He pulls me up from the floor and into his arms, walking me back to my bedroom, where we crawl into my bed and pull the covers up snugly around us. He holds me while I share with him the details of Mara’s overdose.

Alex doesn’t say a word while I talk but just strokes my back with his fingers and every so often grazes his lips against my temple. When I admit with no small amount of shame that I’m terrified I’m going to lose Mara, and that I am doubting my own abilities as a counselor, Alex takes his fingers and places them against my lips to silence my words.

“Don’t,” he says quietly. “Don’t doubt yourself…not for a minute.”

Turning my head to the side to dislodge his fingers from my mouth, I argue, “But I don’t think I can reach her. You should have seen her in the hospital. She wouldn’t even look at me. Wouldn’t talk to me.”

“Some people don’t want to be reached. Some people love the misery.”

“No,” I deny adamantly. “She doesn’t love misery. She hates what the drugs have done to her parents.”

Leaning down, Alex kisses me softly. “But she took the drugs to avoid the misery. And she loved how the drugs made her feel. I imagine it’s going to be hard to reach her right now. She’s tried them twice…both times she didn’t die but experienced escape from her misery. I’m not sure there’s anything you could say to her, Sutton, that will get her to stop. You’re just going to have to keep plugging away with her, and hope that you will eventually get through.”

I let my gaze slide to the left and stare at the moon filtering through my window. Alex is right…I have to keep pushing at her and pray to God that she will be careful.

“Let’s try to get some sleep,” Alex says as he continues to stroke my back. “I have to get up early to meet Garrett at the gym.”

“Okay,” I whisper, wiggling in tighter to him as I wrap my arm securely around his waist.

I listen to the sounds of our breathing even out and grow more measured. Just as my eyes start to droop, I hear Alex say, “Sutton?”

“Yeah?”

“You reached me. When no one else ever has.”

My eyes pop wide open and my heartbeat skips erratically over his words. They are meant as a means of bolstering my confidence, because Alex Crossman by admitted history has some dark demons in his closet. I have no clue what they are because he hasn’t shared them, but I do know that they have shaped the person he used to be. And I do know that he’s apparently not the same person he was before we met.

Tilting my head slightly, I bring my lips to the skin on his chest and give him a kiss. “Thank you,” I tell him with a smile on my face.

He squeezes me tightly and then I close my eyes and drift off to sleep.

Chapter 17

Alex

“This is starting to become a habit,” Sutton pouts but she doesn’t sound in the least bit perturbed.

“It’s a good habit, don’t you think?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m all for making this a permanent habit.”

We’re sitting on the floor of my living room, eating delivery pizza from my coffee table. Sutton is wearing one of my T-shirts and nothing else. I hastily threw on a pair of workout shorts when the pizza dude rang the doorbell.

I had intended to cook dinner for her tonight, something I’ve never done for another woman in my life. Hell, I’ve never even bought another woman dinner in my life.

Yes, my plan was to cook dinner, then see if I could surpass the heights we reached last night when she confronted me with a see-through robe and a box of rubbers. I don’t know that I had ever been so turned on in my life.

But unfortunately, when Sutton showed up at my apartment tonight and I saw her standing there, looking beyond amazing with her fiery hair in a high ponytail and wearing nothing more than her classic jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, I was overcome with such lust, I pulled her quickly in and pushed her down on my living room couch.

She didn’t complain or dissuade me—not that it would have done any good. Instead, she just gave the most pleasurable sigh I’ve ever heard when I made short work of stripping her bare and burying my face between her legs.

I gave her no mercy and within seconds she was moaning and writhing on the micro-suede cushions, her hands gripping my hair for dear life. She tasted f**king divine and I plunged my tongue in and out of her ruthlessly, fueled on by her groans of pleasure and the way her h*ps would buck hard against my chin. It turned me on so much, I may have gone a little crazy on her. I put my tongue to work in other ways, licking and sucking at her while my fingers pushed in deep.

She came fast, and hard, and she screamed my name again, and I swear I almost came just from hearing that. I laid my chin just above her pelvic bone and watched her come back to awareness. When the fog cleared from her eyes and she focused in on me, she grinned and said, “Get naked.”

And then I had a condom on and was pounding inside of her and it was just as good, if not better, than last night. She urged me to go harder, deeper. She dug her nails in my ass and even bit me on my shoulder which in turn caused me to f**k her just a little bit rougher.

And then I came super f**king hard, way faster than I ever have before. So hard, I had lights winking in my peripheral vision, and even after the shudders had gone silent within me, I found I wanted her again.

But that’s when I noticed a burning smell in the air, and when I opened my eyes, I saw a haze of smoke above us.