Free Complete Bliss (a Her Billionaires novella #3) by Julia Kent Page A

needed to physically shield her, protect her from the B-word, as if he could take it into his own chest and let his body act as armor against what he knew Joe was about to unleash and could never, ever take back.
    “—busybody!” Joe ground out. He flinched as Trevor appeared in front of him, and Darla’s hand on Trevor’s back was shaking. She squeezed. Did she expect it, too? When had the world become so charged, so unsafe? They were each other’s sanctuary, the three of them, and somehow everything spiraled out of control within minutes of sharing their bodies and hearts.
    Weren’t you supposed to be able to share until the outer limits of what defined you were stretched beyond recognition, yet still come back more whole than ever before? Wasn’t that the entire point of love?
    “Why are you jumping in front of her like a spider monkey on crack?” Joe snapped. “You’re acting like I’m some sort of…like I was going to…” His brows knitted in confusion and pain. “What the fuck did you think I was about to do, Trev?” He planted his hands on his hips and took a deep breath, the power of his chest expanding in a way that felt threatening suddenly. 
    Trevor moved closer, eyes boring into Joe’s. “I thought you were about to lash out at her and do something you’d regret.”
    All the anger in Joe drained out of him, leaving eyes that were bleak and vulnerable. It made Trevor go cold with regret.
    “Darla,” Joe said softly, “do you think I’d…do that? Hurt you?”
    “God, no. Not physically! No!” Trevor rushed to explain. “You just look like—”
    “No.” Darla’s single word thundered through the room, the declaration a thunderclap of certainty that Trevor welcomed. He and Joe shuddered, as if her word recalibrated them, and Trevor felt his body tense in one big, long chain of muscles, like an orgasm without sex, as if he clenched and realigned every bone, every muscle, each tendon and fiber now back in place. 
    She had that effect on them.
    And only Darla could do that. 
    “You can make fun of me for being a hick,” she said, holding up a hand to stem the inevitable protest that Joe started to put up, “and you can be a crabby jerk because you’re too uptight to admit that you hate law school and hate the life you’ve chosen at Penn, but don’t know how to find your way out of the straightjacket of your parents’ expectations for you,” she said to Joe in a calm, slow, deliberate voice that made her seem timeless and wizened, mature and all-knowing. It made Trevor relaxed and self-conscious at the same time.
    “But,” she added, eyes combing over Joe, then Trevor, then back to Joe. The gooseflesh she left on Trevor’s body came from the timbre of her voice, the cadence of a rock-hard declaration that neither of them dared challenge. “But—you do not get to ruin what we have just because you’re afraid of what you don’t know.” Her eyes flashed and flicked between the two of them. I mean you too , she was saying to Trevor.
    And he knew it.
    “We’re going to Jeddy’s tomorrow,” she said, pulling on Harvard-logo yoga pants and one of Trevor’s oversized flannel shirts, eyes locked on Joe while she did the buttons. “And you’ll sit across the table from Mike and Dylan and ask them how the fuck they figured this shit out ten years ago when they met their first woman. Because those two know something. They know something you two don’t.”
    “What’s that?” Joe croaked out. It made Trevor cringe.
    “They know what it’s like to fall in love in all the weird ways love gives you, and they know what it’s like to have it all taken away not by someone’s stupidity, but by the cruel randomness of cancer.”
    Trevor just blinked.
    “They lost Jill and didn’t have a choice. And then they got a second chance with Laura. Look at ’em. A happy family.”
    Trevor flashed back to the image of a baby at Darla’s breast, and he held his breath. Her green eyes