“No getting out before nightfall?” he asked, his gaze moving from the card to her striking green eyes.
A soft laugh slipped past her lips. “Naw. This place is built on more neutral territory.”
Max lifted his brows. “So not another Reapers’ safe house?”
Instead of answering his question, she said, “Just keep this little exchange to yourself and tell no one that I met with you. And I mean no one. I’m already going to get so much shit for this as it is.”
“You could always go one further and tell us what this Chiswick prick wants with her. Tell us what the hell she—”
Arra held up her hand. “I’m not here to give you answers this time either, pretty boy. Just be grateful for the place to stay.”
“Can you at least tell me if your brother was able to get my truck back to Charity?” Vivian asked, speaking up for the first time.
Arra’s gaze softened as she took in Vivian’s pale features. “Yeah. He got it dropped off last night.”
She’d just been through hell and back, but his woman still managed to give the biker an appreciative smile. “Please tell him thank you for me.”
“Sure thing,” Arra murmured, and before Max could get another word out, she climbed onto her bike, gave them a chin lift, and took off.
“It, um, sounds like my nickname for you is catching on,” Vivian murmured, covering her mouth with her hand as she tried to muffle a soft burst of laughter.
“Yay me,” he muttered, before sliding her a wry smile. He was still too damn relieved to have her safe and at his side again to let the nickname bother him. Hell, as far as he was concerned, she could call him whatever the fuck she wanted, if it made her laugh like that.
They got back in the truck and he handed over the new card that Arra had given him. “I took a quick look at the directions. It shouldn’t take us more than an hour to get there.”
“I just hope there’s hot water. I need a shower so badly I can taste it.”
“You look perfect,” he said, starting the engine and reversing out of the space.
“Hardly,” she scoffed with another quiet laugh, making him smile. “If anyone looks perfect here, it’s you.”
Reaching over, he took hold of her hand and gave it a gentle squeeze, his heart pounding as he thought about how easily he could have lost her back at the garage, if she hadn’t been able to change into whatever it was that she’d become. Because there’d been seven of the bastards, and he could only manage to release his claws and fangs in daylight.
“You scared the hell out of me today, Viv. If anything happened to you, I… I don’t know what I would do.” He slid her a quick look before pulling out onto the road, his chest drawing tight with some unnamed emotion that he was too terrified to try and identify. “You’re the most amazing person I’ve ever known, and I cannot fucking lose you. You drive me crazy, but I’m completely in awe of you, sweetheart.”
“Max,” she breathed, lowering her head as she pulled her hand back.
“Hey, it’s okay.” He reached for her hand again, a frown knitting between his brows when she jerked it away, twisting both hands together in her lap. “I want to hold that hand,” he husked, trying to figure out what had her so skittish with him. “Give it back.”
“You wouldn’t.” She shook her head so hard her long hair nearly hit his arm. “Not if you knew the truth.”
“Wouldn’t what?”
“Want me anymore.”
Her voice had been softer than he’d ever heard it, and he started to get the bad feeling that he should brace for a blow. “What are you talking about, Viv?”
“I…” She released an uneasy breath as she turned her head away from him, looking out the passenger-side window. “It’s all my fault.”
“Vivian—”
“No, just listen,” she said shakily, cutting him off. “I… I made a mistake. A horrible one. At the club.”
“You’re gonna have to give me more than that, babe.”
She rubbed her palms over her jean-covered thighs and stared down at her lap. “There was this…private party a few weeks ago at the Velvet Rope. For some reason, this group…they’d seen me on the floor, serving drinks, and asked the manager to have me serve them instead. And at first, I flat out refused. I mean, there was something about them that really creeped me out, and now I know why, because I think they were all…wargs.”
“Fuck,” he muttered under his breath, that bad feeling in his gut getting even worse.
She lifted an unsteady hand and wiped the tears from her cheeks, then turned her head to look at him, her skin so pale that her freckles were standing out in stark relief. “So, um, like I said, I tried to say no. But the manager, he just kept offering me more money on their behalf. He said they were determined to have me, and when he reached a thousand bucks for just two hours of work, I… I caved.”
Max gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles turned white, and he was surprised it hadn’t cracked. “Shit, Viv. That’s a lot of money.”
“I know. And I just kept thinking how it would mean I could finally buy some Christmas presents for Skye and my family. Ones that didn’t come from a thrift store for once. And so I… I sucked it up and I did it.”
“Did they try to touch you?” he asked, his voice little more than a guttural scrape of sound.
She shook her head again. “We had security with us, so they couldn’t get handsy. But they…” A shudder wracked her slender frame, and she wrapped her arms around her torso like she was trying to hold herself together. “They watched me like they could see under the skimpy outfit I had to wear, and it was terrifying. But the woman with them, she was the scariest one of all.”
“The woman?”
“Yeah. They had this beautiful blonde with them. She was… I just kept thinking that she was looking at me like something she wanted to take home with her, just so she could take me apart and study the pieces.”
“Jesus. That’s seriously fucked up,” he muttered, taking the next right onto the two-lane highway that would take them within a few miles of the address Arra had given him.
“It was. It was the single worst night of my life, until all this…this shit started happening, and it’s all my greedy, stupid fault.” Her voice broke, and the tears that had been slowly slipping from her eyes started to fall harder. “If I had just listened to my gut and said to hell with the money, and walked away that night, telling my manager to shove it, then they would have fixated on some other poor girl and left me alone. I mean, that would still be awful, but at least I wouldn’t be responsible for bringing all this horrible crap down on Skye’s head as well. Plus David’s.” She sounded so shattered and scared it broke his heart. “And yours.”
“Fuck, sweetheart. This isn’t on you.”
“But if I hadn’t been greedy—if I’d listened to my gut and told the manager no—then none of this would have happened!”
“Bullshit.”
“Max,” she groaned.
Reaching over the center console again, he gently took hold of her chin, making her look his way, his attention divided between her and the road. “Repeat after me, Vivian. This shit is not my fault.”
“I can’t.”
“You can, and you will,” he argued. “Right now.”
“I can’t!” she shot back, the stark sound echoing through the cab as she panted with her anger. Every single ounce of it directed at herself.
“Hey, calm down,” he murmured, stroking her soft skin with his thumb. “We’ll talk about your misplaced sense of guilt again later, because I’m not giving up. I’m going to make you see that this isn’t something you need to carry around with you, letting it twist you up inside.” Lowering his hand, he threaded his fingers through hers again. “But for now, I need to know everything you can tell me about that night. Did any of them talk to you?”
“Just crude stuff,” she said quietly, making him grind his jaw so hard he couldn’t believe he didn’t crack
a tooth. “But the woman, when I served her a drink, she smiled at me and told me I was a ‘brave little morsel.’ It freaked me out big time.”
“What did she look like?”
“Beautiful, but…cold. Like some kind of ice queen. Her hair was platinum blonde, skin so pale it was almost white. She was taller than me by nearly half a foot, and reed thin.”
“How did the men treat her?”
“I… I got the sense that they were kinda afraid of her.”
Rubbing his thumb over her delicate knuckles, he said, “So now that you’re finally being honest with me, will you tell me what spooked you the other night, when I showed up at the club?”
“Yeah, okay.” She pulled in a deep breath, then slowly let it out before she started to explain. “When I went up to the VIP lounge, I saw them in a booth. The two creeps who attacked you in the parking lot after you found me at that diner. They didn’t see me come up, but I recognized them from the party, and I ducked through the doorway that leads to the club’s back staircase. They couldn’t see me there, but I was close enough that I could hear them talking…”
He gave her hand a little squeeze when her voice trailed off, letting her know she had him and he wasn’t going anywhere. “What’d you hear, baby?”
Swiping at the tears on her cheeks with her free hand, her voice was almost whisper-soft as she said, “They were talking about if they… If they could get away with fucking me before taking me to the drop point, without some guy named Abel finding out. I was so scared that I ran.”
“I don’t blame you,” he forced through his gritted teeth, wishing he could get just five minutes alone with the assholes again.
And Abel… That was the name of the red-haired giant who’d been giving orders at the garage, which meant he’d been after Vivian from the beginning.
“What happened next?” he asked, thankful that he was driving, since there was a good chance he’d be punching his fist through a wall right about now if she’d told him all this back at her grandmother’s house, and that would have seriously sucked. “You left the club, right?”
“Yeah. I grabbed my purse, told Sharla, one of the other servers, that I had to go, and drove as fast as I could back to the apartment. It’s so stupid, but I couldn’t leave that friggin’ box behind. It was like a compulsion. I had to get it. So I went into my bedroom, got the box out from under my bed, and that was when they showed up.”
“Did you start to feel different right away?”
“No. I… I was just terrified. When they burst into my bedroom, I got my pepper spray, but it didn’t do anything. Just made the blond one laugh. He cut me, and they kept on laughing and making jokes while they wet their hands in my blood and wrote that message on my wall.”
His breath hissed through his teeth at the memory of her slashed abdomen, and he ground out a vicious curse, his rage over what she was revealing as savage and biting as any he’d ever known.
Clearing her throat a little, she went on. “I… I wasn’t just going to lie there and watch, so I started crawling out of the room, and that’s when I saw the cross on the floor.” Max had noticed that she hadn’t worn the necklace since her mom had told her it was her old man’s, and he couldn’t help but wonder if it was somehow tied to whatever species her dad was. “Just as I managed to reach it, one of the wargs grabbed my leg and started pulling me back into the room, and I…”
“I know this isn’t easy, but you’re doing great,” he murmured with encouragement, when her voice trailed off again.
She gave a little nod, then quietly continued. “So, um, somehow I changed into whatever I changed into at the garage. Or at least…partly. I tried to run, but they caught me in the living room, and I don’t even know how it all happened, because it was a blur. Suddenly I was just standing there, with blood on my hands, and they were both lying unconscious on the floor. I think I must have been in shock, but I quickly threw some stuff in my backpack and got the hell out of there. But as I started my truck, I saw them run out the front door, and I knew they were going to follow me. So I drove like a freaking maniac, and somehow managed to lose them.” She ran her tongue over her lower lip as she turned her head his way again. “Or maybe I didn’t, seeing as how they found me at the diner that night.”
Deep voice rough with emotion, he said, “I know you wish you weren’t going through this shit, Viv, and I wish you weren’t either. But I’m damn glad that you were able to save yourself that night.”
She took a moment to process what he’d said, then managed a shaky smile. “I never thought I’d say this, but me too.”
Me three, the wolf murmured, surprising him. Max hadn’t heard from it for a while, but then, it never talked much when he was in the shit, as if it knew he needed to concentrate and didn’t want to be a distraction. And right now, he was too upset to even argue with the animal. Not when he could feel its own fury and frustration with everything that had happened. With how close they’d come to losing her.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, when a guttural sound tore its way up from his chest, visceral and raw.
“It just terrifies me, how many times I’ve come too close to losing you. Those assholes could have taken you that night, and I wouldn’t have been able to do a goddamn thing about it. You have no idea how crazy it made me when I saw that message they left on your bedroom wall. It scared the shit out of all of us. Me, Elliot and Skye, until she played back those messages you left for her on the answering machine, and we realized the pricks were lying.”
“I’m sorry,” she said in a broken whisper.
“Stop apologizing,” he husked, pulling her hand to his lips so that he could press a gentle kiss to her knuckles. “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for, sweetheart.”
She slid him a tear-drenched look that felt like a punch to his chest. “But I don’t want anything to happen to you either, Max.”
“Trust me, baby. I’m not going anywhere,” he muttered against her soft skin, keeping her hand pressed to his lips. “And you’re not going to run again, right?”
She sniffed, and her breath left her lungs in a trembling gust. “Oh, I’m not going anywhere either. I’ve decided I need to stay as close to you as I can, so that I know you’re okay.”
“For how long?” he scraped out, her words sending a molten wave of heat rushing through his body that was so intense it burned.
Her soft lips curled with a tender, breathtaking smile. “For as long as you’ll let me.”
Chapter Fifteen
Desperate For You
Vivian shivered with awareness as Max made a thick sound at the back of his throat that was raw and full of need, her emotions swinging from one extreme to another as he unexpectedly pulled the truck off the road, stopping behind a clump of trees that would offer them shelter from any passing cars.
Looking around, she asked, “Why are we stopping? Did you see something? Was someone following us?”
“No one’s following us,” he said, reaching over to undo her seatbelt, then quickly pulling her over the center console and into his lap. “I just need to hold you, and I plan on being about a mile inside of you while I do it.”
“You really still want me?” she whispered, amazed it could be true after what she’d just shared. The embarrassing truth of how stupid she’d been.
“Want you?” He looked at her as if he thought she was crazy for ever doubting it. “Christ, Vivian. I’m fucking desperate for you.”
She was…surprised. A bit confused. Happy. Yeah, definitely happy. God, she was all of those things and more. And greedy. Greedy to get her hands on him. On every part of him. “I’m desperate for you too, Max.”
“That’s my girl,” he groaned, taking her mouth in that way that only he could, as if he knew precisely how to drive her crazy with his warm lips and the hungry flicks of his tongue. It wasn’t easy in the tight confines of the truck, but she managed to get her shoes and jeans off, straddling him as he eased his seat back a bit, their hands
as eager as their lips as they touched and tasted as much as they could. She loved how each breath she took was filled with his hot, masculine scent. Loved the taste of his mouth and the feel of his ripped, powerful body.
He gritted his teeth as she reached down and started working his jeans open, her mouth watering as she pulled his cock out, and all she could think was that it wasn’t fair for him to be so…so freaking addictive. The heavy head was ripe and succulent, so swollen it looked painful. She’d never, ever gotten hot and bothered by the sight of a guy’s junk before; not that she’d seen all that many. But even if she had, she knew it would be different with Max, just like so many other things.
Everything was different with him, and not just because he was the first guy she’d ever been with who wasn’t human. It was the way she felt when she was with him, and how she felt about him. There she was, going through the most messed-up time of her entire life, and yet, she felt a fragile, impossibly sweet kind of hope for the future. Felt as if she were finally exactly where she was meant to be, doing exactly what she was meant to be doing, even though she really didn’t have a clue what that was. But it still felt…right.
Studying him with a hungry, heavy-lidded gaze, she ran her thumb over one of the veins that bulged under the silky skin of his dark shaft, loving the way he trembled beneath her.
“God,” he groaned, his powerful body shuddering even harder as he ran his big hands from her hips to her waist. “You’re gonna be the death of me, Viv.”
“Oh! Ohmygod, wait!” she suddenly gasped with panic, gripping his wrists when he buried his face against the side of her throat and started to pull her shirt up. “What are we doing? I’m still all gross from the fight.”
She felt him smile against her collarbone. “Beautiful girl, you could never be gross.”
“Max, I’m all sweaty,” she argued, torn between wanting to seriously jump his bones and finding the nearest possible shower, so she could get all this disgusting grime off. “And my cuts are still bleeding all over the place.”
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