Reverse (The Bittersweet Symphony Duet, #2)

by Kate Stewart

Jesus by the river.

😂

“I want you to remember this moment. Right here, right now, just you and me in a fucking SUV, taking a drive to nowhere.” He looks at me pointedly. “Promise me you’ll remember this.”

“You just fucking fell out of the sky, didn’t you?” The cabin of the SUV clouds with energy as a surreal gravity threatens to draw us closer. “In a way,” I swallow, “I guess I did.” My mouth dries as he refuses to free me from the power of his perusal. As I opt for honesty, my heart begins to thrum harder with each passing second. “Thank you for giving me a soft place to land, Easton.”

Thanking him, I push my plate away and rip open another lemon-scented packet to clean my hands. “You sure you’re good?” He glances down at my sparsely covered plate, “Or should I order another beer and reload the trough?”

“If you weren’t so determined to keep me out of your bed, I’d be fucking the breath out of you right now, Natalie.”

What appears to be bold black feather tips peak along the side of his neck.

Benji’s Ravenhood tattoo. 🐦‍⬛ 🥰🖤

I hate so much that Easton Crowne is the most beautiful secret I’ll ever have and will forever be the one I’m forced to keep.

“Intelligent men don’t let life-changing women pass them by without trying to grasp onto them with both hands. I don’t need endless months to figure out you’re that woman for me. I’m not most men, Natalie. I know exactly what I don’t want, and it’s everything outside of that door. What I do want is standing in front of me, and the idea of letting her walk away from me a second time is fucking eating me alive.”

“This is me fighting dirty for us both, so please just admit it so I can give you the best parts of me, because I want every fucking part of you.”

“I asked myself a thousand times on the plane how I could have fucked up with you so horribly that you could find it in yourself to deceive me this way. To hurt your mother this way.” Natalie crumbles where she stands, her eyes overflowing as Nate turns to my dad, devastation coating his voice. “Is this my fucking life, Reid? Is a Crowne man destined to swoop in and take everything that’s precious to me?”

He withdraws his fingers as I grip his wrist with one hand, bringing it back to where it was, and use the other to clutch his jaw firmly. “Easton, I love you, and if you want to punish me later, I’m all for it, but it’s been way too long, so I’m going to need you to skip the preliminaries and punch the hell in to get to work.”