Page 68 of House of Scarlett
I can’t even let her get another word out. No matter how fucking rude it is, I interrupt her to beat her to the punch. “I’ll go. You don’t have to tell me to leave.”
Her eyes widen, and a stricken expression crushes her features. “What? No!”
She rushes toward me and wraps her arms around my middle like she’s planning on physically holding me in place with only her brute strength. But she doesn’t need brute strength to level me. Her words do that all by themselves.
“I don’t want you to leave. Jesus Christ, Gabriel. Give me a goddamned second to process this, okay? I’ve always fought all my own battles. No man has ever been willing to go to the mat for me, so I don’t know how to handle this.”
Her tears soak into my shirt, and I wrap my arms around her.
How has no man ever been willing to fight for her?She’s the kind of woman who could cause a fucking riot without even trying. It’s one more blindingly bright fact to show that her father was a complete and total failure at protecting his little girl, and I fucking hate that for her.
“I won’t go.”
She looks up at me. “You’d better fucking not. I’ll just track you down and make you promise that when we’re in my house or on my doorstep, I get to have a say, and you will not run roughshod over me and pretend like I’m not even here. I don’t care who is at the door.”
“I can’t make that promise,” I tell her and watch as her face crumples.
“Why?”
“Because if someone with bad intentions comes and wants to make trouble, I’m your shield, Scarlett. I stand between you and the bad shit outside that door. It doesn’t touch you. I’ll give you all the respect you deserve and more, but I can’t lock that protective instinct away. I won’t. There’s too much ugliness in the world, and if it comes looking for you, it’ll find me instead.”
Forty
Scarlett
“Well, hell,”I whisper with a shake of my head. “How am I supposed to argue with that?”
I meet Gabriel’s eyes and stare into them for long enough to drown in the deep blue pools of swirling emotion.
He’s giving me the truth, not just the answer that will shut me up, and that alone tells me he’s different from every other man who has played a role in my personal life.
It’s not easy to hear that what you think you want isn’t what you’re going to get. But the longer I stand here in silence, the more my respect for Gabriel Legend grows.
He is who he is, unapologetically, and while I’ve been getting to know him better each day, there’s still so much more I want to understand.
What kind of hellfire does it take to forge a man who would throw himself in front of any danger so that it doesn’t touch what he cares about? My heart aches for what he’s been through, but I can’t help but marvel at the man he is.
Honorable. Forthright. Unflinching in his convictions.
Shit.Now I really want to climb him.
“You can argue all you want, ladybug, but—”
I move forward and press a finger to his lips to stop him. “I need you to kiss me. Right now. And hard.”
His brows dive together for a beat before that half smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. He doesn’t say another word as he reaches out to wrap both arms around me and pull me against his body.
His lips crash against mine, and it takes no time at all for his tongue to demand entrance. Like the emotions running high between us, the kiss iselectric.My nails bite into the skin at the back of his neck, and he responds by lifting me and carrying me to the sofa. Spinning around, he lands first, cradling me against his body as he frees a hand to spear into my hair.
We devour each other, lips melding to lips, tongues dueling, teeth nipping and scraping.
Before I lose myself completely to the kiss, one thought echoes through my brain—I don’t have to be strong every minute of the day with him. I can finally let go.
It’s a heady feeling, and I pour every ounce of it into the kiss, tugging his T-shirt up and scraping my nails across his bare skin. I want him so fucking badly that if I don’t touch him, I feel like I might lose my mind.
“Baby, someone’s coming in.”
I jerk my head up to look over at the door as the knob turns. For a split second, I consider not moving, because I don’t want to lose this feeling.
