Jericho Barrons just told me he loves me.
Words are easy; lies as simple as parting your lips and breathing.
Pretty girl and all. Asking. Gotta love that. Stuff of heroes. Don’t get the role too often.
He pulls me around and kisses me. “You’re Mac,” he says. “And I’m Jericho. And nothing else matters. Never will. You exist in a place that is beyond all rules for me. Do you understand that?” I do. Jericho Barrons just told me he loves me.
Yesterday was a memory. Tomorrow was a hope. Today was another day to live and do one’s best to love.
You’ve been doing something bad since the moment you met me, lass.
How does it feel, MacKayla? You have a piece of me in your mouth. Would you like another?
Jericho Barrons was my poison now.
Pretty girls don’t have ugly mouths.
Hard. Fast. Deep. When I’m done you’ll know you’re mine.
There are really only two positions one can take toward anything in life: hope or fear. Hope strengthens, fear kills.
He wasn’t handsome. That was too calm a word. He was intensely masculine. He was sexual. He attracted.
Even now, my back was still arched with sensual invitation, my bottom was questing up like a cat in heat, and my every move was supple, sinuous. I was one great big come-hither.
I was a twenty-two-year-old single white female alone in a strange country where my sister had been killed.
Don’t lose yourself to anger. It’s gasoline. You can burn it as fuel, or you can use it to torch everything you care about and end up standing on a scorched battlefield, with everybody dead, even you-only your body doesn’t have the good grace to quit breathing.
I can’t help but see myself in them. The Seelie are who I was before my sister died. Pink, pretty, frivolous Mac. The Unseelie are who I’ve become, carved by loss and despair. Black, grungy, driven Mac.
It seemed Barrons had finally gotten his cake and eaten it too.
Nobody looks good in their darkest hour. But it’s those hours that make us what we are. We stand strong, or we cower. We emerge victorious, tempered by our trails, or fracture by a permanent, damning fault line.
Now you know how I justify my addictions – if I can pay less for it than I would at Wal-Mart, I get to have it.
Love can grown among the rocks and thorns of life.