Third a Kiss

I was sad when my past had been ripped away, but now…now my future had been taken too and that was far, far worse.

Sully could’ve been a wonderful future. A future I would’ve gladly, gratefully accepted, turning my back on everyone else because he was worth it.

He was the singular reason I’d been put on this earth.

And also the reason I wished I’d never met him.

He’d awoken my heart only to pulverise it into dust.

Tears once again tried to spring. A well inside me, crashing with waves up the sides, doing its best to escape through my eyes. To make me weak. To make me beg all over again.

Damn man.

Damn—

“Put the harness on, Jinx.” His gaze tore itself off my breasts, his hands ruthlessly tearing open boxes.

“Don’t do this, Sully.”

His teeth glistened; his lips thin over sharp canines. “Your right to call me that has once again been revoked.”

“Sullivan, then.” I balled my hands, laughing a little crazily. “Mr. Sinclair.”

“Shut the hell up.”

“Nope. I have something to say to you.”

“I have no interest in—”

“I fucking love you, you son of a bitch.”

He refused to look at me, icing me out all over again.

This wasn’t how declarations were meant to go. Anger should never be the main ingredient in professing the terminal diagnosis of falling in love, but…so what. I embraced my rage, using it as a shield against his. “You know I love you. I know you do. You saw it the moment you looked at me after you laughed on the boat yesterday.”

I tensed every muscle against the painful memory. The way he’d jolted when he’d read the message clear in my eyes. When he understood the unspoken language literally howling the truth in his face.

And he’d looked at me with the same raw connection. He’d tried to stop it. He’d gritted his teeth and looked away and returned to driving the boat as if nothing had happened.

But something had happened.

Something that could transcend this wreckage.

If he was prepared to fight for us…for me.

If he was ready to put his past behind him and choose a new kind of future where trust was the foundation that could sprout such happiness.

“You have nothing to say to me in return?” I hissed. “You’re honestly going to pretend you feel nothing?”

He ignored me, continuing to shred boxes apart and rip out their contents as if it was me he systemically destroyed.

“I love you, but I damn well hate you right now, Sully.”

His jaw clenched. His entire body seethed with the visible restraint of not entering into the war I was so desperate to have.

He wanted to prove he felt nothing?

He wanted to hurt me this much?

He wanted to throw me away without allowing common-sense and the truth to fix us?

Fine.

Fine!

“You’re a coward, Sullivan Sinclair. A goddamn coward.”

He stilled.

A subtle shift of sizzling tyranny settled into blistering self-control. His hands stopped massacring the boxes. His shoulders turned stiff, his very breath slowed from harsh to hardly at all.

Terrifyingly slowly, he turned to me. His eyebrows raised mockingly while his blue gaze remained on lockdown from feeling. “Interesting choice of words, Jinx.”

“What? Coward?” I narrowed my eyes. “No, actually, I think it’s the perfect one.”

“A dangerous slur to slander.”

“Truth is never dangerous.”

He smiled with daggers of frost. “Truth is the most dangerous thing of all.”

“Is that why you run from it?”

“It’s why I deal in lies.” He rolled his shoulders, doing his best to stay in control of the volcano I poked. “I created this island and filled it with hypocrisy and fraudulence. I embraced the fact that all life is a lie. All feeling is fiction. All trust ends up being deceit.”

“Trust is hardwired into us. It’s a fundamental law for co-existence.”

“And yet, I’ve survived just fine without it.”

“Trust me, you’re not fine.” I pressed a fist between my breasts, imploring him. “Survival is not happiness, Sully. Survival is a damn imposter for living. Truly living. To laugh. To be free. Can you not remember how good it feels to relax? To have faith. To trust.”

He laughed with a scary chill. “You ask me to do something I’ve proven is the one thing I am incapable of doing.”

“You’ve just trusted the wrong people.”

He swooped toward me, snatching my jaw with no sympathy. “I trusted those I called family.”

I flinched against his aggression. “Family doesn’t automatically earn a free pass.”

His eyes darkened until I stared into a black hole. “Family are supposed to be the one network that’s got your back.”

“Family we’re born into can make mistakes.” I struggled to speak with his tight grip on my jaw, but I wriggled until I had enough freedom to mutter, “Family we choose to share our life with can make mistakes. But the family you choose with your heart, your soul, that’s worth trusting. Trust is ninety-nine percent of what makes being in love so magical. To know you’ll be cared for in sickness and in health. To know they accept you…regardless of your flaws and—”

“Trust is the one reason I will never be in love.” His gaze flickered to my lips before narrowing back on mine.

“You’re already in love, Sullivan Sinclair. You’re just too chicken to admit it.”

His eyes snapped closed.

His fingers dug into my cheeks until I tasted blood. “I suggest you stop antagonising me before I do something we’ll both regret.”

“You’re already doing something you’ll regret.” I poked his unrelenting temper with a stupid twig of truth. I knew Sully had the potential of exploding. Of cracking the very earth I stood on, of suffocating me in smoke, of burying me in lava.

But it didn’t stop me.

It only made me wilder, stupider, reckless and careless and desperate.

Desperate to stop him from being such a stubborn asshole.

My temper had always gotten me into trouble. I’d kept it silent in Mexico. I’d done my best to keep it tethered around this man with unfortunate results.

But here?

Now?

I couldn’t contain the tempest inside me. I was the sea whipped by the wind. I was the sky pierced by lightning.

This could get me killed.

Or…it could save us from a mistake that would ruin both of us for life. Because if he did this—if he gave me to another man after our hearts had tangled into this messy, tricky chaos, then he would lose me.

As surely as I’d lost him.

Men in love don’t share.

Men like Sully, who wore possession like expensive diamond cufflinks, did not rent out the woman they’d chosen.

If he could do this.

If he could give me to another.

Then…what I felt for him was a lie.

And what he made me think he felt in return was the worst kind of forgery.

This whole damn island was full of deceit and distortion and the very myths he traded in.

And I was done trying to yank at the curtain, doing my best to get it to tumble down, frantic with the need to shatter the illusion Sully had trapped himself in.