“To look at ya there’s not much about us,” he said pensively, studying my face. “But in here,” he knocked his knuckles against my chest, over my heart, “yer a Coulter through and through.”

  “Aye, yer one of us, lad,” Owen agreed with a grin, “whether ya like it or not.”

  I smiled, stumbling on my feet as Owen pulled me into a crushing hug that felt like a balm on every tired, shaking muscle in my frigid body. I wasn’t ready for the embrace and I definitely wasn’t ready for the tears that stung my eyes when he let me go. I tried to hide them, tried to look down and surreptitiously wipe them from my face before they saw them, but Owen had his mom’s keen eyes. He caught them and my shoulders, holding me firm.

  “Listen here, Kellen.” His tone was gentle but severe. “Ya don’t need to be ashamed with us. Not of nothin’, definitely not yer joy. We’re yer family. Yer clann. We’d foit for ya. Die for ya ‘cause that’s what a man does.” He shook me roughly, making me lift my watery eyes to his. “Ya live hard, ya love harder, and ya put your family first above everythin’ else. That’s what makes ya a man. And if yer not afraid to cry o’er the fullness of your heart, well, that’s what makes ya an Irishman.”

  I looked at him for too long. Longer than I normally could have stood, but then I tossed my body against his and embraced him hard the way he’d hugged me and I let the tears fall from my eyes. I let my heart overflow onto my face, into the night, and I’d never felt more fulfilled in my life.

  I’d never felt more whole.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Jenna

  “It’s an ocean,” Kellen commented drolly.

  “I suspected it might be.”

  “Do you know how I knew?”

  “You’re a genius?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Enough. You’re genius enough, trust me. I feel it every time we watch Jeopardy.”

  “But the ocean,” he prodded.

  “Oh, right, yes. The ocean. How did you know?”

  “It’s made of water.”

  “Yes.”

  “And there are waves.”

  “Whoa,” I breathed in amazement. I put my hands on the sides of my head, mimicking a burst from my skull. “Boom. Mind blown, buddy.”

  He grinned. “I thought you’d like that.”

  “I love learning.”

  “Not French.”

  “No.”

  “And not Gaelic.”

  “For fu—“ I snapped, exasperated. “We’ve been here three days. How have you learned so much of it in three days?”

  “I thought you said I was a genius,” he laughed.

  “You passed genius a long time ago. You’re a friggin’ witch at this point.”

  “Warlock,” he corrected.

  I shoved him hard in the shoulder, toppling him onto his side in the grass. He was quick to grab me, pulling me down with him until I lay there next to him on the cold earth with the ocean at my back, his body at my front, and the low afternoon sky hovering in swirling clouds above us.

  We were alone on the cliff overlooking the sea. We’d borrowed Owen’s car and taken a drive together to find it. To see it for his mother the way we planned six months ago when we sat overlooking another ocean on another day that felt like a million miles and minutes from where we were now.

  Yesterday we’d spent the day with Mason on a tour of Dublin, checking out the Guinness factory, having lunch by the River Liffey, wandering the campus of Trinity College. We’d ended the day at a pub with some of his ‘mates’, two of whom were intensely British. It shed a lot of light on the bastardization of his accent.

  Today I wanted to make sure we saw this, the ocean, because I knew Kellen wanted it but he’d never ask for it. It was too much to talk about. We hadn’t mentioned his mom as we sat there – now laying there – but she was in the air. She was on his mind and I knew it by the way he got quiet. Not cagey the way he did over the abuse, but melancholy. Almost sullen.

  Kind of like he was right now with his brows pinched together and his dark eyes brewing something sinister behind them.

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  His face instantly cleared. “What’s what?”

  “What were you thinking about?”

  He didn’t answer. He looked out at the sea again and he avoided my eyes, but I shook him gently, unwilling to let it go.

  “She would have loved to see you with your family like this,” I told him.

  The scowl returned. “You don’t know that.”

  “I can imagine, though. She’d want you to be happy.”

  “Then she should have sent me here to them before she died.”

  “She didn’t know them, Kellen.”

  “She didn’t know the people in the foster system either,” was his barbed reply.

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t know how to defend a woman I’d never met so I stopped trying. I lay there next to him, my body hugged loosely to his by his arm, and his eyes on the horizon.

  I was cold. I’d made a mistake with what I wore, not anticipating the shift in the weather from chilly to downright cold as balls. I wore three layers – tank top, long tunic, and jacket – over thin black leggings that were letting the cold from the ground seep into my hip. Into my legs. I had regrets, but coming here with Kellen was not one of them.

  I knew he was angry at his mom. I’d known for a while, even though he never talked about it. This right now, this frustration, was the closest I’d ever seen and to be honest it scared me. Madeline was the one person in the world he’d ever trusted with his whole heart and ever since he found out that she’d kept him from his birth father even as she knew she was dying, he had a thorn in his paw. One that was festering. Infected and angry. Aching.

  “I wish—“ He paused, taking a breath. The scowl deepened. “I wish I could ask her why. Why did she work so damn hard to keep me away from my dad? And if she knew she was dying and she knew we had family in Ireland why didn’t she send me to them? Why didn’t she at least contact them and tell them what was happening?”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but Kellen wasn’t done.

  “She had to have a reason. She had to. She loved me. She wouldn’t have just quit on me. I was only a— Fuck.”

  “You were only a kid,” I supplied quietly.

  He nodded. “Yeah. I was a kid. I was alone. She took me out of Vegas like she was trying to make sure I didn’t end up with my dad, but why? How bad could he have been that she wanted me alone instead of with him?”

  “Ask him.”

  His eyes flickered to mine, then darted away. “No.”

  “He’s the only one who knows,” I reminded him slowly. “He’s the only one who was there. Just him and your mom and she can’t answer these questions, but maybe he can.”

  “If I go see him I’ll just end up in jail again.”

  “You won’t.”

  “I’d hit him, Jenna,” he insisted.

  “Why?”

  He chuckled darkly, then fell silent. I wasn’t sure if it was because he didn’t have an answer or if he didn’t want to voice it. With Kellen it could go either way.

  I decided to try a different tack. I decided to answer for him. “You’re angry at him because your mom was angry at him. You don’t know why. You’re following the leader. Your mom was your world and who she loved, you loved. Who she hated…”

  I could see the wheels turning, picking up speed. His breathing became harsher, more labored. Angry.

  “You need answers,” I reminded him, unwilling to let up. “You always want to know why and how. You read books on subjects you don’t give two shits about, but you still want to know just for the sake of knowledge, and of all things you have to know this, Kellen. Finding out the why on her hate toward him might answer the why on her isolating you, and you need that. You want that for her as much as for yourself. Probably more.”

  He looked at me hard. He didn’t hide behind a mask the way he usually did. He let me see his anger, his displeasure. His frustration and annoyance, and some of it was for me, but it was because I was right. That I could live with.

  “I don’t want to like him,” he told me coldly.

  “You don’t have to like him to talk to him.”

  “I’m still going to punch him in the face.”

  “If he’s been a gambler in Vegas all these years I doubt it’ll be the first time.”

  “You’re going with me.”

  “Whether you like it or not.”

  He sighed, tightening his hold on my body, pulling it closer. “I have to stop sitting by the ocean with you. You talk me into the craziest shit.”

  “Don’t worry,” I soothed him, smiling against his neck as I burrowed closer. “There are no oceans in Nevada. You’ll be safe.”

  Kellen ran his hand through my hair, down my back. “Are you cold?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “We can go back.”

  “I’m happy here. I like being alone with you for now.”

  “For now?” he laughed, his body shaking mine.

  “You get tiresome after a while.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “Whatever, dude, I’m awesome and you know it.”

  “You certainly seem to.”

  I lifted my head to look at him, a smile on my lips and a quip coming behind them, but then he kissed me and I was lost. I was lost to his lips and his breath and his taste. To his arms tightening around me like a vise and his scent in my nose like a drug. Like a shot to my veins that sent me flying.

  Kellen kissed me fervently, as though he had just realized that, yes, we were alone. No one could see us or hear us. No one was looking and he could take his time. He could take whatever he wanted.

  His hand fell down my back farther and farther until it found my ass, cupping it through the thin material of the leggings and hiking me higher, harder against him. I groaned into his mouth, bringing his tongue out to taste it. To taste me and my breath going staccato as my leg wrapped around his waist and his fingers followed the curve. He pulled it higher, followed it back down, and teased over the sensitive center of my body that begged him to find it.

  I whimpered when he didn’t. When he brought his hand up to my hip and slipped it under my shirt. Up, up, and up to my bra. Pulling it down, down, down until I was exposed and open. Until he could dance his fingertips over the peaks waiting hard and ready. Until he could hold me in his rough palm and tighten my entire body from this one point. From one hard squeeze of his hand.

  I went rigid. Unpliable and demanding, my hands groping against his clothes, looking for skin. For heat. For him.

  “Stay with me Kellen,” I pleaded, my mouth moving over his face. Over the rough stubble that scratched and burned and brought me to life there in the cold. “Stay with me the way you did that morning.”

  He groaned. “It wasn’t all the way.”

  “I don’t care. It was enough.”

  “It’s not.”

  “It is. You were with me.”

  He breathed hard through his nose, pulled my head close to his until our foreheads touched and it nearly hurt how hard he held me. “And when I started to feel that feeling, that fear, I bailed. I always bail. I’m a coward, Jenna. I can’t help it. I’m sorry.”

  I bit my lip, wanting to scream. Wanting to cry out, but I didn’t because it wouldn’t help. It wouldn’t change anything. I could never take away the fear he had when it came to sex. No matter how sweet I was, how comforting, how helpful, no matter how much he loved me, I could never make him feel safe enough. The fear would always, always be there between us.

  Unless—

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Kellen

  “You’re not scared when you’re in the ring, are you?” Jenna asked excitedly.

  I frowned, not sure where she was going with this. “No. I’m too angry. It takes over. It blots everything else out and all I know is what I am and what I feel in that moment.”

  “Then give me that part of you.”

  “No,” I denied adamantly. “You don’t want that.”

  “I do. I do because I want you and whether you see it or not, it’s all you, Kellen. Every part.”

  Her words were echoes of Ben’s¸ insisting I could fragment myself in my mind as much as I wanted but I could never escape the fact that every piece of me was in fact me. I could run as far and fast as I could but I’d never outrun myself.

  “The animal…” I started, unsure how to explain it to her. “It’s not nice. It’s how I vent out all the shit I can’t deal with. Everything that’s too much and too big I feed to that part of me and it burns it away in this cloud of…”

  Her eyes lit up hopefully. “Passion.”

  “No. Quit trying to make it nice.”

  “But it could be.”

  “It can’t—“

  She sat up suddenly and straddled my lap, her hands on my chest and her eyes pouring down into mine. “It could be,” she whispered.

  Her hips shifted forward slowly, then back, grinding her body on mine. I closed my eyes against the rising of my blood. My pulse, my body. My everything. She moved again, so slowly like the tide and I remembered where we were, out in the open hidden only by a row of bushes from the road, and it only made me want her more.

  Jenna leaned forward and her lips touched my ear, her breath hot against my skin. “I want you to love me, Kellen.” She licked the outside of my lobe. “Love me hard.”

  My eyes opened, staring up at the gray sky. It shifted with the wind. Transformed and changed, dark clouds rolling in quickly. Running. Racing.

  “Are you serious?” I asked her, my voice low and husky. Rough on every edge.

  She reached for my hand, pulled it between us, and pressed my palm to the thin material of her leggings. It was hot. Wet.

  “Do I feel serious?”

  She felt like everything. Every sweet, delicious thing the world had ever known was rolled up in Jenna Monroe and as she ground herself against my hand I wondered if she wasn’t every wicked thing as well.

  I fluttered my fingers just barely, only vaguely touching her, and her mouth fell open on a languorous sigh that cut the brakes and barreled me forward.

  If she wanted to try this, I’d try it. If she wanted all of me, I’d give it to her.

  If she wanted the animal, I’d give her the animal.

  I let it take over the way I always did it – slow and by degrees. I ran my free hand up her side, reaching under her shirt gently and tickling her skin, making her squirm. She smiled down at me, her long hair framing her face, cascading over her breasts, and I watched it move as my hand found her bare under her shirt and cupped her delicately.

  She sighed, running her hands up over my chest as she leaned into my touch. I was gentle with her. Patient. I let her come to me, let her set the pace, and slowly she started moving against me again. I kept my hand underneath her but I could feel the pressure everywhere. It built inside of me. It took hold in my gut, in the itch in my hands as I moved them over her, never able to get enough.

  I squeezed her harder, making her shudder. Making her moan. I moved my hand against her core, forward and back in the opposite direction of her thrusts to make them longer. Make them work her harder. She whimpered in the back of her throat.

  I stepped out of the animal’s way.

  It wasn’t the same as it was in the ring. It felt different because I was different. Jenna was different from my opponents. But what was the same at the core, what made it work, was the tension. The buildup, the burning inside of me that screamed for a release. That looked up at Jenna in all her beauty and glory and demanded that we destroy her. That we shatter her into a million pieces hoarsely screaming our name.

  My name.

  I flipped her over onto her back, taking her by surprise. That was familiar. That sent a roar of excitement through my chest – the round, shocked eyes staring back at me. I got that look a lot in the ring and it made it all so much easier. It made it feel right.

  And it made me feel sorry for her because she hadn’t seen anything yet.

  I knelt between her legs, reached down to where her leggings kept her from me, and I ripped the seam straight up the middle.

  She gasped in astonishment, her eyes going even wider, but she didn’t protest. She didn’t complain.

  I ran my hand down the open, tattered material, feeling the soft purple cotton underwear underneath. She was closer, so much closer, but still too far away. I slipped my finger under the elastic band near the inside of her thigh and I pulled it aside, opening her up to me. Then I teased her. I tortured her. I pushed her to the ropes, backed her into a corner where she was defenseless and breathless, all strategy lost and control slowly slipping away. But before she could fall apart I retreated. I gave her space and a fighting chance and she glared at me menacingly.

  “You fight dirty,” she breathed scathingly.

  I smiled, but I didn’t speak.

  Instead I slowly unbuttoned my pants. Lowered the zipper one notch at a time, letting her watch. Letting her know. I showed my hand because it was a winner. Because this was my round to lose.

  Just as I reached for her the clouds let loose. It started to rain in a fine mist that wetted her hair, her face, making her skin glisten with a dewy sheen that soaked her white shirt and showed me everything she was hiding underneath. The outline of her bra, the swell of her breasts, the brilliant colors of ink on her skin muted by the veil of fabric. She half-closed her eyes against the falling drops and I leaned over her to protect her. I shielded her from the rain and the wind, from the world, and I gave her my heat and my heart as I lowered myself down on top of her. Inside her.

  The sound of her breath rushing out as I rushed in made me insane inside. It made me wild. It pushed me to do it again, to land that blow and hear her react. To milk every sound and screech and whimper from her throat that I could manage and throw it like gas on the fire. I sped up, taking her with me, and when she pushed her hands inside my shirt and dug her fingers hard into my back the wheels came off my control. I fell headlong into the fight. I wasn’t gentle. I wasn’t soft and loving. I was possessed, obsessed, but it was over her. It was Jenna and no one else. It was the love I felt for her, the desire I always carried when I looked at her, and not another woman on earth could have made me wild the way she did there on that cliff.