“Oh, but I think you do,” he snarled. “You have to pay for what you have done, don’t you think?”
I had nothing to threaten him with. I had nothing to defend myself with. And this time, I was probably not going to get another way out. If they wanted to make me pay, if they were going to be merciless, if they wanted to hurt me, they could.
“Okay, that’s enough,” somebody said in a calm, casual voice that sounded almost bored.
My head automatically snapped to my right, where the voice had come from, to see another man detach himself from the wall. He might have stood there throughout my whole assault.
He was even taller than the other three, with intimidatingly broad shoulders, strapping arms that he kept folded over a well-built chest, and legs that seemed endless. The way he was dressed—black leather jacket, black jeans, black sports shoes—he looked like a biker, threatening and mean and much scarier than his friends.
“I said, that’s enough,” he growled to the man still pressing me against the wall.
Slowly and with lethal grace, he approached us and coolly removed my captor’s hands from my body, giving him a shove until he was forced to step aside. Then a pair of fire blue eyes fixed me for an interminable moment. It wasn’t just the strength of his body that intimidated me but also that of his demeanor. Power and control exuded from him, so fiery and potent that when he walked closer, I felt scalded.
“Are you okay?” he asked, ducking his head to better see my face.
No, I was not okay. Despite my efforts, I was trembling, and more infuriatingly, my eyelids were stinging and my nose was prickling, a taunting warning before I started crying.
All I wanted to do was crawl beneath a blanket in the safety of my room and forget all about what had happened in that dark alley. But the man currently standing before me had other intentions.
“I know you have a tongue because you have just spoken to these idiots...” he continued, coming even closer to me as I shrank back.
He assessed me, then he straightened to his full height and stepped back. He knew I was scared, but he wasn’t set on acting on my fear. That surprised me.
“Look, I am not trying to scare you. I just want to know if you are okay. Are you?” he pressed when I still said nothing.
It was odd that moments ago I had been able to beg his less likable friends to release me, and now, I was entirely incapable of forming an answer to a simple question. Instead, I nodded. He continued watching me as if not absolutely sure I was telling the truth, but eventually, he nodded too. If he had witnessed the whole ordeal, he knew that his friends hadn’t done anything more than thoroughly scare me and teach me to never choose a shortcut in my life.
“They weren’t going to hurt you,” the blue-eyed man explained, motioning absently to the retreating figures of my three assailants. “They just have a strange way of spending their time. And you got scared much too quickly, which only... entertained them.”
“I’m glad they enjoyed themselves,” I muttered in a low voice, hardly hearing myself.
His eyes snapped to my lips before they locked on my own. His stare was torrid and harshly intent. Then a broad smile pulled up the corner of his lips and lit his eyes so brightly that they seemed spotlights in the growing darkness.
I looked away, and seeing that he didn’t corner me like a predator, I dared to move. He didn’t stop me when I began walking away, but he did follow.
“Let me walk you home,” he asked, the side of his body almost touching mine. “I need to be sure that nothing else happens to you tonight.”
“That is not necessary.”
“Please.”
His fingers locked around my wrist, briefly stopping me in place, absently caressing the skin there. The contact didn’t last more than a second, but it electrified me. I snatched my hand back and cradled it to my chest as if he had burned me. My reaction brought a frown to his face, knitting together his well-defined brows.
I set off once more, not sticking around to inspect his facial changes. “That is not necessary,” I repeated, even more curtly than before.
“Maybe that’s better,” he concluded, finally letting me leave.
I hugged myself and struggled to walk as fast as possible, which in my anxious state was not fast at all. And suddenly, the weird urge to turn and catch a last glimpse of that man pulsed furiously in my blood. I was so tense, so edgy, that when he called out, I all but shrieked.
“Aren’t you going to get your bag?”
Instinctively, I reached for my bag, which was not hanging on my right shoulder anymore. Hesitation stopped me in place. When I turned, I found him standing in the exact same spot where I had left him, holding my purse and urging me with his wayward stare to go and get it.
I finally mustered the courage to return for my bag, feeling his searing blue eyes on me with each step that I took. Reaching for the handbag, I made the mistake of touching his fingers, and the contact sent a flaring jolt of awareness through my system.
I pulled on the strap with more rudeness and more force than necessary, but his grip matched my brusqueness with an unflinching strength. I looked up into bright, singularly beautiful eyes that narrowed just a bit as he tried to figure me out, like I was a mystery that he needed to solve.
When I prepared to yank at the bag again, the stranger let go, a quietly amused smile flapping defiantly across his features. He didn’t say anything more. He didn’t expect me to say anything more either. He just disappeared, and so did the scare his friends had given me.
Or so I thought.
Chapter 2
Marcus
I glared up at the clouds and stepped outside L’Affaire onto the already wet sidewalk. I favored the idea of a storm before or during a race as much as I liked that Kai, Bryson, and Brayden were going to ride in their inebriated states.
Brayden tripped over his own feet then ran into a strawberry blonde girl, who was clutching her coat around her frame and her bag to her chest as if she were holding her entire life in that small sack. As she tottered on her feet and almost fell, she looked up, her eyes finally leaving the ground where they had been riveted. She seemed young and much too innocent for what was coming.
“Hey gorgeous,” Brayden said, settling his big hands on her narrow waist.
The girl blinked in confusion, then, despite the growing chill outside, her cheeks warmed up and her eyes returned to the rain-dampened ground. So she wasn’t just innocent, she was also timid—a heady concoction for Brayden’s obnoxiousness.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured then tried to push Brayden’s hands to the side so she could leave.
“No need to apologize, sugar,” Bryson cut in with a big grin that matched his brother’s. “I assure you he enjoyed tremendously how you bumped against his—ahem—chest.”
Brayden threw his head back and howled with deafening laughter, clapping Bryson’s shoulder, who joined in his brother’s antics. While Brayden and my cousin, Kai, were three years younger, Bryson was my age, but sometimes, he seemed the most stupid and reckless of us all. Watching him enabling his little brother and turning a blind eye to his dangerous and morbid habits was no surprise anymore. In fact, what stunned me was Kai, who sneered at the girl and joined Brayden’s never-ending vicious cycle.
Kai was reckless in his own way but never disrespectful and never cruel to those weaker than him. He tolerated Brayden’s habits, but he never contributed to his idiocy. Alcohol might have been clouding his mind but not so badly as to turn him into a different man unless other things were weighing on his mind.
“I didn’t mean to—I was just not paying attention—”
Their amusement grew while the girl was almost brought to tears. She clutched her bag tighter to her body as if it could protect her. Her chin was burrowed to her chest, and her shoulders shook with repressed tears and mounting fear. The image of a vulnerable girl, who I doubted was even of age, held no amusement to me.
“You should be paying
attention,” I told her coldly then pushed each man behind, offering her a clear way out.
She blinked then fastened her gaze on me. Her pupils dilated, and her lower lip quivered slightly but enough to show me that she was more scared by my voice than she had been by Brayden and Bryson’s approach. Typical.
“Now try to get home without any other incidents, darling.”
“But...” Brayden interrupted, vexed by my interference. They knew that when I usually interfered, it was to break their little party and not join it.
“But...” I muttered, mimicking his expression. “Put one leg in front of the other and walk.”
“Dude,” Bryson said, clamping my shoulder, “you didn’t have nearly enough alcohol yet.”
I shoved his hand and glowered until the grin slipped off his face. “I don’t drink before a race.”
I hadn’t had the best of days. In fact, all I wanted was to forget all about the past day, or better, the past month, and the only way I could achieve that was by racing.
When I was on my motorcycle, with the wind in my face and the speed making my heart pump faster and my blood run hotter, the adrenaline gave me strength.
When I raced, I felt so powerful that nothing could break me or bring me to my knees. Nobody could take the control from my hands. And walking the thin line between life and death added a shade of danger that only made everything better.
When I raced, I could forget, even if for a short while, that my own father was the man aiming to put me behind bars.
“Dude, are you listening?” Kai demanded, elbowing me in the ribs.
I ran a hand over my face, a habit to both hide my emotions and scatter the upsetting thoughts that crammed my mind. I looked at Kai without a clue, and with an arch of my brow, I prompted him to speak although I didn’t have the slightest interest in whatever he had been discussing. My interest was solely focused on getting to the race where I could shut off my brain.
“What?”
“Liv just called. She said she needs your help. Stat.”
“What? Why?” I hissed. “What’s wrong?”
“Dude, chill,” Bryson sighed, rolling his eyes in exasperation. “There’s just a power outage in the neighborhood. I don’t know why she doesn’t just call somebody else.”
I allowed myself to breathe a sigh of relief. Every time Liv called, I expected that something dreadful had happened, and though a power outage for her must have been horrible enough, at least I knew she was safe.
It was in that short moment of relief that I picked up on Kai’s irony. What he had meant was that she didn’t need me immediately but was only being capricious. I didn’t agree. She truly needed me. And I was always going to be there for her. No matter what.
I veered right on a narrow dark alley before they could say anything to stop me. I knew they were following just by the sound of their cadenced footsteps on the pavement. I wished they hadn’t because sooner or later they were going to do or say something that tested my patience.
“Dude, the race?” Kai called.
“I have time,” I threw over my shoulder and hurried to Liv.
“You are a complete idiot,” Bryson sighed again but kept his distance. He knew better than all of them that when Liv called, they should mind their own business.
“Oh, but what do we have here?” Brayden growled dramatically. He looked like a predator on the hunt.
My eyes followed his gaze to stumble upon the hurried silhouette of a woman. At first, I feared it was the same unfortunate girl from earlier, but this one was unmistakable even if she only graced us with her back.
She was slightly taller than the girl we had encountered earlier and definitely womanly-shaped. Her hair, draped over one shoulder, stood out against the cream of her coat and was a wild halo of long chocolate waves.
Brayden licked his lips and walked her way. He had a softness for long-haired women and an obsessive desire for revenge directed toward all the wrong targets. It didn’t surprise me that he planned to harass her too. Unfortunately for his new prey, I wasn’t going to stick around to get him off her when he would cross the line. Because he would.
“For God’s sake, don’t go,’ Bryson tried one more time as Brayden followed the woman. “Let’s have fun. Let’s meet that girl. Let’s go to the race.”
“Have fun,” I muttered and walked off. By now, Liv must have been hysterical.
I didn’t stop when I walked past the woman and saw her scared expression as Brayden, Kai, and Bryson cornered her. They might have been half-drunk and too obnoxious for her taste, but they weren’t going to actually harm her.
Raindrops started falling faster, but despite the thrumming of the rain, I could hear the woman’s pleas to be left alone.
I was not a decent man. I was not particularly kindhearted either. I rarely empathized with somebody else’s fear or pain. But while Brayden had a tendency to scare innocent-looking women and enjoy doing so, I had the tendency to protect them.
Liv was my first, sometimes my only priority. Protecting her was both duty and instinct, but though she was waiting for me, the big brown eyes of the woman I had just passed in the alley flashed before mine and made my step falter. I had seen her for only a fraction of a second. I had hardly noticed anything about her other than the fear and despair soaking her sight, but I was going back for her.
Brayden’s laughter echoed gruesomely loud. If he had scared the strawberry-blonde girl from earlier, he frightened his current plaything to the point that she was shaking and struggling to breathe.
“Please—I—just let me go. I have nothing to give you,” she pleaded. Her eyes shone with unshed tears, and I couldn’t comprehend how a man, tipsy, drunk, or sober, could enjoy such fear.
“Oh, but I think you do,” Brayden told her sharply, towering over her while she grew smaller. “You have to pay for what you have done, don’t you think?”
Finally close enough to watch every emotion dancing chaotically on her face, the woman was fascinating despite her anxiety. I leaned against the wall where they had her pinned, adopting a leisurely attitude when, in fact, I only wanted to slap the idiocy out of the three of them.
I heard a groan and looked past Brayden and Bryson, who were cornering the young woman, to see Kai holding his guts. I almost laughed. So she was a fighter. I liked that. And respected it.
Then I observed her. She had a pale complexion, which I wasn’t sure whether it was her natural skin color or a temporary pallor caused by the panic that she emanated in almost tangible waves. Those big brown eyes looked even larger now that I was closer, and the long eyelashes adorning them fanned her cheeks softly.
She had a beauty spot that contrasted with her pale skin just above her upper lip, near the left corner of her mouth, and her mouth... Well, her mouth was delightfully shaped with voluptuous lips that were red and tempting.
She was not the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, but there was something about her that felt intoxicating, addictive. Once my attention was distracted by her feminine appeal, I knew it was time to cease the scrutiny.
“Okay, that’s enough.”
Kai and Bryson stepped back with a roll of their eyes, wobbling away as if nothing had ever happened. Brayden, however, didn’t even acknowledge me. But the woman did.
Her eyes found me and glided erratically over my body. When her features deepened with fear, it didn’t surprise me that I scared her more than her assailants. I was used to it by now. If only I had looked like Hulk or Frankenstein, I would have understood where this fear was always coming from.
“I said that’s enough,” I ordered and straightened, taking a step closer so I was standing right behind Brayden.
His determination to scare the woman wavered, but that didn’t mean he complied with my command, so I physically removed him from sight. The glare I gave him as I did so efficiently shut him up.
“Are you okay?” I asked the stranger, but no words came out of her mouth. She only shivered. “I
know you have a tongue because you have just spoken to these idiots...”
I had returned only to make sure that Brayden and the rest gave up on their attempt to disturb her, but all I had managed was to scare her further. And our proximity didn’t do anything to help matters.
Once more, I ran a hand over my face and stepped back. She needed her space as much as I needed her to assure me that those morons hadn’t harmed her.
“Look, I am not trying to scare you. I just want to know if you are okay. Are you?”
Still no answer. Although the woman’s fearful attitude could have been amusing, at the moment it was becoming annoying. Couldn’t she understand that I didn’t mean her any harm?
“They weren’t going to hurt you,” I spoke, seeing as she didn’t plan on saying anything. “They just have a strange way of spending their time. And you got scared much too quickly which only... entertained them.”
“I’m glad they enjoyed themselves.”
So, besides being a fighter, she was also a smart-mouth. I liked that more than I wanted to admit, and because of that, I needed to part ways with her as quickly as possible.
“Let me walk you home,” I told her instead, frowning as I realized what I had just said. Liv was waiting for me, for God’s sake, but despite that, I kept walking by the woman’s side. I didn’t even know her name. “I need to be sure that nothing else happens to you tonight.”
“That is not necessary.”
“Please,” I pressed, my hand reaching for hers.
As my fingers brushed her skin, her appeal turned even more powerful. It invaded me. The brief contact, however, seemed to only appall her as she recoiled and stared at me like I had just taken advantage of her innocence.
“That is not necessary.” She strode off, wrapping her arms around herself.
“Maybe that’s better,” I muttered more to myself than to her. She was nobody to me, so I was not responsible for her safety. But I was responsible for getting her belongings back.
“Aren’t you going to get your bag?” I shouted after her. She turned cautiously, her eyes immediately lowering to the bag she hadn’t noticed I had picked up off the ground and carried for the several steps we had walked together.
Darkside Love Affair Page 2
