Redemption Hills: The Complete Collection

22. Eden

TWENTY-TWO

EDEN

I stared at him through the bleary darkness, my fingertips running over his swollen lips.

Awed.

Floored.

Unsure if any of this was real or if I’d lost myself to the shock from earlier and had slipped into a dangerous fantasy. One where I was his and he was mine.

His body burned me up where we were tangled, our flesh slicked with sweat and our muscles still ticking with aftershocks.

He kissed my temple in this adoring way that made me want to come apart all over again. “Be right back.”

Trent climbed out of his enormous bed. Completely bare. Almost every inch of his body was covered in colors and designs. Strength rippled from his sinewy, imposing form, the man this stunning work of art that I got to fully appreciate as he walked into his bathroom.

I didn’t know whether to hide my face or ogle his beauty.

I was miles away from what I knew. So beyond my comfort zone. Treading far, far outside the bounds of familiarity.

He disappeared into the bathroom. The faucet ran, and I clutched the sheet and brought it to my nose.

Trying to figure out where I stood. Wondering if it was possible for us to remain here—where we’d met in the middle.

Two people so different crashing together, joining, like we were made to fit.

There was no stopping the redness that streaked across my already overheated skin when he reappeared in the glaring light of the doorway.

An outline of power. An etching of desolation. A pen line of hope.

He sauntered out, no shame, just all that rigid, fierce cockiness carved in every muscle. I had to bury my face farther into the sheet when I saw his huge penis was still partially hard. I thought if I asked him to take me, he’d be ready for me all over again.

Still, I peeked out as he approached. That redness heated to a flashfire, the sheet fully pressed to my face by the time he made it back to me.

A rough chuckle filled the air, and he tugged the silky fabric away, peering down at me through the dusky light. “You hidin’ from me, Kitten? If you run, this time I can’t promise that I won’t go chasing after you.”

The words were a tease, but they were weighed down with a tenderness that had never been there before, the way he gently nudged the sheet down far enough so that he could take in the entirety of my face.

Trent hovered above me.

All that fierce, unyielding intensity staring down like he’d uncovered a treasure.

Darkness that blazed the brightest light.

My teeth clamped down on my bottom lip. I nodded against his pillow, my throat thick when I admitted, “I wouldn’t get very far. I’m pretty sure I would only come running back to you.”

Emotion rippled, and Trent climbed onto the bed, a massive palm splaying across the side of my face. “How did we end up here? How’s it possible the two of us match like this…because that…”

He trailed off, his tongue swiping out across his full bottom lip as if he were trying to process what we’d just shared.

Something different.

Magical.

Extraordinary.

I didn’t need to have been with a bunch of different men to know it. To understand it. This connection that bound us in some intrinsic way.

“Perfect,” I supplied on a whisper.

Trent dropped his forehead to mine. “Want to be that for you, Eden.”

My fingertips scratched into the stubble that covered his strong jaw, urging him back enough so I could meet his eye. “You are perfect, Trent. You’re perfect in your flaws. Perfect in your strengths. Maybe you believe you’re all wrong, that you don’t have anything to offer, but I can’t help but believe you’re perfect for me.”

I guessed it was right then that I finally accepted its truth. When I no longer was afraid of his past, of the pain he could cause, but knew I wanted to stand at his side in spite of it. Hold him the way he was holding me.

I just prayed he would find his way through his guilt to me.

On a needy moan, Trent pressed his mouth to mine in a close-mouthed kiss. His eyes squeezed tight. Like he was savoring. Committing us to memory. Then he curled his arm around me, and a squeak of surprise ripped up my throat when he flipped our positions, rolling us until I was on top.

The two of us were chest to chest, though I was angled, my legs off to the side. The sheet barely covered me where it was twisted around my bottom. Trent pushed his fingers into the fall of my hair. “You really believe that, Eden? That I could be perfect for a girl like you?”

A tease wound its way into his tone.

“You act like I haven’t made a mistake or two.”

“Doubtful.” Affection flitted through his grin.

“Of course, I have.”

He arched a dark brow. “Let’s hear it.”

I chewed at my bottom lip, trying to think of the worst thing I’d ever done.

Tattooed fingers brushed through my hair, and he held back a sound of amusement. “You can’t even think of one thing, can you, Kitten?”

“No, it’s just there are so many I can’t settle on one.”

I hoped right then wasn’t one of them.

“Come on then.” Playfulness ridged his mouth.

“Okay…so when I was a junior in high school, Tessa and I snuck my daddy’s car and went to a concert in Tahoe that we’d been forbidden to go to. I was grounded for four weeks, but it was totally worth it.”

Trent gasped with a mock waggle of his brows. “Scandalous.”

Giggling, I smacked at him, a giddy sensation rippling beneath my skin. “You’re a jerk.”

He softened, his fingers still running through my hair as he sent me a tender smile. “And you’re sweet. Love that about you.”

His gaze darted across my face, and then he moved to tip up my chin. “Guess you aren’t completely innocent, though, going and seducing me like you did. Little Temptress.”

“Seducing you?” I scoffed, my chest pitching in a riot of excitement and need. “I think that was all you.”

I mean, six years and not a flicker of a feeling. And then there was this man.

Potent.

Provocative.

All consuming.

“There was no resisting you.”

This dark, dark defender.

He huffed a breath through his nose. “And I wanted to get you out of your clothes the first time I saw you…see all that sweetness hidden underneath.”

“You felt it then?”

“Didn’t you?”

My nod was wary, a frown pinching my brow as I thought back to the way I’d felt that first night. “Yeah.”

He ran his knuckles along the apple of my cheek. “But you were scared.”

Another nod. “I felt that part of you, too.”

“And now…after the shit back at the bar?” I could tell he was trying to suppress the fury when he pushed out the question. To bring us back to the moment that had brought us together this way, though I had a feeling that we would have ended up here, anyway.

We were bound, fated to this moment.

“And now, none of it matters. None of it matters except we’re both here. Right now. Together.”

Trent released a low growl, and his hand was fisting in my hair.

Possession.

Power.

A shiver raced down my spine, that dark aura taking me whole.

Wicked possession.

“Oh, Kitten, it fuckin’ matters. Matters that someone would be so foolish to send me a warning through you. Pussy is gonna pay.”

Pain leached into his rage. Worry and dread. I wanted to wipe it away. Tell him it was fine. That we were safe. Clearly, that wasn’t a promise I could make.

“It means they’re watching, Eden. Pinned you as a vulnerability. As a weakness.” His voice only got harder with each phrase he spat.

Part of me wanted to look away, to find reprieve, to fight the flash of terror without him witnessing it played out in my eyes. But I couldn’t move. I was held by his intensity.

The man a hook and a snare.

“Will they try to hurt me? Try to hurt Gage?” I could barely force out the questions.

His lips thinned. “They might try, but I won’t let them get close to either of you. Promise you that.”

“I’m not weak, Trent. I just need to know what we’re up against.”

We.

The proclamation rang through the air.

I was in this with him.

Trent swallowed hard. “No, Eden, you’re not weak. I see your goodness for what it really is. Strength. Resilience. But you also don’t understand where I come from, how ugly it gets, and it’s the last thing I want to involve you in. Don’t want to taint who you are, and that world has a bad way of doing just that.”

He glanced away, unable to look at me as he gritted the words. “If something were to happen to you…”

My head shook. “I won’t say I’m not afraid, Trent, but everything…it’s led me here to you.”

Shame blanketed his expression. “Last place you should be.”

“Don’t say that.” It was a plea. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”

His fingers threaded deeper into my hair, as if he felt the need to hang on. “You sure about that?”

“Don’t ask me to regret you.”

“I’m bound to mess this up, Eden.” He repeated the same thing he’d told me in my bedroom last week—a night that felt a million years away from right then. As if all that time had passed and we’d been caught up in it.

Becoming one.

Not knowing the details but understanding each other in a way few ever did.

“Not if you choose not to, Trent.” I hesitated, then pressed. “Ghost?”

The word was a question. Different than when he’d been undressing. It was acceptance, then. Now, I was asking him to let me farther inside. I wanted a view into who he really was. The part he kept shrouded in the shadows.

“Who I used to be,” he reiterated. He took my hand in his and pressed my knuckles to his lips. “So much shit I don’t know how to leave behind. I’ve done bad things, Eden. Really fuckin’ bad things.”

Dread slicked down my spine. I could feel my spirit being crushed by the malignant, haunted desperation that churned in his eyes.

My mind raced, lighting with blips of images of the things he might have done. The blood that stained his hands. My thoughts skipped from one to the next because I realized I really didn’t want to envision them.

Because in the end, I only had one truth that mattered. “We all have history, Trent. All of us. It’s how we live on the other side of it that counts.”

He grunted. “How’s it you handle yours so well?”

A huff of saddened laughter left me, my past so different than his, but I wondered if they’d somehow affected us the same. My voice was coarse with sorrow when I whispered, “I’ve been lost for a long time. Looking for my way. Just fumbling through life, day-to-day, wondering if I would ever feel again. If the numbness would ever go away.”

A crash of guilt and anger flashed through his expression, and his teeth ground as he forced out the words. “Are you okay with it? Me touching you…?”

He left off the last.

After him.

After Aaron.

Torment twisted through me. Loss. My own guilt. My head slowly shook as I burrowed close to Trent, to the steady, hard pounding of his heart. “I miss him, Trent…I’ll miss him every day. I know I told you he was my best friend, but I did love him. But it was a peaceful kind of love…the kind that grew out of that friendship…out of comfort.”

I thought back to how it’d been. Aaron, Harmony, and I growing up together. Running through the woods and playing in our backyard. Defending each other and fighting with each other. I guessed until I’d received the second letter from Harmony, I’d blocked out the rest. Her jealousy. The way she’d hated it when I’d played with him instead of her.

I realized my gaze had drifted, lost in thought, and my attention slowly shifted back to Trent. “We grew up next door. His parents went to the same church as ours. In third grade, Aaron started at the school, and he’d sat in the desk right next to mine. He and I climbed trees together, went to the movies together, to prom together, and we just…fell into that pattern. It also became…kind of expected of us.”

Nervously, my fingers traced across the words stamped on Trent’s chest.

Live to Ride, Ride to Die.

“My parents were comfortable with him, trusted him, so we slipped into the mold our parents imagined.”

Trent huffed.

My head shook. “We weren’t forced into anything, Trent. It was just…easy.”

I glanced at him, chewing at my bottom lip, the admission a breath of old affection. “I always thought he actually had a thing for my older sister.”

That time it was a grunt from his delicious mouth, his fingers gliding through my hair, like he couldn’t stop touching me. Holding me. “Pretty sure you could never be considered the consolation prize, Kitten.”

My shoulders hiked a little, brushing our bare chests together. A tiny flicker of flames lit in the middle. “Harmony was the wild one. The one who was always laughing. Always getting into trouble, too. I think Aaron got stars in his eyes every time she came into the room, but she never wanted him around. She thought he stole my attention from her.”

Could feel his muscles bunch in his arms. “She the one who got you and your father into financial trouble?”

My nod was desolate. “Yeah.” I swallowed it down and forced a smile. “My momma got sick and passed when I was fourteen and Harmony was sixteen. My sister left soon after.”

Grief filled his face. I knew he felt that kind of loss on a personal level. “I’m sorry.”

I shook my head as I was hit with a swell of emotion. “I was so broken after that, so alone, that I think I leaned even more on Aaron. After that, he and I fell into what we were.”

“And what was that?”

“Happy. Content.” A wistful hum rolled up my throat. “We both liked the quiet life. Staying home and watching movies on a Friday night. Working in the yard. We both wanted a big family. We’d just bought our first house a month before he died.”

“And you were going to fill the rooms.” Trent barely hid the spite in his tone.

I nodded again.

His thumb brushed my cheek. “I’m not that guy, Eden.”

No. Trent was Aaron’s opposite.

“I loved him, Trent, but I didn’t burn for him.”

A growl rumbled in his chest, and his fingers fisted in my hair, lifting me higher so I was straddling him and my face was hovering an inch from his. “You burn for me, Kitten?”

“Yes.” It left me on a pant. “I never knew I could want a man the way I want you.”

“That’s a good thing because I’ve never wanted anyone to have me the way I want you to.”

My heart took off at a sprint. “What do you want me to have?”

“All of me, Kitten. Fuckin’ all of me.”

He angled up to capture my mouth. His kiss rough. Possessive. Mind-bending.

I swore, every single kiss altered who I was.

I kissed him back, crawling over the rigid lines of his body as Trent owned me from below. That hand in my hair cinched down tighter and his other gripped hard onto my hip. He sat up, our kiss turning frantic as he pulled me against his cock that was hard and huge and stealing my breath.

I gasped at the contact. Sensation rushed over my skin as he guided me to rub our bare flesh together.

Sparks that stoked that raging fire between us into an inferno.

I pressed up onto my knees as he licked from my mouth and down my throat, my head dropping back and my entire being arching into his touch.

Desperate for more.

My fingers dug into his shoulders, and needy sounds were slipping up my throat as he kissed along the slope of my neck, his voice a low reverberation, “You, Eden. So fuckin’ beautiful. So good. So right. Want it. Heaven.”

“You have me,” I mumbled back, writhing over him.

So different.

With Trent, it was so much more than I’d ever experienced.

The feeling of being consumed alive.

Owned.

Possessed.

And I wanted it.

“I want it all,” I whispered.

He kept trailing down, kissing a path down my throat and to my chest. Every nerve ending came alive as he licked over the top of my right breast and sucked my nipple into his mouth. His teeth raked the sensitive flesh before he bit down.

Hard enough to make me yelp.

Everything fired.

Flashed with desire.

I arched into the feeling of it.

Everything. Everything.

I begged for more.

“Trent.”

My nails scratched into his back.

He softened, licked his tongue over my nipple that had pebbled up, so tight and tingly, and he pulled back to watch the action as he ran his thumb over the peak.

Nail raking it.

Back and forth.

Back and forth.

“These tits. Perfection, baby. Knew it. Knew it the second I laid eyes on you. All of you. Every inch. Want to live in this body.”

He kept me pinned with that gaze as he slipped his hands farther down. He curled his right into my hip while the other slipped between us, his fingers rubbing at my center, pressing inside.

I was no longer writhing. I was rocking. Begging. Riding his hand in a desperation I didn’t know existed before Trent Lawson crashed into my life.

Chasing this feeling that grew and grew.

Pleasure.

The blinding kind.

The kind that would cause me to lose all control.

I was so ready to let it go.

“Do you want me again, Eden?” he grunted, that stormy stare unrelenting as he watched me. Tracing my expression. Waiting for a cue. He didn’t need one because he already knew all of them, anyway.

“Yes,” I whimpered when he shifted his fingers, hitting a spot that made my sight flicker at the edges. “Always. Forever.”

It might have been way too soon to say it, but it was the truth.

I was never going to stop wanting this man.

I could feel his penis twitch between us, and on instinct, I wrapped my hand around it, the fat head throbbing and dripping.

Trent groaned as I stroked him, my fist wrapped tight as I pumped his massive length, and I found myself leaning down to his mouth, my greedy tongue sweeping across his lips.

I dragged my teeth over the bottom one and bit down, as hard as he’d done to my nipple.

He’d said he liked it hard. I just hoped I wasn’t a fool aching to discover what that meant.

A dark chuckle rumbled from his chest when his bottom lip popped from my teeth. Sooty eyes turned to black, glittering crystal.

Feral.

Shivers raced, and my pulse thundered.

He wound his hand back in my hair. The words were low and curling through the room like a threat. “Ah, Kitten, you do like to play with fire. On your hands and knees.”

He had me flipped around before I could even process the command, on my hands and knees and facing the opposite end of the bed. Just off to the left was a giant mirror propped in the corner of his room, and my sight snagged on the reflection, my eyes wide as I took in the scene framed in gilded black metal.

My hair wild and my chest heaving.

My body bare, slicked with sweat, trembling with anticipation.

And I felt beautiful. Sexy and wanted in a way I’d never felt before.

Then I was trembling anew when Trent got to his knees from behind, that foreboding wraith covering me like a shroud. His body cut and chiseled, vibrating with want. Jerking with need.

He grabbed me by both hips, and his fierce stare found me through the mirror just as he was running both palms over my bottom.

Tattooed fingers squeezed and kneaded.

My heart ravaged my chest with jagged, uneven beats.

“Look at you, Eden. Fuckin’ fantasy, right here.”

I whimpered.

Ached.

Wanted.

He chuckled again, then he was dipping down to kiss a lusty path down my spine. Chills lifted in his wake and spread over the surface of my flesh.

Emotion scattered.

High and low and coming at me from every direction.

Standing at a precipice. Riding a razor-sharp edge as I waited for something brand new.

His name left me on a gasp when he used his hands to spread my bottom. He never slowed as his tongue stroked through the cleft of my ass, around my hole, before he licked down to my center.

Lapping.

Stroking.

Growling possession as he went.

My sight narrowed, fuzzy at the edges. The wave of pleasure that slammed me made me dizzy.

I whimpered and begged, rocking on my knees. “I need you.”

Trent eased back, enough that our eyes tangled in the mirror, and he was dragging his fingertips through my crease again before he was swirling the tips of two fingers around my ass.

Air rushed my throat, my lungs quivering, my thighs shaking as he started to put the barest pressure there.

My knees felt weak as I was struck with a flood of desire. Half terrified, half frantic.

A big hand splayed out across my lower back, pushing my chest closer to the mattress and jutting my bottom out. “Look at you,” he grunted, his voice a rough scrape across my skin.

A torch that flamed.

And I was sure this fire was going to consume us both when he started to press harder, as I whimpered and writhed and pulled away and pushed back, my hands fisting into the comforter as he slowly drove deeper.

Because I’d never felt so vulnerable.

So prized.

So panicked.

I heaved a needy, lust-hazed breath when he dragged his fingers out.

The low laughter Trent released dripped sex, and he leaned down and kissed across my shoulder, muttering, “Oh, Little Temptress, we’re going to have so much fun.”

He pulled away and moved to his nightstand. I was panting like some kind of fiend as I watched him roll on a condom, his outline the most devastating thing I’d ever seen.

Then he was back behind me, pressing the fat head of his penis between my shaking thighs as he hauled me onto my knees that could barely hold my weight.

My back to his chest.

Those inked hands spread across my stomach, splaying wide, like a writhing statement written across my clear flesh. He ran them upward. Cupping my breasts for a moment, his thumbs perfect torture as he teased my nipples before he dragged all the way up to guide my arms over my head. He never stopped until he had my hands locked around the back of his neck.

His mouth came to my ear, and his hand curled around the front of my throat, his fingers fluttering along my jaw as he warned, “Hold on, Kitten, it’s about to get rough.”

And I didn’t care if I fell into his darkness.

Just as long as he met me there.