Total pages in book: 164
Estimated words: 156728 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 784(@200wpm)___ 627(@250wpm)___ 522(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 156728 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 784(@200wpm)___ 627(@250wpm)___ 522(@300wpm)
Her pulse quickened for reasons she couldn’t blame on proximity alone. She set down the comb, afraid that this was the start of an unwanted goodbye.
“I have something for you.” His warmth radiated through the thin cotton of her t-shirt.
“Something for me?”
“I should have sent it to you weeks ago, but…” His voice trailed off.
“What is it?” She couldn’t imagine what else he could possibly give her.
His hands rose slowly, passing over her head, and a delicate gold chain caught the light. Her breath seized in her throat as tears sprang to her eyes.
“My locket!”
“It was returned to me the night of the Feast.” His voice was quiet, almost reverent, as though he understood the gravity of what he held between his fingers.
He gathered her damp hair with one hand, lifting the weight of it from her neck with utter care. His knuckles grazed the nape of her neck as he draped the chain against her skin, and the cool kiss of gold settling into the familiar hollow of her collarbone flooded her with a sense of homecoming.
He worked the tiny clasp with patience that contradicted the size of his hands. His breath teased her skin, awakening her body once more. When the closure caught, he smoothed her hair, his palms trailing the length of it with a gentleness so deliberate it made her heart clench.
His hands lingered on her shoulders.
Daisy lifted the locket from her chest and pressed the tiny clasp with her thumbnail. The oval face opened and her mother smiled up at her, unchanged, undamaged, that familiar sepia warmth radiating from the photograph as though Pamela Burdan herself had been waiting patiently to be found.
She closed the locket and wrapped her fingers around it, pressing the warm metal into her palm. “Thank you.” The words were wholly inadequate for what he had returned to her.
She turned in his arms and kissed him, softly, her free hand resting against his open collar where his pulse beat steady and strong beneath her fingertips.
Her lips parted from his in reluctant increments, and the quiet that settled between them carried a different texture than the charged silence of the bedroom.
Softer. More uncertain.
The kind of stillness that preceded questions a person wasn’t sure they had the right to ask.
His face was so close she could count the faint lines at the corners of his eyes, the places where years of guarded expression had carved themselves into his skin.
He’d given her back a piece of her past, and that made her think of how little she knew about his. Six years old. Eight years of suffering before he escaped whatever monster tortured him. The mathematics of his pain were staggering, and the more she considered them, the more one detail snagged like a thorn in her mind.
“Jack, was R.A. a relative?” The people closest to children were often the ones who did the most damage.
His expression shuttered. “No.” His voice flattened to something clinical. “I don’t have a father.”
“Oh.”
The syllable hung between them, insufficient and clumsy. She could feel him receding, retreating into the fortified interior he had spent decades constructing, and the distance that opened between them in that small, awful pause felt wider than the weeks that had separated them.
“I… Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”
He studied her face with those perceptive silver eyes, reading the questions she was holding back the way he read everything about her, with an accuracy that left her nowhere to hide.
Without a word, he took her hand and led her from the bathroom to the bed, where he sat on the edge and pulled her down beside him.
“Ask.” His knee pressed against hers. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
“Are you sure?”
He nodded, ruthless determination rolling off him in waves. “I don’t want any secrets between us.”
She hesitated, sorting through the tangle of things she wanted to understand, discarding the questions that felt too invasive for an afternoon this gentle.
“Did you have a mother?”
The pain that flashed through his eyes was sharp and immediate, a flinch he couldn’t mask quickly enough.
“I did. She died twelve years ago.”
“Oh, Jack.” Thinking of her own grief, she caught his hand. “I’m so sorry—”
“Don’t be.” His tone carried no bitterness or self-pity. “She was a terrible mother.” His judgement was flat, the calcified surface of a wound that had scarred over long ago.
Protectiveness immediately overtook her sympathy. She didn’t ask why she was a terrible mother, because the way he said it told her everything.
Whatever his mother had done or failed to do, the verdict had been rendered years ago by a boy who needed a protector and clearly didn’t have one.
“How did she die?”
“Drugs.” He turned his palm in hers and gripped, his fingers closing around hers with a pressure that spoke louder than words. “She was an addict.”