“Five seconds ago, you were somewhere else.”

“Creed –”

His hand at my neck slid back into my hair and his arm around me gave me a squeeze while he prompted gently, “Sylvie, asked you a question.”

I pressed my lips together then slid my hands up his chest, one stopped at his neck, the other one I wrapped around his jaw and watched as my thumb traced the edge of his lower lip.

When my thumb was retracing its path, I looked into his eyes and whispered, “I missed you calling me ’beautiful’.”

“I missed havin’ you close so I could call you that,” he whispered back.

I shifted off his c**k but moved down his body so I could lay my cheek on his chest and both his arms went around me.

“It’ll never stop hitting us,” I said softly.

“Don’t ’spect so,” Creed said softly back.

“Sometimes it doesn’t feel like winning when that sucker punch comes and we’re reminded of how much we lost,” I told him then felt, weirdly, his body shaking under mine like he was laughing.

I lifted up and looked down at him.

Yes, laughing.

“This is funny?” I asked quietly.

His hands came back to frame my face and he replied just as quietly through his waning laughter, “Baby, I hauled you into my house last night, kissed you at the door. I made love to you in my bed. I woke up to you. I spent the day with you and my kids. I watched you go down over the pizzookie. You barely got your spoon in there. And, ten minutes ago, I watched you ride my c**k hard and make yourself come before you made me do the same. No way, after what they took from us, no way am I gonna let them make me feel that isn’t anything but what it is. Us winning.”

Shit, he was right.

He also wasn’t done.

“Wish I was a better man,” he said quietly. “Dad’d be pissed at me, he knew I was even thinkin’ this but, I get the chance, I’ll spit on your father’s grave, what he did to you, what he did to me. But, if I don’t get that chance,” his hands at my face pressed in and his voice dipped low, the smooth sliding clean out of it, his expression shifting to intense, “I’ll take this. I’ll take this every day and every day I’ll know in the end I beat that bastard. He might not have been alive to see it, but I beat his goddamned, motherfucking ass.”

Seriously, he was hot when he was being all vengeful badass.

Thinking that, it hit me.

I loved the Creed that was and he was still in there, with his kids, with me.

But without what happened to us, this Creed would never have been.

And I loved this Creed in a way that maybe time had dulled the feeling I had before even though it didn’t feel that way. Because I loved the man under me in a way that wasn’t just meant to be. It wasn’t a way we were born to be. It was in a way that needed to be.

With sudden clarity it hit me that I was always a bit of this Sylvie. I liked clothes and I gossiped with my girls and I put on makeup, even now. But I was not the daughter my father wanted, who adored ballet and wore ribbons in her hair and didn’t beg him to let me go fishing with him every time he went out with his buddies.

So maybe the Sylvie due to circumstances I became was the Sylvie I was supposed to be.

And Creed had always had badass in him. He was his father’s son. We even talked about him joining the military when we got wherever we were going to go, settled in and he was okay with the possibility of leaving me to go on assignment.

So maybe due to circumstances, he became the Creed he was supposed to be.

And because the universe wasn’t right without us together, we became that way then we came back together.

On this thought, I pressed closer and asked, “Do you think that shit had to happen so I could be who I am with who you came to be?”

Both his hands slid into my hair and fisted gently at the back of it, none of the intensity shifting out of his face when he replied, “Fuck… no. My Sylvie who had my back and stood by my side as best she could from the age of six to the age of eighteen did not deserve years of torture and living with the knowledge a man is dead at her hand and I didn’t deserve the shit dished out to me either. What I think is, it’s life. Life can be shit. We had our shit. We’ll have more of it, though, God willing, not that f**kin’ bad and we made our way back together because together is the way we’re born to be. But,” his hands in my hair pulled me closer and his voice dipped lower, “you wanna think it was supposed to happen that way. That makes you feel better. Think it. I just don’t agree.”

“The me that I am right now though, Creed, feels like the Sylvie I was meant to be,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, you are,” he agreed. “Comfortable in your skin. Good at what you do. You enjoy it. You like the way you live. I can see that. But you could have become this Sylvie without that shit buried in your soul,” he replied and I tipped my head to the side.

“Would you be down with that?”

He lifted his head an inch from the pillow so our faces were mega close and he whispered, “Then and now, beautiful, I’ll take you any way you come to me.” His hands in my hair shook my head gently. “Any way. I love this Sylvie. I loved that Sylvie. I just love you, baby.”

And I just loved him.

Any way he came to me.

To share this, I shoved my face in his neck.

Creed got the message and I knew this when his arms circled me and he gave me a mighty squeeze.

He allowed seconds to tick by before he murmured, “Gotta let you go, need to deal with this condom.”

“Right,” I murmured back and shifted off him.

He kissed my shoulder before he exited the bed. I had pulled on my panties and camisole by the time he got back.

Creed turned off the lone light we had on and pulled me into him, tucking me close and I took us full circle.

“I’m glad your kids like me, Creed.”

“What’d I say?” he asked in reply.

I pressed in closer, grinning at his shadowed skin.

Creed’s arms around me tightened then loosened and I relaxed into him.

Finally, I gave it to him.

“Just so you know, you haven’t changed much but I’d take you any way you came to me, too,” I whispered. “I loved you then. I love you now. I just love you, Creed.”

I heard him draw a breath as I felt his chest expand with it.