Celestra Forever After Read Online Free PDF Page B

cold shoulder, you’ve been doing a lousy job.”
    She pushes in with another kiss, and this time her tongue swims around my mouth as if to prove my point. Skyla hasn’t exactly been holding back in the lip-lock department. If anything, she’s been more than generous with her kisses.
    Skyla quakes with a laugh. Her entire body trembles, and I take in her sweet vibrations.
    “Well, I have. Maybe not the cold shoulder, but you know.” She digs her fingers into my sides and runs her tongue over her lips as if she’s flirting. “But I think I’m ready.” Her features soften. Her mood grows all together serious. “I think I’m ready for me and you again.” She picks up my hand and threads our fingers together without ever breaking our gaze. “I think I’m ready for everything you can give me, Gage.” Her eyes moisten with tears. “I’m going to talk to my mom.” She glances up, alluding to the fact it’s Candace she’s referring to—her long-dead mother that runs the Decision Council, a version of fate on steroids. “There’s nothing I won’t do to keep you alive.” Her eyes fill with tears. “You won’t die. I can’t go through what I did with Logan ever again. It’s too painful.”
    “Whoa. I’m not going anywhere.” Yet—but I leave that part out.
    “I love you so damn much, it hurts just to catch my next breath. I feel really bad knowing that I’ve held things off with you for so long.”
    I pull her in and plant a kiss on the top of her head. “You and I both agreed to give it time, so don’t worry about it. But if you feel ready to pick up where we left off, then I’m right there with you.”
    “No.” She shakes her head, solemn as stone. “I’m not ready to pick up where we left off.” Her lips curl just shy of a wicked smile. She bears into me with a magnetic pull, seductive and carnal—and, holy hell, she’s eye-fucking me. “I’m ready to take things a whole lot further.”
    I lean back and examine her under the dismal Paragon sky.
    My heart thumps. “If you’re ready, I’m ready.”
    Her face breaks out in a full-blown grin. “I like the sound of that, Gage.”
    “So do I.” So do fucking I.
    I crash my lips over hers, and we engage in one hell of a welcome-to-the-next-level-of-our-relationship kiss. I’ve always known I’d be with Skyla one day. I knew it years before I ever met her thanks to those prophecies that almost drove me to the brink of insanity. And to think I once doubted them, and yet, here we are.
    Skyla and I are together at last, just the way it was foretold.
    Just the way it should be.
    I love Skyla so damn much it hurts just to catch my next breath.
    And it’s kind of nice to know she feels the very same way.
     

 
    Logan
     
    The sky glows a rusted cinder. The pines etch themselves against the landscape like petrified soldiers as if God, himself, had called them to look after the residents of Paragon.
    “So where are we?” Liam glances around, aloof and removed per usual. To say he’s laidback would be an understatement.
    “Paragon.”
    Liam is built and fit, and in every way appears to be a slight variation of myself. He looks about my age, a little over nineteen. I’m not too sure how old he really is—hell, how old I really should be. I gave up on keeping track of our ages and stages long ago. He’s the one who went back in time and sacrificed his life for mine. I was Mom’s late-in-life surprise, then the Counts came and arranged for our parents to die in a fiery car crash. I survived with severe burns that I had to deal with my entire life, until fate stepped in, renewed me as an infant, and sent me to Paragon to live with my brother, Barron. It turns out destiny needed me at another point in time, for someone else entirely, and that someone was Skyla Messenger.
    “So this is home, huh?” He takes a few steps over the damp Paragon soil.
    It was Liam who sacrificed his life to get me here in the first place. It’s a soul for a