at my fuckin’ hands. Ever. Again.” He was in front of me now, fury rippling behind him like some kind of cape.

He didn’t wait for me to reply. Didn’t seem like he wanted me to speak at all. “You’ve seen a lot of shit, Rosie. Ugly shit. The kind that slithers into the core of you, coils up and routinely clutches onto you, hurting you. Sometimes when you expect it to, other times when you’re unprepared, happy.” His gaze glittered, the words making my own blurry. “I know I can’t protect you from the thing that hurts you the most: yourself.” His hands framed my face. “But I’m gonna try so hard to distract from that, to give you so much sweet to hold onto that it drowns out the bitter.” His breath was hot and minty on my face. “And when I can’t do that, I’ll make sure you’ve got someone to share your pain with. But in no fucking way, figurative or literal, am I going to let any part of you die. Is that understood?”

I nodded. “Understood.”

He picked me up and I didn’t hesitate to wrap my legs around him, my sensitive core pressed to his hard length.

“Now I’m going to remind us both just how fucking alive we are,” he growled.

And he did.

Twice.

* * *

“Have you told anyone, babe?” Luke asked the ceiling.

“What? That you quite possibly just broke my vagina? Dude, it just happened. Gimme a second to tweet it to my fans,” I said, also to the ceiling.

It was two weeks after the big… whatever Luke fucking me on the floor and spewing out all our truth was.

He’d been over often.

In other words, every night.

Luke’s arms tightened around me. He did that often too. Squeezed me like he wasn’t quite sure I was real and needed to make sure I wouldn’t fade away into smoke. I knew it because I did that too.

“No, babe,” he said softly. “About what happened to you that day. That night. The one before you left.”

His words were soft. Their impact was not.

Dirt settled over my skin as the memory rushed into every cell of my body. I wanted to escape. Cover my nakedness so my skin didn’t touch Luke’s. I tried. Luke had clearly anticipated that. He didn’t let me go.

I chewed my lip. I really wanted to say something flippant and dismissive. Something strong. But I couldn’t. I was naked now, in every sense of the word. I didn’t have the energy to lie to Luke. I was using it all to lie to myself.

He waited, for me to get my shit together, to find something inside me to push the words out. “No, no I haven’t,” I choked out, barely above a whisper.

I expected him to reply immediately. To chastise me for bottling things up, not asking for help, all the clichés. He didn’t. He just let us lie there, tangled in each other, staring at the ceiling, staring at the past.

“Let’s say if Lucy, or Ashley or Polly went through something like that on their own,” he murmured. “How would you feel for them if they didn’t have the support you know they’d need?”

The question somehow wasn’t accusing or confrontational.

It hit the right spot, though.

He didn’t wait for me to answer. “I’m never going to completely understand what you went through, babe. I only know what I went through witnessing the aftermath. And that was the worst hell I’ve ever experienced. Knowing you went through something worse?” He shuddered. “I wish there was something to do to take that shit away. But there isn’t. Know there isn’t. I’m gonna love you. Be here. Let you deal with this in whatever way you can. I’m not forcing you to talk to me. I’m never going to force you to be a certain way around me. I do want you to think about talking to your girls, babe. Doesn’t have to be about us, though I would like that to be on the future cocktail agenda.”

He kissed my head. “I know your girls are your soul mates. Biggest compliment I’ll get, apart from knowin’ you love me, is you sharing us with them. When you’re ready. But this isn’t about me. This is about the girl who lives for her sisters, her family. Who makes herself up from those people. I know you’re not whole, keepin’ these big chunks of yourself from them. Want you whole, babe. Want to be the man who makes you that way, but I’m not stupid. I know that one person can’t make another whole. Not with you, at least. Your heart’s too big for that. I’ll settle for a corner. A large one.”

Tears streamed down my face and I couldn’t control them. I hadn’t cried, really cried, since that day they found Bex.

I was at the wharf.

It was the only place I could think of… after. After I’d seen Bex brought into the club.

Or more aptly, Bex’s body.

She was breathing.

But it was still her body.

Something important had been taken. You could tell by looking at the emptiness in her eyes. Her body was beaten, broken. Her spirit was all but ruined.

As was Lucky’s. The man who lit up the lives of so many people, reminded us all not to take life so seriously, was gone.

How could you stay inside your own optimism when the person you loved was raped? Beaten? Tortured? Taken from you. Despite being able to retrieve her, she was gone.

It was too soon to tell if she was coming back.

And I couldn’t handle it all. I was weak. But I couldn’t let my weakness show. I wouldn’t.

So I came to the place where I could be weak with only the ocean to witness it, to wash it away, like it had never happened.

Like always, he was there. When I was at my lowest, he was there to shield me from it. From the worst of it all. From the worst of myself.

He didn’t touch me at first.

Didn’t speak.

Just stood beside me, watching the wild ocean.

I wondered if he was wishing it would wash away all of the pain my family had to endure. That Bex had to endure.

Probably not.

He was practical. Practical men knew the frivolity of wishing.

It came out of nowhere. The wave. Not out there in the ocean, but in there, in me.

My feet just stopped holding me.

He caught me. Easily swept me into his embrace, like he’d been expecting it. And he held me while I clutched at his shirt and sobbed, broke down. He held me, kissed my head, murmuring everything and nothing at the same time.

And somehow, by doing that, he stopped my whole world from falling apart. So then I could help Bex put hers back together.

It occurred to me that every single time I really cried, really let myself go, I was in Luke’s arms.

I moved almost on instinct so I was on top of him, straddling him, framing his face with my hands. The whiskers of his stubble rubbed against my open palms.

“You have a corner,” I whispered through my tears. “You occupy the prime real estate, Luke. You have since I was five years old.”

And with that open honesty, I kissed him, the flavor of my tears mixing with the flavor of us.

Because the memories made me feel him inside me, and every instinct I had was to crawl away and let that dirt turn to rot, I went against them. My hand fastened against Luke’s, pushing it down, right to my perfect spot.

We both hissed out rough breaths as he rubbed me. Then, as if he knew what I wanted, what I needed, his fingers went inside.

He may have not been clean anymore, but he worked at washing the dirt away.