Inked in Lies (The Fallen Men, #5)

by Giana Darling

There is a saying my mother taught me. El que con lobos anda, a aullar se enseña. He who runs with wolves learns to howl. You are the company you keep.

And that was it, the moment when I found the words for what that man was to me and what he would always mean to me. I loved him. Unintentionally, but irrevocably.

He planted flowers all over my body, inside the cage of my ribs, in the fertile soil of my heart, yet he never noticed how they bloomed just for him.

“I’m not everyone, Nova.” “No,” he mused, running a hand through the long hair at the top of his head so it stuck up in sexy disarray. “Never thought you were, Flower Child.”

“You could tell me every dark thing you’ve ever done, every terrible thought you’ve ever had, and I’d still love you. The bad we’ve done doesn’t make us inherently bad people, Nova. It makes us human. It’s the good we’ve done that matters. And you? Everything good in my life was planted there by you. How could I not love you for that?”

If Nova had planted a garden in my heart all these years without stopping to smell the flowers, he was tending to them now, watering the growths, shaping the topiaries into something even more exquisite, even more precious to me.

“Whenever I think of home, it’s you,” I told him, plucking at the flowers in my heart, pulling up the grass and roots so he might see the beauty and depth of my love for him. “You’re my closest link to Dane, you’re a Booth and a Fallen man. But…it’s more than that. It’s like clean laundry and sleeping in our own bed after vacation. It’s like loving someone because you were born loving them, like your parents or siblings, but more. You’re more than my family, you’re more than my best friend. You’re the choice I want to make every single day, to live to the fullest and love the hardest.”