The Keeper.
Should have known he’d be concerned.
Hey, asshole. It’s noon and we haven’t heard a word from you. Everything good?
Nope. I was completely and utterly fucked.
I tapped out a vague reply to Zee. Yep. Everything is good.
Immediately it buzzed again. You didn’t come home last night.
I resisted rolling my eyes. The kid was a sharp one.
Another text came in right behind the last.
You with Shea?
Yeah, I answered.
Your girl okay?
My girl. What the fuck? Should have known Zee wouldn’t leave it alone.
Memories from last night went careening through my head. The way Shea had looked at me when I’d undressed in front of her, seeing beneath all the hard and cold and scarred.
My chest tightened, a painful squeeze of my lungs.
My girl.
Maybe in another lifetime, if I’d chosen another path, if I’d made a million different choices.
She was shaken up, but okay, I returned.
Okay, man, keep us posted.
Will do.
Stuffing my phone back in my pocket, I roamed Shea’s living room, looking at the pictures on the walls, the books crammed into the bookshelves, the basket of toys in the corner on the floor.
Home.
And I was invading it, putting a blemish on the safety of this place, but I didn’t know how to stop.
I drifted over to the baby grand. With my index finger, I struck one key. The sound rang through the room, and my ear tilted when that hidden place inside me thrashed, pushing from the inside out.
Music had always been my peace.
Drawn, I sat down on the hard bench and my fingers began to move lightly across the keys. Instinctual. I kept my voice barely more than a whisper as I fumbled through the words I’d written for Shea just days before, feeling something bleeding out from within. I got lost in it, in her song and her depth and some kind of fucked-up shame, because I knew I’d done this, was responsible for everything Shea and I were stumbling through. Because I couldn’t find the willpower to stay away.
She was my weakness.
I froze when I felt the presence behind me. The song slowly blinked out, the last note lingering in the dense air, before I slowly looked over my shoulder to find Shea. Thoughtful eyes met mine in all their warmth—covering me, pulling me in, dragging me under.
“You play,” she said, a statement rather than a question.
“A little,” I said with a shrug.
She scoffed. “I would hardly classify that as a little.” She shuffled toward me, barefoot, and still wearing that robe. “You have a beautiful voice,” she whispered, and again it took on that reverent tone, like she was recognizing something inside me I didn’t see.
She ran her fingers up the back of my neck and into my hair, and I lifted my head to it and tried not to moan like a girl when she pressed her hot mouth to my Adam’s apple, kissing me there like the temptress she was.
“Such a beautiful, beautiful voice for a beautiful, beautiful man.” The words vibrated against my throat.
“Shea.” My response was hoarse, uttered toward the ceiling as she kissed up and down my throat. With her daughter’s innocent face running like a reel through my mind, I searched inside myself for some kind of resolve. For courage. For a speck of integrity. “I should go. I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t have stayed. Shouldn’t have come back.”
Never should have come in the first place.
“You’re exactly where I want you to be,” she coaxed against my skin.
“Shea.” It was a plea for one of us to find reason.
“Please,” she whispered, hands sinking into my shoulders.
Weak.
Weak.
Weak.
That’s what she made me.
Groaning, I gave, because she already had me, and I swiveled a fraction, grabbed her by the hips, and pulled her onto my lap. She was quick to straddle me, a smile taking over her face as I palmed her ass, all those waves of shiny soft hair falling down around us.
“It’s hardly fair, you know,” she said.
“What’s not fair?”
“You…looking the way you do. Then you turn around and have a voice like that? Singing and playing that way?” She pulled back with a grin. “Tell me you don’t play guitar. You know what they say, a man with a guitar automatically becomes ten times sexier than any other guy in the room.”
I curbed a snort.
Didn’t I know it.
And that was exactly the shit I’d come to hate.
“Pair that with this face and this body…” she continued, purely playful.
Any other girl started talking like that and I’d have tossed her from my lap.
Instead, I kneaded my fingers deeper into the flesh of her ass, rocking her into my cock that was at the ready and begging for more.
Shivers rolled through her. “…and I would say you’re irresistible, Sebastian Stone.”