Luca didn’t like the way this felt; vulnerability, an overflowing of emotions he couldn’t begin to comprehend or handle. He refused to acknowledge the possibility that something was wrong with Baby; he refused to deal with the concept that this was a fall she wouldn’t recover from. He’d been so far away when she had been blasted by the electrical hot plates short-circuiting–though he swore he could still feel the faint traces of her pulse, there was nothing Luca could do but beg and plead with her to wake up. He wanted to throw his head back and roar in agonized pain, bu he was too busy choking on the sobs that rolled out of his body in waves to even handle assisting her in CPR. How did you revive someone who was suffering from ingesting too much smoke? What were the fucking rules of fire safety again? Luca tried to roll through the safety classes and training he’d been required to take at Laurent Brodaire’s behest, but everything floated through his mind like incomplete, tangled thoughts. And above it all, he just saw her face reflected in the imprint of his mind, again and again.
Baby Doefoot was the very fabric of his being. He refused to acknowledge a life where she wasn’t beside him.
But then, through the fog of his own grief, Luca heard a soft, exhausted voice call his name. Like an angel descending upon a fallen creature, Baby Doefoot was fluttering her eyes open wearily, gazing up at him with what Luca could only imagine was a mixture of confusion and awe. Was she repulsed, seeing him like this? He felt shame, white hot and heady, surging through his veins at the realization his lover had seen him break down in front of her. Luca had never grown up in a loving home, and so he’d never been taught that expressing his emotions was a healthy thing to do. As such, he felt shame and agony that Baby had seen him in such a strong point of weakness, his brows furrowing together as relief flooded his shaking body. He bent his head, kissing all along her sweet face, as she tried to sweetly tell him she was alright. She was such a brave girl, his Baby was, and Luca felt a surge of warm affection for the submissive sprawled out on the grass beneath him.
His sweet, precious jewel. She was alive.
“Yes, sweet girl, it’s me,” he said at last, his breathing evening as Baby slowly regained full consciousness. He couldn’t stop the way his hands shook as he brushed her rose gold hair out of her face, but–she was alive. She was going to be alright. In that moment, despite the pain radiating in his leg, Luca swore he could fly. He glanced down, his brows furrowed together, when Baby commented that he had ruined her mother’s dress. He felt his heart sink with something close to guilt as he surveyed the damage he had done. But, reflecting on the choices he’d been left with, Luca didn’t particularly regret his decision to tear the bodice of her gown to permit her to breathe. Based on her dazed, disoriented response, it didn’t seem as though Baby was particularly bent out of shape over it, either. As Luca shifted, cradling her body under his arms, he heard her apologize for not listening to him earlier. Luca couldn’t quite explain the sensation or reason behind it, but he felt his chest clench at her apology; his mind flitted back to their argument with one another from earlier. That was almost the last thing they’d said to each other, and Luca’s tongue burned with an acidic taste at the thought of his last moment with Baby being tainted by jealous cruelty.
One thing was for certain: he wasn’t letting her out of his fucking sights any time soon.
“Let’s get one thing straight, kitten,” Luca began, standing slowly and clutching Baby against his chest. The pain in his knee throbbed, but he felt more stable and secure now that his heart had slowed itself down to a normal heart rate. As he tucked her against his chest and began to walk away from the inferno, plunging deeper in to the woods, he glanced down at his submissive cradled in his arms. Because that’s exactly what she was, wasn’t she? She was his submissive; she didn’t belong to Christian or Matthew or Draven or any other man. She belonged to him, and he…he belonged to her. “I will always come for you, no matter how many obstacles stand in my way. I will never leave you in the dark; if I could not run, I would walk. If I could not walk, I would crawl to you.”
“Come on,” Luca continued, his voice thick with a swirl of emotions as he twisted and turned through the forest. “There’s a cottage out here; somewhere safe for us to hide out in while I tend to your wounds.”
In all of her years of knowing him, Baby had not once seen Luca cry, and a part of herself had been honestly convinced that it just wasn’t something that he was capable of. The Head Dom wasn’t particularly known for his range of emotion, and perhaps that was one of the reasons why that Baby picked as many fights with him as she did. Getting Luca to feel anything was an accomplishment as far as she was concerned, and she’d long ago learned that she’d take any amount of attention from him that he was willing to provide her with, whether or not it was positive or healthy. Right now, though, the only word that she could possibly use to describe the look on his face was a deep sense of anguish. He...he had honestly thought that he had lost her, that her life had been forfeit to the flames and the smoke despite his best efforts to save her, and the sudden knowledge that her supposed death had been enough to elicit this sort of reaction out of him was a startling realization for Baby to come to terms with. He had to have cared about her then, right? And not just as his best friend’s little sister that he just so happened to fuck on a regular basis? If...if the thought of losing her had been enough to bring him to tears, then surely...
Surely she must have meant something to him.
She was still dizzy and faint, just barely alert after having regained consciousness, but it was beyond easy for her to focus on Luca nevertheless. Her hazy brown eyes trailed fondly across his face, spanning over each marble-carved angle and razor-sharp definition, and she felt herself smile a little dreamily when he called her his sweet girl. Sex between the two of them came as easily as free-running water, but affection? Affection was something that Baby went looking for in all the wrong places, and very rarely found in Luca. “You aren’t hurt, are you, daddy?” she asked softly as he began to bend down towards her; she’d sworn that, for a brief moment that he didn’t want her to witness, he’d tensed the slightest bit, and she couldn’t help but worry that he had somehow managed to injure himself in the process of rescuing her from the ballroom. Her dark-blonde brows furrowed together anxiously, but she could do little more than that out a tiny peep as Luca wasted no time in picking her up and cradling her against the warmth of his body.
In his big, strong arms, she felt safe; with her tiny little frame nestled protectively against the toned musculature of his chest, she was able to curl up and rest, one silken-soft cheek laying gently upon his shoulder as she wound her bruised-up arms around his neck. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d carried her like this - had it been when she was a child? She quite enjoyed when he’d pick her up and toss her over his shoulder like a caveman dragging his prized bitch back to the bedroom, but this was...different. It was intimate; he held her now as if she was something precious and valuable, and Baby, as starved for love and affection as she was, eagerly, greedily soaked up as much of it as she possibly could. “I’m s’posed to be the one crawling to you, remember?” she asked with a sleepy little yawn, rubbing her nose back and forth beneath the curve of his shoulder and allowing her eyes to flutter gently shut. She was so tired, and every single part of her body seemed to ache with a throbbing, bone-deep kind of pain.
He was carrying her through the woods as if she weighed absolutely nothing, and Baby couldn’t help but replay every word he’d just said to her over and over again in her mind. He...he had promised himself to her in a way that he never had before; he’d sworn with a fierce sort of intensity that he’d never leave her alone, and after having spent her entire life trailing after men who seemed to want nothing to do with her as soon as she’d spread her legs for them, the knowledge that Luca wanted her even still was enough to jolt deeply into Baby’s very soul. “The - the Bennet cottage, right?” she looked up at him tentatively to ask as he mentioned a place they could go to check over her wounds, and she had to worry her plush bottom lip a bit at the mention of...well, at the vague mention of Christian. “Are - are you sure that everyone else is alright? What about Raphael and Camille, and...” Her nose scrunched up a little bit then, but with a tiny sigh, she continued. “...and Tatiana. Are they all okay?”