“Did you mean it?” I reached out for him, and he took both of my hands in his.

  “Yes,” he said. I could see him now, and his eyes were running over every part of my face, examining every feature. Was he worried?

  “So did I,” I told him, and he sucked in a breath and pulled me closer, until we were only inches away from one another. “I want to be yours, I think—I think if today never happened, if I hadn’t met you this morning… If you hadn’t saved my life… I feel like maybe I would’ve met you at my job, or been in line behind you at the grocery store, or something. I don’t know how else to explain it. But you already belong to me, Dylan. And I belong to you. And that’s just the way it’s meant to be.”

  He was silent for a long while. “My mom used to say things like that. I never believed her.”

  “Do you believe her now?”

  He sat up, his long legs spilling over the edge of the bed, and looked up at the moon through the window. His profile was breath-takingly handsome. Dylan sat like that, so still I couldn’t even see his chest rise, and then he walked over to the dresser in the dark. I heard him rummage through a drawer before he came back to the bed and kneeled next to me. In the bright silver light, he looked like an avenging angel. His hands slid around mine and pulled me upright, so that my face was closer to his, and when he kissed me I felt him slip a cold ring of metal around my finger.

  “I believe her now,” he whispered, and pulled me back into the kiss.

  ~~~

  Epilogue

  Dylan

  Nothing made me happier than coming home.

  I loved my job—I’d liked it before, but when Jarvis and Crayden confessed that they’d basically hung on to Riley just so I would meet her, something changed. Jarvis told me he thought I might need closure, but Crayden rolled his eyes and said they both thought I just needed to get laid. “You’re so fucking uptight,” Jarvis told me, and I laughed out loud.

  “You think I’m uptight?”

  “You are,” he said, shrugging off my laugh as Crayden smirked at both of us. “You have a lot to prove—I get it,” he told me, and suddenly there wasn’t any laughter in the room. We’d never talked about it, but because they were both from my old neighborhood I knew they’d heard the rumors. I never wanted any of that shit to come to light—if my senior officers ever suspected I’d been involved in a shooting, even as a juvenile, I was afraid I’d lose everything I’d worked so hard for. Nobody knew about Shady; not even folks in the Terrace knew for sure. The rest of it was mostly public record. Everybody knew my dad died in prison, serving life for murder one; only people from the Terrace knew my dad went down for killing the guy who shot my mom. She was collateral in some beef between them, and I hadn’t been a good enough bodyguard to keep her safe from the life my father led. Everybody knew that story back in the Terrace; it was all part of the legendary life of Loco McIntyre. But I didn’t want any reminders of it here on the force.

  Jarvis surprised me by putting his hand on my shoulder. “You’re a great cop, dipshit. Take it easy on the rest of us—don’t patrol alone on Route One, don’t fucking take on any piece-of-shit kingpins by yourself, and stop doing your fucking paperwork so fast. Makes the rest of us look bad.”

  Things just changed, from then on. Crayden and Jarvis rotated patrol with me so I wasn’t alone, and they both stood in as partners when I needed one. Jarvis wanted me to work with another rookie, someone like me, fresh out of the Academy and from the old ‘hood, when it was time to get another permanent partner. He said there were four kids graduating later in the spring I could help, that they’d be good cops. Like me.

  We ate lunch with Crayden’s dad most days.

  And then I went home.

  When she started school in the fall, Riley would ride into town with me; she’d given her deposition at the station, and it looked like Damien’s trial would be brief and uneventful. He’d get twenty years for kid-napping and attempted murder, at minimum. Some garbage human being named Asher Lutz was the new king down at the Terrace; Riley told me she remembered him from elementary school, but they weren’t in the same circles. Thank god. So no one was looking for her, not any more.

  For now, Riley mostly stayed at home.

  And I loved my job—truly, I did, I loved having friends that understood me, and I loved the work itself—but I really, really loved coming home.

  I pulled up in the driveway and had to stop myself from running to the door. The dogs were lazy, padding around in the yard; my aunt left a little earlier after spending a couple days helping Riley plan the wedding this summer, and clearly the two of them fed the pooches a bit too much eggnog flavored doggy treats, or whatever the hell they’d cooked up. I made most of our meals, but lately Riley’d been getting in to baking. She said she thought she might sell cookies in town this summer, have a little side business. It would help pay her tuition.

  I didn’t worry about any of that. She could do whatever she liked, as long as she was here with me the rest of the time.

  I missed her all damn day.

  “Baby?” I slammed through the door, ready to get my hands on her. The last two nights that my aunt slept here I wasn’t able to be as close to Riley as I needed to be, and I felt the ache in my chest like an arrow piercing me. “Riley?”

  “Back here,” she called, and I walked down the hall to our bedroom and stepped inside.

  It was different now; everything was. The house looked lived in, yes, but it looked like it belonged to a happy pair of twin souls. She hadn’t wanted to change the paint color, but she made me take down all the curtains and blinds. It was bright inside now. Plants were growing all over the damn house, and she let the dogs sleep in the living room half the time. The kitchen smelled like her skin—like cinnamon and café con leche, one quarter coffee and three quarters cream. I came over to the bed and sat down next to her; she must have been napping. She’d been doing that a lot lately in the afternoons.

  “I love you,” she said softly, and the sun hit her golden eyes at just the right angle, so that she seemed like she was lit from within by fire.

  “I love you,” I whispered, and then I pulled the blankets down and got in next to her.

  She liked it when I wore the uniform sometimes; sometimes we pulled out the cuffs and got a little rough—well, rougher than I was usually, which is to say we’d broken a couple tables and chairs. I slid my hands over her body, her nipples peaking at my touch, then leaned down and kissed the tip. I didn’t want to be rough right now, though, in the sweet afternoon light; I wanted to be inside of her and feel her open like a new bud in a spring rain. I wanted it soft, and sweet.

  I pulled off my uniform and kneeled between her legs, looking down at her soft curves and the beautiful smile she gave me. Stroking her little opening for a moment, I found her wet and ready, and slid inside. She wrapped her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist, and I felt so good it almost hurt.

  We moved like that, gentle and slow, until her hips rocked into mine, asking for more, and her spine arched as she purred for me. I told her again that I loved her, that I needed her, that she was everything. I could never tell her enough. She kissed me until we both came, exchanging breath as I filled her inside, then lay down in a tangle on the bed.

  “I love her, but I’m glad she’s gone,” I said, tracing Riley’s lips with my fingertip. “Maybe we should put an extension on the house. Then we don’t have to be so quiet when she stays over.” My mother’s sister was not a prim woman, but Riley and I were both a little too private to share how we felt about each other in such a passionate way. We were having a very traditional wedding, except for all the cops and robbers who’d be attending. And her red wedding dress. I’d suggested gold, but she just winked and told me to wait for the honey-moon.

  Thinking about all of that made me want to—

  “Dylan, do you think you could do that?”

  “Hmm?” I stopped nibbling on her shoulder and looked up at her lovely face. “Do what now?”

  “Build an extension.”

  “Yeah, sure. Built this house, didn’t I?” I went back to work, but she leaned down and lifted my face up with her hands to meet hers. When she kissed me we almost got started again, but then she leaned back, her eyes focusing.

  “You’re distracting me,” she said softly. Her face wasn’t quite mischievous, but… Something was going on. “I think we might need to build one. That’s why I’m asking.”

  “She wants to move in?” I really did love her dearly, but—

  “No,” Riley said, and bit her lip. It made me lean forward once more, but something stopped me.

  “Riley? Baby? What were y’all talking about, if she’s not moving in?” I’d gotten her mom into a decent treatment center about a month ago, and we had high hopes. Shit, maybe we needed a couple of condos or something along the edge of the property.

  “We might need to move the wedding up,” she said slowly, and I watched her, waiting.

  “Alright,” I said. We were having it here. It was going to be a lot of fun, and the invitations didn’t go out for another month. That wasn’t such a big change.

  There must be something else.

  “And I think we’re going to need more room, like an extension or something,” she said quietly, watching me intently, “for when the baby comes.”

  I absorbed her words. It took me a while.

  “Are you sure?” My voice shook. Riley had tears in her eyes, the gold gleaming with them, the joy on her face so intense that it matched what I felt in my heart, the beauty and hope so crushing I had to catch my breath when she nodded.

  And I remembered one more time what Mama told me: love was the reason, she’d said, why all great things happened in the history of the world. Like you. You happened because of love.

  My mother bought herself that ring. It was made of gold, and cost her everything she saved—except the land where our house stood, the land where our children—her grandchildren—would grow up.

  “I want to tell you why I gave you that ring,” I whispered, thinking about how my mother told me that you needed to have the strength to love, always, to love yourself and the whole world too—to love it with hope, and good intentions. To be someone sure and strong and true. Someone who loved like I did, someone as pure as Riley was. Someone who hoped like Mama had.

  “Please,” Riley said, nodding at me, and I kissed her just as the sun set over her shoulder, painting the whole room in golden light, my whole life, I felt, shifting slowly towards gold, forever leaving grey behind.

  The End

  Kendall Duke’s Innocent Series

  Follow the links and don’t forget to leave a review! I hope you enjoy reading these sweet little books as much as I enjoyed writing them. I’ve included an excerpt from The Virgin and the Hero at the end of this book—check it out and if you like it, follow the link to enjoy the rest of the book on Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited.

  The Virgin and the Hero: A First Time Military Romance

  From the Flames: A First Time Steamy Romance

  The Rookie and the Virgin: A First Time Romance

  Heartbeats: A First Time Military Romance

  The Virgin and the Convict: An Alpha Bad Boy First Time Romance

  Her First Ride: A First Time Cowboy Romance

  The Surfer and the Virgin: An Alpha Bady Boy First Time Romance

  The Kissing Game: A Rock Star First Time Romance

  Other books by Kendall Duke:

  The Bodyguard Anthology: An Erotic Russian Alpha Romance Books 1-4

  From The Hero and the Virgin…

  Jordan

  I was starving.

  Cold. Way past hungry. And headed for exhaustion.

  Marcus at the diner remembered me from way back, and he always gave me an extra cup of coffee, even on days when I couldn’t afford more than my regular meal. The mill had me whipped but I was determined to get in some more over-time if it killed me; I was still $400 short of my brother’s hospital bill, and I’d be damned if one more shift was the difference between him getting the help he needed, and not. I could barely see but I pulled my pick-up into the diner’s parking lot and was grateful they stayed open twenty-four seven. I needed to eat something before I went home and fell into bed to work another 18 hour shift.

  The diner opened years before I was born, but Marcus hadn’t bought it from the old owner until I was seventeen, right before I joined the Marines. I remembered when he was just a server himself, still learning how to work the register and terrified of the deep fryer. That was a long time ago now, it felt like, although it’d only been ten years. Ten very, very long years.

  I parked the truck and made my way through the door, listening to the little bell ring over my head and scanning the room automatically. I couldn’t help it; the training never left you. There were three guys sitting at the big round table in the corner being louder than the hour necessitated, but they were young, probably around twenty, and obviously a little drunk. There was another old vet at the counter; we’d served in different wars, obviously, me being at least two decades younger, but we understood one another very well and nodded without speaking. Marcus was in the back; I could hear him rattling around the pots and pans. I sat down at the counter and waited.

  And waited.

  I am a patient man. I have a bad temper, yes, and I’m not known for saying much, particularly anything very clever, but the one virtue anyone would agree I’ve always had, even before the military, is patience. I’ve always been able to wait. And wait. And wait.

  But I was fucking tired. And cold, and hungry. Very hungry.

  Without speaking, I stood up and looked through the plate rack back to the kitchen. Sure enough, there was Marcus, but he looked a little frazzled, as if he’d bitten off a big bite of something that he couldn’t quite swallow. And while he was standing still, looking frazzled, someone else was rattling around in the kitchen making all that racket.

  Great. A new server.

  I sighed and sat back down. Marcus got new people to work the graveyard shift all the time, and they never failed to fail. It was a difficult shift that didn’t promise a lot of tips, just a lot of harassment from the riff-raff that came in drunk or were too taciturn to be polite, like the other vet at the counter and me. I didn’t know his name—didn’t even know his regiment—but we’d been sitting at this counter every once in a while after a late shift for at least a year, since I got back from my second tour. He gave me a knowing look and then returned to his coffee. There was a new twinkle in his eye, though, that gave me pause, and when I finally saw the kitchen door swing open I immediately understood why.

  I didn’t believe in love at first sight—didn’t believe in anything, any more. But when I saw that girl for the first time I knew something was happening to me—love, a heart attack, or maybe God finally had pity on me for all the things that had gone wrong in my life and sent down an angel just to say hello, I don’t know. But something was happening, something big.

  She was only five feet tall, I was sure, and had freckles the color of cinnamon spread out across a dainty nose. Giant brown eyes and copper waves of hair, lips a shade of red I’d seen far too many times in my life but these… These were living, bright and bold. And her shape… She was wearing a uniform that clearly belonged to someone else, as it was a little too big and fell down around her shoulder, revealing a turquoise bra strap that sent my stomach down to my knees. She needed that bra, because her breasts were pushing at the sack of that uniform even though the rest of her was tiny, and her hips were so round I could see them swinging, shifting the whole thing left and right. I tried to stop staring, but I couldn’t. And when she walked right up to me, picked up her pen and looked me straight in the eye, it took almost all of my will to speak words like a normal human and not just sling her over my shoulder and walk out the door.

  “Hi!” She had a voice with a laugh tucked inside of it, as if everything amused her. “What can I get you?”

  I ripped my eyes away from her face and stared down at the menu for a long minute before I was able to answer her question. I thought she might leave, but she didn’t, and when I looked back up she was calmly waiting, that smile still dancing on her full lips. I felt the scrutiny of her eyes but tried to concentrate on my order. “Cup of coffee, black. Whatever soup’s on special. Two sides of bacon.”

  “Okay,” she said, and walked back through the kitchen door, her hips doing a dance of their own across the floor.

  The old vet next to me took a sip of his coffee and the silence between us filled with the unspoken conversation we didn’t need to have. That girl was like a slice of sunshine. A beautiful, sparkling note striking through the blackness.

  But men like us lived in the dark.

  I didn’t need the kind of trouble my heart already wanted to get me in—my cock was first to follow her, of course, standing at attention beneath the counter in a way it just hadn’t since I got back, but I had a funny feeling in my chest, too. I made my decision without having to think about it, though. I would eat my meal, enjoy the view, and leave. Nothing could pull me out of the shadows, and I’d be damned if I dragged someone—anyone, but especially something as beautiful as her—into the dark with me. I had enough on my conscience.

  The old vet knew all that, without either of us having to say it.

  All the same, I could swear he disapproved.

  And fate, it seemed, had similar ideas.

  The rest of Jordan and Jessica’s story is available on Amazon!

 

 

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