Ripped

  I want to weep in gratitude when I realize they’re finally no longer my enemies. How could they be? They’re letting me take over.

  I glide my fingers up the muscles of Mackenna’s back, slowly, sinuously pressing my body to over six feet of pure, hard male. I feel the supple muscles tense beneath my fingertips, and I feel, rather than see, his sharp inhale of breath when I brush my hand up his front.

  Do you recognize me, you fucking god? Do you?

  Pressing my lips to his skin, I graze his shoulder with my teeth, nipping him playfully. Then I can’t take it any longer and I swipe out my tongue, tasting him.

  He curls one arm around my waist and tugs me around, not missing a beat as he continues singing. Circling him while making sure the most parts of my body connect with his, I step in front of him. Shamelessly I press my lips to his chest as I move with him.

  That’s right, it’s me. And I’m going to rock your fucking world like you rock mine, Mackenna Jones.

  I slowly move my body against his, pressing my tongue to his puckered brown nipple. Circling. Rubbing the hard little point. Letting him know, in front of all these people, that I want him.

  I trail my hands over his muscles, thinking how perfect he is. I’m always so reserved and contained, but he’s the one I want, the one I love, and I want him to know it. He pulls me hard against him and rocks me at his side, running his hand down my body. That wasn’t scripted. None of it. The way he squeezes my ass. The way that, between those hot, rumbling lyrics, I feel the heady sensation of his lips against my neck. He’s stealing touches every moment he can. In charge of things. Of his song. The dance. Me.

  He swings me around to face away from him, then pulls me back to him and swoops me so my hair falls away and I’m arched with my head hanging back.

  Silence falls.

  Catching his breath, he lets me straighten and touches my forehead slightly with his. Before he knows what hits him, I anxiously tug his microphone down to his chin and press my lips to his. His mouth—so familiar, so hot, so wanted—was waiting for mine. He kisses me harder than he’s ever kissed me, until my lips and mouth—my every cell—are burning like fire. The lights flare, and there’s a silence as we keep going, our heads slanting to one side, then the other, our kiss only stoking our desire.

  Then I pull away and caress his jaw with all ten of my fingers, and whisper into his mouth, “You’re mine. I claim you. I love you. You’re mine.”

  The fans roar behind me. Holy shit, I forgot all those people were there. I face the ecstatic crowd, my lips lifting at the corners. When I turn back around and my wide eyes meet his wolf ones, I want to weep with the raw emotion I see there.

  How do you tell the guy you love how much you love him and how badly you fucked up?

  I wait a breath or two, until my quickened pulse has quieted. Then I slip a small note in his hand and whisper in his ear, “Meet me at this hotel. There’s a key waiting. Please come.”

  I turn to leave, but he spins me around by my wrist, growling out one word: “Wait.”

  He plants a harder kiss on me, pushing his tongue in to connect with mine and triggering sparks across my nerve endings and bolts of lightning to my toes. Releasing me, he smacks my rump to send me on my way.

  “Now that,” he murmurs in the sexiest, roughest voice ever as he addresses his fans, “was Pandora.”

  My smile hurts my face as I hear a roar erupt from his fans. And I carry this smile as I retrieve my suitcase from the roadie and take a cab to the hotel.

  ♥ ♥ ♥

  I’M SO NERVOUS. So excited. I think this is what cardiac patients must feel like when their hearts start acting “different.”

  I’ve never been so nervous or excited in my life.

  Even when I stole from my bed to see him at night . . .

  Rushed to the window to receive him . . .

  Reliving, in my bed, my very first kiss with him . . .

  After he saved me from the school bullies. After I held his hand outside court. The night I met him at the docks, where, before we even said hello, before a word was spoken, he pushed away from the column he’d been leaning against and I picked up my pace, and before we knew it I was in his arms and he was in mine, our lips locked and moving, hot and fast, our breath wild, our hands moving. “You came,” he murmured, holding my face and kissing my temple, chin, cheek, nose.

  “Always,” I whispered back, clutching his jaw and loving how his hands felt big on my face, like he still had a couple of inches to grow into them.

  I loved him like crazy then. But that level of crazy is nothing compared to now!

  Melanie would be proud. Hell, Brooke would be proud. Even Magnolia would be proud.

  I pace around the hotel room as I wait for him, then I go check my appearance in the mirror. Fuck. Do I look stupid? I put on some earrings and switch my boots for a pair of heels, and I paint my nails pink instead of the dark purple-black I usually wear. I exchange my leather jacket for a soft white silk top too. God, it’s so obvious I want to please him. Because I like it when he calls me “Pink.” I want to look girly and soft, but . . .

  Okay, fine. Let it look obvious that I want him. He called me his vampire queen . . . and I want him to be my king. For him to take a chunk right out of my heart, bleed me out, and carry me to his bedchamber. Lair. Wherever he fucking wants!

  I’m pacing around, rubbing my bare arms, when I hear the click! of the door. I swing around, feeling like some stupid eighteenth-century maiden, about to swoon.

  Because he’s swoony, swoon, swoon, right here, in my hotel room.

  My rockstar.

  A rush of emotion sweeps through me when he shuts the door and just stands there, looking at me with those greedy silver eyes that want to eat me up, inch by inch. Rivulets of sweat drip down his chest. He’s wearing a pair of white jeans with a silver belt—looking very much the rockstar. His wrist is covered in thick cuffs, and the silver ring on his thumb glints in the light. A visceral tug jerks me on the inside as I think of how much I want to feel that silver ring brush against me. My chin, lips, my nipples, my sex. God, yeah—why stop at my lips when I can feel it trail deliciously everywhere?

  “You came.” The gruff tone makes my skin pebble.

  He takes the first step toward me, but I raise my hand to stop him and blurt out, “Kenna, we can’t have a future if you don’t . . . if you don’t really know who I am. What I did. When you left me.”

  He laughs softly and drags his hand over his delicious buzz cut in a way that drives me crazy. “I made a mistake too, Pandora,” he tells me, his eyes shining with regret as he takes in the visual of me like I’m some sort of vision he can barely believe. He spreads his arms out. “Baby, we were young, and that’s all right, we know better now. We won’t hurt each other anymore. I had no future, nothing to offer you, I still shouldn’t have walked away, no matter what you said . . .”

  “You! You had you to offer me, Kenna.”

  He stares as I extend my hand to show him the ring he gave me. I’m wearing it, proudly, on my finger. And don’t I wish that I could be just as proud of my words.

  “I know what my mother did,” I painfully whisper. “I didn’t then, but I do now.”

  He stares more, eyebrows pulling low over his eyes.

  “Mackenna,” I say, my voice turning huskier and darker, “everything you think you know about me, everything you could possibly feel, it could go away right now.”

  A flash of wild grief grips me as I pause for breath and he murmurs, “The way I feel isn’t going anywhere. It’s not changing. It’s not ending. It’s . . .”

  “Kenna, I suck. I suck—”

  “Whoa, baby.” He stops me with an incredulous laugh. “Call me any names you want, but I’ll be damned if I let you sit there and insult my girl like that—”

  “I was pregnant, Kenna.”

  The words drop on him like a bomb.

  I can’t go on for a moment, a spurt of anxiety seizing me. I mea
sure him for a moment—how still he is.

  “When you left, I was pregnant,” I force myself to finish.

  The shock holds him immobile, while the pain quietly cracks me open. This is my box. The box of bad things Pandora should never open. Here it is, every last part tearing out of my soul so that the one person I want to love and accept me will know.

  “What the fuck are you saying, Pandora?” His voice is distant already. It’s one hundred percent disbelief.

  Oh, the look on his handsome face. I will remember it every day to my death. The morphing of his eyes from silver to shocked gray. The lines of his perfect features freezing in disbelief.

  It takes every ounce of courage in me to breathe out the rest. “We have a little girl.”

  He keeps standing an inch away, his chest not expanding at all, not even for air.

  “She’s a little younger than Magnolia. It was a closed adoption.” I can barely look at him, watch his eyebrows slant, his lips thin, his jaw clamp. “I gave her up, Kenna,” I choke out, the hardest five words I’ve ever had to utter in my life.

  He hasn’t breathed. Or moved. Nothing. I’m hugging myself just to keep my body from falling apart.

  “It kills me not to know . . . ,” I continue in this wretched whisper. “I don’t know if she has your eyes or mine. I don’t know if she’s happy. If she belongs . . . or not. But I know I needed you with me. I needed you to take us away. I didn’t want to be weak and give her up, but I couldn’t do it. Mother said I couldn’t do it. And I was frightened, and I felt betrayed, and so I gave her up . . . like I thought you’d given up on me.”

  I can’t look at him. He’s too still, too silent, curling his fingers into his palms at his sides, his knuckles white.

  His lack of reply frightens me.

  He will never, ever love you again, Pandora . . .

  Never call you “baby” again, or “Pink,” as if that’s your name and despite your darkness, you own it . . .

  “That’s why I switched schools,” I continue. I scrape my nails over my arms, up and down, up and down. “And met my new friends. Melanie and Brooke, and Kyle.”

  He’s staring at me like I’ve just ripped his heart out, for real.

  And I’m about to cry for the first time in six years.

  “I was going to abort. I had nothing to offer her on my own.” On some level I knew, somehow I knew, once I talked about this to someone, to him, it was going to burst out of me, and now it’s like squeezing the toothpaste out of a tube—you cannot put it back. And like the toothpaste, my confession is oozing out of me nonstop. “But I was underage, and the clinic contacted my mother. That’s how she found out that I was pregnant. And even if what my mother did to keep us apart was wrong . . . using your father against you . . . she’s not evil. She’d just lost my father and she was consumed with worry over losing me too. She wanted me to have the baby. She said there were parents out there, better parents, who could give our baby a better chance. So I said yes, but . . .”

  I clutch my stomach.

  “But I didn’t know I’d grow so attached to her in those nine months. She was a part of you and I loved her for it, but it hurt having her inside me too because you left Seattle without me.” I glance away and then back at him, keeping my eyes in the vicinity of his throat, where I see his pulse pounding hard and violently.

  “I signed a form to say that I wouldn’t try to find her, but I know she’s out there. We will never know if she’s bullied or has friends, or if she knows who she is. Never know if she has a good mother, because no matter how good they might have looked on paper, what if she didn’t get a good mother? She was probably better than me, but I still . . .” I lift my eyes to his, and I think the hurt, impotence, and pain in them mirror the way I feel. “I wonder if she fits. Maybe she’s grumpy, like me, and people don’t understand her. Or maybe she’s restless, like you. Or she could be beautiful and musical and fun, like you.”

  Okay, I can’t keep going, but when I stop all I hear is Mackenna’s voice, cracking as he speaks.

  “Pink,” he says, then he clears his throat and shakes his head, falling silent for a long moment, dropping his head as he breathes, in and out, in and out. “Your mother came to me—”

  “Kenna, I know,” I admit, taking a step toward him. “I owe you an apology.”

  “No, Pink. I owe you six fucking years. I owe you being there for you and for her—”

  “No, I waited too long to tell you, and then you were . . . gone. And you were famous. You were making your dreams come true, and I couldn’t tell you anymore. If you didn’t want me, I was sure you wouldn’t want her.”

  “Baby, I would’ve come to you. I fucking loved you.” He pulls me into his arms, and I feel how hard he’s shaking, how much my news has rocked him. I tighten my arms around his waist and kiss his thick neck, and all I can do is kiss it again, and again, as he stands there holding me, his emotions barely contained in his taut, straining body. “We have a daughter,” he whispers almost reverently in my ear.

  “We lost a daughter,” I whisper, hanging my head in shame.

  He catches my chin and lifts my face to his.

  “We made a daughter,” he corrects.

  There’s a spike in my very throat, but I manage to speak through it. “Yes.”

  Clouds suddenly darken his eyes. “My girls needed me . . . but I wasn’t there. I was hurting. A rebel, unwanted, writing a stupid song about how much I loathed your kiss.” He rubs my lips with that silver ring that I crave so much, and my whole body shivers. “When really, your kiss was all I wanted. One more kiss from you. For these lips to tell me their owner loved me.”

  “We can’t see her . . . can’t talk to her. You have no idea how much I regret it.”

  “We will talk to her,” he assures me with steely finality, his ring still skimming over my chin and my neck. “I’ll find a way for us to talk to her.”

  Love flows through me. For years I haven’t dared even hope . . . but now I can’t help feel anything but hope. “You don’t hate me?” I hesitate for a second but can’t stop my hands from sliding up the back of his neck to his head.

  He laughs bitterly, biting his lip uncertainly for a moment before lifting his gaze to mine. “I’ve hated you, your mother, my father, being apart from you . . . I’ve hated all that I could for as long as I could, but I’m fresh out of hate, Pink.” He’s still biting his lip, his eyes a mix of regret and, above all, acceptance. “I love you,” he whispers. “So we screwed up. We screwed up big. Holy shit, but I don’t want to screw up again. Do you?”

  “No, god, no.”

  “Then do you love me? And I mean for real, Pink, the nonstop kind.”

  This is the thousandth time he’s asked me if I love him.

  My heart quakes in my chest in response.

  I close my eyes, gathering my courage.

  “Come on, babe. Only three words.” He brushes my ear with his lips, his voice urgent, almost pleading. “They’re like magic. Say them, and good things start happening.”

  “I said them to you in front of thousands of people, you greedy man,” I whisper-laugh, then, completely serious, “Kenna, I haven’t said them to a man in my entire life, except to my dad, and look what he did to us.”

  “Holding back those words wouldn’t have made it hurt any less.” He strokes the pink strand of my hair between his thumb and index finger. “So, he made a mistake. Difference is, he didn’t have a chance to fix it—but we do. Come on, Pink, say it, tell me. The next couple of decades, you will say those words to me, and that’s a promise I’m making to you right now. Now, tell me that you love me.”

  “I fucking do!”

  His laugh is deep, delicious. “You still won’t say the ‘L’ word?” he asks. “After all we’ve been through? All these years apart, when we could’ve been together?”

  The quivers in my heart are spreading down my limbs too.

  Love.

  It’s just one word.

>   But when it’s so real and true and you feel it in your heart, when it has hurt you and you’re afraid to lose it again, it becomes more than just one word. It becomes everything. Everything this man is to me.

  Quietly, suddenly, Mackenna ducks his head and slips his fingers into the straps of my top, then eases it off my shoulders. He kisses my bare skin, his lips both loving and tender, and the kiss crashes against my walls like a wrecking ball. When I make a soft whimper of pain, he lifts his head and his gaze is a whirlwind of contrasts, framed by desire and need.

  “It’s going to be all right, Pink, I promise,” he whispers. “She’ll know that we love her.” Strong, gentle hands curl around the back of my head as he kisses my forehead. We stay there for a moment, quietly mourning, when soft, fevered kisses start raining down on my face—more feverish and wetter by the second, and when he lets go a low wolf’s growl, I know that he needs me. He needs to be close. To feel our connection. To reestablish it. God, I need it too.

  “Do you need me like I need you?” I ask him quietly, almost pleadingly. “Do you plan to gorge on every inch of me like I plan to gorge on every inch of you?”

  His words are textured, his face intently serious. “Have I ever given you doubt that I won’t?”

  I shake my head and then, because I need him, because I want him, because I love him, I slowly peel off my top.

  I need him now more than ever. I need to know he’s here for me, and I need to show him I’m here for him. I need to feel his love like it’s his forgiveness . . .

  Something my mother never taught me, but Mackenna will.

  Because of the way he looks at me now—accepting me with all my darkness and all my pink as he lifts my hand and looks at the ring I’m wearing—I know he feels my acceptance like a brand as well.