Primal Bargains

by Raleigh Davis

  “And the smoke?”

  Wolfe rolls his eyes. “I don’t know how that one got started, but there was never any smoke.”

  “Yeah, it’s not like you were stoking any of those crazy rumors with your behavior,” I say dryly. “So why did you smash all the panels?”

  His eyes flash blue at me. “Why? The fucking system failed me. Among other reasons.” He looks to Rustem. “Go home. I’ll be fine.”

  Rustem doesn’t move.

  I nod to him. “I’ll take care of him.” I don’t let myself look at Wolfe as I say that.

  “Call if you need anything,” Rustem says.

  Once he’s gone, I keep my gaze on Wolfe’s many scrapes and cuts. It’s going to take a while to clean everything.

  I dab at the abrasions with the gauze, but none of the gravel comes out. I’m going to have to get rougher, which I don’t want to do. He’s already in pain, his breath coming short, sweat on his forehead, and his pupils dilated so much his eyes are indigo.

  “You need to have a doctor irrigate this,” I say. “I’m worse than useless.”

  “Harder,” he grits out. “I can take it. And I am a doctor.”

  My gaze flies to his. How did I not know that?

  “Well, close to a doctor.” He shrugs. “I dropped out of med school in my last year.”

  I didn’t think my eyes could get any wider. “You couldn’t finish med school?”

  “I said dropped out, not flunked,” he growls.

  Well, at least he’s feeling well enough to do that. “But why? If you were so close, why not finish?”

  He doesn’t answer. Instead, he turns his head away from me.

  Fine. He wants to be surly, I don’t care. I scrub at the wound, watching with grim satisfaction as some of the dirt comes out.

  His breath hisses in. “Goddamn it,” he mutters. “Goddamn it, goddamn it, goddamn it.”

  I keep scrubbing. More and more dirt comes out. I try to ignore his sounds of pain, but it’s getting harder. I’m not made of stone. I whimper when he makes a particularly bad sound.

  “My parents were surgeons,” he says out of nowhere.

  My mind trips on the past tense, my hand going still. “I’m so sorry.”

  He grimaces. “They are. Shit. I don’t know why I always put it like that. They’re still alive.” He doesn’t sound happy about that.

  “Oh.” I angle my head to get a better look at the scrape. I think I might be making progress after all. Just a few more bits of gravel and it will be clean. “Did they want you to go to med school?”

  “I don’t think they ever wanted anything for me.” He gasps as I go after a particularly stubborn piece. “Want would be too tender. They expected me to go to med school. Expected me to do a lot of things.”

  I swallow hard. “But they must be proud of you now. You’ve built a company that saves lives. Way more lives than you ever could have as a doctor, working on your own.”

  He snorts. “Don’t think I’m some kind of hero. I’m not. I started the company to get back at my parents. All this?” He points to everything surrounding us. “It’s a giant fuck-you to them. The biggest fuck-you I could build. I’m not doing this for the good of humanity.”

  That’s the coldest thing I’ve ever heard. I can’t imagine feeling so bitter toward my parents. Feeling such hatred. It’s like black ink seeping out of him and onto the floor it’s so powerful.

  “You say all that,” I say quietly, “but you still do a lot of good in this world. Your heart’s not as black as you claim.”

  I let the gauze fall into the trash and start to wrap the scrapes, my hand trembling slightly. I’m suddenly achingly aware of his bare chest, naked skin so close, so warm.

  “What makes you think I have a heart?” he demands.

  “Well, you did all this for your parents. So you must still care some even if you think you don’t.”

  “My parents.” He practically spits that out. “Someone who cuts people open for a living thinks nothing about cutting their own son’s heart out.”

  My own heart goes cold, quiet. He’s saying that like he really believes it. But I can’t somehow. Even after the trick he pulled, I can’t believe his heart is hollow. Maybe because there’s still pain in how he talks about his parents. Somebody without a heart wouldn’t care anymore.

  “Rustem.” I grab onto his name. “You definitely care about him.”

  “He’s my employee.” He flicks that out like he could fire Rustem at any moment.

  Again, I call bullshit. “And your friend,” I say defiantly. “Along with Gage, Archer, Cassian, and Bishop. You’ve been friends since you were young; I saw the pictures. You all came up together; you still hang out. You definitely care about them.”

  “You think it was some kind of shared childhood that bonds us together?” He’s sneering at me. “Oh yeah, we share some stuff. But it’s not great memories of summers at the swimming hole.”

  I stare at him for a long moment. At the sensuous lips turned cruelly, his drooping, sooty lashes, the iron line of his jaw. He’s beautiful, but he’s trying so hard to look like a monster.

  “You want me to hate you,” I say slowly.

  A single, quick blink. “You’re finally getting it.” Relief, just the faintest hint, lurks under his words.

  I won’t hate him. I can’t. But he wants me to so badly, and I’m desperate to know why. What could he have possibly done to think that way about himself? And it can’t just be his parents, although it’s clear they fucked him royally. I hope I’m never in a room with them, or I’ll let loose.

  I straighten up. “Fine. You’re a monster. You’re awful, hideous. A nightmare in human form. Something straight from a horror—”

  “Okay, okay,” he grumbles. “You don’t have to go that far.” His gaze locks with mine. “Promise me you’ll remember though. No matter what happens.”

  He’s deadly serious. As serious as he was when he first told me he couldn’t trust anyone.

  “I won’t forget,” I say just as solemnly. I won’t say I hate him or anything like that, but I can promise that.

  “Good.” He nods to his hand. “Could you finish? Please?” he adds hastily.

  I finish wrapping up his arm. As I do, the air between us shifts and eases. It’s like making me admit he’s a monster has made something in him open to me. Like he can trust me now that I know how bad he is.

  When I’m done, he holds up both hands, one in bandages, the other in splints. “Shit,” he mutters.

  “I guess I’m doing the cooking tonight.”

  “I was thinking more about work.” Gideon lowers his hands with a sigh. “Can you take dictation?”

  The look I send him has him throwing up his hands again. “Just a suggestion.”

  “Cooking is my limit.” I pause by the door. “I won’t go upstairs again. I only did it to check on some wiring.”

  He raises an eyebrow.

  “Okay, I went to check on the wiring,” I confess, “but then I started to look around. But I won’t again. Although there is a security system up there.”

  I wait for him to explain what it is. I don’t think he will, but I won’t pretend I don’t know it’s up there.

  “If you need to go up there to install stuff, it’s fine,” he says gruffly. “I’d prefer you not to, but if you need to…” His jaw twitches. “Don’t worry about the other security system.”

  I take a breath and take a chance. “Why pretend that something awful happened to you? Never letting anyone see you, never going out, letting the rumors fly? What’s that about?”

  He shifts in the chair and leans back. “I want people to think I’m hurt worse than I am.”

  “But you are hurt bad!” Realization dawns. “You want the intruder to think you can’t defend yourself. You want them to try again.”

  It’s madness but also the only thing that makes sense. All of this is bait. And he’s setting himself up as the trap.

  “Y
ou’re crazy,” I whisper.

  He scoffs. “Crazy like a fox. I need to know who’s behind this. And when I catch the fucker, I’ll know.”

  “What are they after?” I ask. “This can’t be about… cash in the safe or jewelry or whatever.”

  He looks away and grabs his ribs.

  “They attacked you.”

  “Well…” His jaw works. “I tried to grab him, and when he fought back, I ended up going down the stairs.”

  Oh, that totally makes it better. “It’s still bad. And way beyond what a run-of-the-mill burglar would do.” I plant myself in the doorway. Nobody’s getting any dinner until he talks.

  “I guess you’re owed some answers,” he says, still not looking at me.

  I cross my arms. “After you lied to me like this? Yeah, it’d be nice.”

  He sighs and gets up. “Fine. But I’m hungry. Let’s do this in the kitchen.”

  Ten minutes later, there’s a spread of hummus, cheese, flatbread, olives, and stuffed grape leaves. He pours us each a large glass of red wine.

  “Should you have this?” I ask. “Did you take any pain meds?”

  The look he sends me is pure annoyance. “This is my pain meds.” He takes a long swallow, and I can’t help watching his throat move.

  I take a quick sip of my own wine, trying to chase away the sudden dryness in my throat.

  “So.” I set down my glass. “What’s the story?”

  He seems to look inward, as if viewing a memory. “I had a… a guy. You could call him a mentor. He helped all of us—me, Archer, Bishop, Cassian, Gage, and—” He cuts himself off and doesn’t finish that. “Anyway, he helped us all turn our lives around.”

  “Turn your life around?” I ask. If he was in med school, his life couldn’t have been that screwed up.

  “Remember my dropping out of med school?” A sad smile flickers over his mouth. “I wasn’t going to flunk out, but I was about to be kicked out.”

  My eyebrows fly up. “I mean, you’re kind of… surly, but kicked out?”

  “Surly?” he growls. “I’ve been really nice to you. Or tried to be.”

  “You mean you can be worse?” When he continues to glare, I lift my palms. “You pretended to be horrifically scarred.”

  “No, you assumed,” he says smugly. “And I wasn’t doing it to you personally. Like you said, it was bait.”

  “For what? What’s at the middle of all this?” I’m not going to be sidetracked here.

  He rubs his face with his good hand. Or rather, his decent one—neither one is good at the moment. “I hated med school. I never wanted to go, but I couldn’t make myself give up. So I developed a drinking problem. That’s why I was about to get kicked out.”

  Wow. He had a drinking problem in med school but still got good enough grades to stay in. I’m impressed in spite of myself.

  “Then what happened?” I ask, because he doesn’t have an MD or a drinking problem now, at least as far as I can tell.

  “Ira found me. Encouraged me to do AI and programming on the side. I’d always been interested in it but never gave it my full attention. He pushed all of us to be better, to design smarter, more elegant things.” His tone is rich with affection. A small smile plays at the corners of his mouth. Everything that should have been in his voice when he talked about his parents is there now.

  “When did he die?” I ask softly.

  “Eight years ago.” Gideon’s staring at a point far, far away. Or maybe it doesn’t even exist. “It was a car accident. Our friend Tynan was with him.”

  “I’m so sorry.” It feels so small against Gideon’s grief, but it’s all I have.

  He squares his shoulders. “Don’t say that.”

  I flinch at his tone. I might not know him well—at all, really—but saying I’m sorry is pretty accepted when someone tells the story of how their father figure died.

  “Ira left us all money in his will,” Gideon goes on. “I was the executor. We used it to start our companies. And he left us…” He chews on possible word choices. “Notebooks. One for each of us, including Tynan. But since Tynan wasn’t around, I held on to his.”

  “That’s what’s in the safe?”

  He nods.

  He thinks this is all about a notebook? I want to ask what was inside them, but considering the lengths he’s gone to protect it, he’s not going to tell me shit.

  Whatever it is, it must be explosive. And what the hell is in his notebook then? The secrets to his success?

  “But why now?” I ask. “Why not steal it when you lived someplace less secure?”

  “I don’t think the others knew Tynan had a notebook. Things were really confused right after. I never explicitly told them I had Tynan’s notebook. They might have realized or figured out recently that it exists and I must have it.”

  “But they have their own. Why would they…?” I’m missing something big here. It’s like trying to find my way around a boulder in the dark, but instead I’m inching around the things he won’t tell me.

  “Each notebook is different. We compared them when we first got them.”

  My mind starts to spin out possibilities. “So you think it’s one of the guys then? Or what if it’s one of Tynan’s relatives? Shouldn’t it have gone to his next of kin?”

  He tears off some flatbread. “Tynan didn’t have any relatives. No next of kin to give it to.” He dips up some hummus. “Raven and Morgan are also possibilities.”

  “Raven and Morgan?”

  “Ira’s daughters,” Gideon explains. “They got some money in the will, as much as the rest of us.”

  I frown. “They didn’t get notebooks? And did Ira have a wife?”

  “His wife died when the girls were young. But no, no notebooks for them. They did get the house though.”

  He doesn’t elaborate on why their father didn’t make the same bequests to his own family that he had for Gideon and his friends. Maybe because his daughters were girls. Only Ira’s big, bad foster sons got a notebook, containing whatever it was. “Weren’t they mad their dad didn’t prepare notebooks for them?”

  He pauses with a stuffed grape leaf halfway to his mouth. “No. They’re not like that.”

  I tuck my tongue in my cheek. “They’re good girls, never cause a fuss?”

  He nods, totally oblivious. “They wouldn’t care about that.”

  I’m not so sure, but I’ll take his word for it for now. “So your only suspects are your best friends?”

  “You can see why I’ve barricaded myself here,” he says dryly. “If it’s one of them, I have to be here to catch them.”

  “You don’t have to go it alone,” I say. “You have Rustem. And… well, me too, I guess.”

  Something flares deep in his eyes. “You? You’ll take down an intruder? For me?”

  I duck my head, because whatever is going on in his expression is too much for me. “Not that. But I can give you the best security system humanly possible.”

  The intensity in him fades. “I suppose I do have to trust you on that. But no, you should never be taking any intruder down. Rustem isn’t either. It’s my problem to solve. Tynan’s gone, Ira’s gone, so there’s only me. And I’m not going to let them down.”

  It sounds so incredibly lonely. Like it’s him against their ghosts and the world. My heart squeezes, hard, and this time I let it, because this time it feels like he’s earned it.

  Chapter 14

  I never meant to tell her all that, but something about Tess Robards’s gaze cracks me right open.

  At least she didn’t ask what was in the notebooks. I might have actually told her.

  She’s watching me with wide, solemn eyes. Like she wants to take the weight off my shoulders and onto her own. “You’re not alone. Don’t think that.” She puts her hand on my face, just like she did before.

  I suck in a sharp breath. Her touch is like no one else’s. Soft but electrifying. “Don’t feel responsible for me. That’s the opposite of what shou
ld happen.”

  It’s the opposite of what is happening—I’m imagining her trying to stop this thief, and my chest hurts so bad it’s hard to draw air. I feel so responsible for her I’m going a little mad thinking about her in the face of danger.

  I should let her go. Tell her to move back out, never come back. But her hand’s on my face and I can’t do anything but lean into her touch.

  “But that’s my superpower.” Her eyes are sad. “Feeling responsible for everyone.”

  Tess looking sad is fucking gutting. Like seeing the sun blotted from the sky. I never should have let her see my face, because she can get close now.

  Too late though. I lean in and capture her lips.

  Immediately I ignite. The hunger, the need she whips up in me is almost uncontrollable. I frame her face with both my hands, her jaw so delicate between them, and devour her. I don’t even need to breathe anymore because she’s got everything I’ve ever needed.

  “Jesus,” I mutter. “You’re so fucking sweet and hot and goddamn gorgeous.”

  “I’m not.” She sounds all dreamy, like I’ve kissed her into another world.

  I don’t know which part she’s protesting, and I don’t care, because it’s all true. “Don’t deny it,” I demand. “And you’d better not give a shit about me after this.”

  Her eyes open. “You’re a monster. I haven’t forgotten.”

  The tight knot in my chest eases. Good. She’s safe then. “That’s right.” I bend my head and kiss her again. Kiss her until the entire world starts to spin and my skin is aching for her.

  “Let me touch you,” I rumble, thrusting my thigh between hers. “Just touch you, that’s all. With clothes, without, but if I can’t get my hands on you, I’m gonna implode.”

  She makes a sort of whimper that’s close enough to a yes for me. I bend her backward over the counter, spreading her legs with mine. Her pussy lands on my thigh, and the heat’s so scorching I can feel it even through the fabric.

  She thrusts against my leg like she just can’t help herself. It’s so hot I have to grit my teeth, because otherwise I’d be grabbing my cock and getting myself off. Only a few strokes and I’d be there, she’s got me so wound up. And I haven’t even touched her, not really.