“You’re so deep. So amazingly deep.” Her confession breaks me and I damn near lose control.

This is too important to fuck up so I hold on longer, making this last even though I have ached for it for so fucking long. My body screams at me to ram my cock inside and pound into her as hard as possible. But I don’t want to just use her like that. This isn’t like any of the sex I’d had before. Even with her. It wasn’t about getting in and getting off. I love this girl. With all my heart. I’m not just fucking here, I’m staking a fucking claim.

I’d wanted this for so long. The number of hours we’ve spent apart have been a torturous waste and I was going to make up for that by making her come as much as humanly possible.

Dropping my head below hers, I allow my tongue to travel south. Sucking her sweet flesh into my mouth makes my entire body hot. Almost too damn hot.

“Please,” she whimpers, slamming her knees together and clenching her thighs. I watch her squirm for a long minute before returning my gaze to hers.

“Please what, baby?”

“Um . . .” She pulls her bottom lip between her teeth and squirms some more.

I chuckle, resuming the slow, arduous path of circles with my tongue. When I reach one of her tightened nipples, she cries out.

Writhing beneath me, she thrusts her body upward and grabs my arms around each bicep. Her beautiful eyes flare brightly. “Gavin fucking Garrison, I am going to implode if we keep this up. I need you. I need all of you. I’m ready now.”

After sucking each of her soft pink peaks into my mouth, I glance up at her with the most innocent expression I can manage under the circumstances.

Her hand grazes my face and traces a burning path down my chest and abs. I brace myself for her to grab my dick when she takes my hand instead.

“Ready for us,” she whispers, lowering my hand with hers. “For all of us. For everything that entails and then some.” The moment my fingertips touch the scorching-hot wetness between her legs, I lose my grip on logic. On reality. On myself.

Stroking her undoes me. It’s everything I can do not to come apart right then.

The tight pulsing of her walls clenching rhythmically around my finger was the push I needed to back it down for a second. I can focus on her, give her this.

Sitting up on my haunches, I watch as her entire body detonates around my hand. Plunging in and out, I hold back as long as I can while she rocks her hips and moans in time. Even sex with my Bluebird is going to be like making music with her. Frantic and then slow. Amazing. Freeing. Real.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asks into the darkness after I’ve made her come and she’s caught her breath. She stills completely, clamping down around the two fingers that remain inside of her.

“Because you’re beautiful. Because I’ve wanted you, wanted this, for so long. I want to enjoy it. Memorize it. Memorize you.”

“Well,” she says on a breath, “how about you come here and do that then.”

Slowly retracting my fingers from inside her, I give her a wicked grin before sucking them into my mouth. Her expression alone could light the entire house on fire.

She pulls me to her, and I let her. Her little tongue lashes against mine, and I tug at her bottom lip with my teeth.

Wrapping her legs around my waist, she angles her hips upward and presses against me. I groan loudly and force myself to pull back before I give in to the urge to fuck her harder. Much harder.

Her whimper of protest makes my dick throb in response.

“I’m suddenly feeling extremely hungry,” I say, working hard to keep my voice even.

“O-kay,” she says, eyeing me warily like I’ve lost my mind. “Can it wait?”

“Hmm.” I let my eyes map every exposed inch of her body. “No, I’m afraid it can’t. I’m starving, babe.”

Before she can argue or say a single word in protest, I lower my head and lick a path up her inner right thigh. And then repeat the process on the left.

“Gavin, please,” she cries out, begging and trembling beneath me. The noises she makes when I swirl the tip of my tongue around her delicate folds makes me want to beat on my chest and shout from the rooftops. She is mine, dammit. Mine and only mine. No one else will ever touch her, taste her, the way I am allowed to.

The louder her moaning gets, the weaker my self-restraint becomes. I finally lean over to reach for a condom, and she stops me.

“It’s okay. Um, I’m on the pill,” she informs me.

“I know this.” I tear open the foil packet and sheath myself, growing even harder because she is watching so closely. The streetlights peeking in from the half-open blinds light her up like she is made of something other than skin. Something shiny and beautiful. And mine. “I’m still going to be careful with you. Always. Until . . . until you don’t want to be careful anymore.”

A slow smile spreads across her lips. “You’re always looking out for me,” she whispers as I lower myself back inside her, bracing myself above her by lacing our fingers together as I did before.

“Always.”

Tangled together, telling truths and swearing never again to keep secrets, we bond in a way I never knew was possible.

Dixie Lark is as much a part of me as my past. Because she is my future.

I don’t know why it took me so long to see, why I got caught up in the short term and failed to see how powerful what we had was, or the kind of future our love is capable of providing.

Something about her song, about the way she trusts me so implicitly, to hold her, to kiss her, to be inside her—I finally understand what an honor and privilege that is now. She bared her soul and I decided to finally bare mine right back.

“There’s nothing I wouldn’t trade to make your dreams come true,” I tell her in bed the morning of the Phi Kap show. “You know that, right?”

“This is my dream come true,” she tells me, looking up at me with those endless blue pools. “This and the band finally making it.”

“Working on that last one,” I say as I take her hand in mine and kiss the back of it softly.

“And . . . I want Liam to be safe. I can’t stop thinking about him.” Her voice lowers. “He’s so much like you, Gav. And I learned so much more about you by getting to know him.”

“You do have a thing for us troubled black sheep, don’t you?”

“What if they give him back to his dad? What if—”

“Don’t think like that. Sheila is working on it and Ashley might own us for the rest of our lives but she’s going to do what she can, too.”

“She will never own you,” Dixie growls like an angry kitten. “I mean it, Gavin.”

I chuckle lightly. “I know, Bluebird. The only one that owns me is you.”

“You’d do well to remember that, Garrison.” She pins me with a glare before pouncing on my chest and covering me with kisses.

“Yes, ma’am.”

She collapses on my chest, both of us still too tired for more lovemaking. I think we’ve set some records in the past twenty-four hours. “So you never told me about your mom or what happened with the charges filed against you. I was going to ask yesterday after rehearsal, but . . .”

But we didn’t exactly use words to communicate yesterday.

“Ashley was able to get Carl to drop the charges by threatening him with Mrs. Lawson’s eyewitness testimony that he assaulted Liam first. I let the trailer get hauled away since my mom had stopped coming home anyway.”

“About time,” Dixie huffs.

“I know. I guess I felt I owed her since she bailed me out the night of the accident.”

Dixie stiffens in my arms.

“I would never hurt you or Dallas intentionally. You know that, don’t you? Believe me, I would rather break every bone in my own body with a crowbar than cause either one of you an ounce of pain.”

She nods against my skin. “I know.” Her voice is so soft I can barely hear her.

I tilt her chin to face me. “Bluebird, you are now and will always be the most important thing to me. I won’t let anything jeopardize what we have, even my own stupid self.”