Strange Secrets

by Lexy Timms

  I kissed his jaw, smiling as he slowly drew himself out of me. He was reluctant to give this up, and I knew just how he felt. There was something so addictive about this sensation, I couldn’t imagine going back to reality now that we were done. Though, hopefully, this wouldn’t be done quite so soon...

  He flopped down on the couch beside me, our limbs still tangled up together, and looked over at me with a smile on his face.

  “I hope that’s a good enough apology for the article,” I told him, cocking my head to the side and widening my eyes to play at innocent. A devilish smile crossed his lips, and I knew that he had far more planned for me.

  “Hmm,” he murmured in response. “I’m not sure about that. I would expect something a little more selfless to act as a real apology...”

  As he closed the distance between us, I hooked my arms around him once more and kissed him back, smiling into the embrace. This felt softer, sweeter than what we’d just shared, and it made me glad to know that he wasn’t looking to get up and run out the door as soon as he was done. He didn’t want to go. He wanted to stay here with me for a while longer yet, and I knew that I would have to come up with a hundred different ways to make that worth his while. He pulled me into his lap, and I tilted my head to the side so that I could kiss him properly, our tongues meeting again. Could he taste the wine that I had been drinking? I didn’t much care either way. All that mattered to me was that he knew I was drunk on nothing but him tonight. He was the only thing that mattered to me. And I needed him to understand that...

  But before we could get too lost to the moment, I heard his phone ring from his pants pocket—and he pulled back from me with an irritated groan.

  “I should probably get that,” he murmured, smiling as he brushed his nose against mine and reached for his buzzing cell. I sank back on to the couch. Hey, I could wait a little while longer. My muscles were still essentially jelly from the fucking that he had just given me, so maybe it was for the best to give myself a little time to recuperate.

  He answered his phone, and I listened to see who was on the other end of the line—I was eternally nosy, after all, even when I knew that I should have been minding my own business for a change. But I couldn’t hear anyone speaking to him—and when he pulled the phone away from his ear to see who was calling, his face dropped.

  “I need to go,” he said suddenly, and he ended the call and pulled up his pants and headed for the door. My stomach dropped. Something serious was going on—but what the hell was so important that he couldn’t stay a little longer?

  “Really?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Really.” He cast a look over at me for a moment before he stepped out into the hall once more.

  “Stay safe,” he ordered me. It wasn’t a platitude when it came out of his mouth. I knew that he was offering me a warning. And I couldn’t help but wonder, as I sat there on the couch and watched him leave, just what had been so serious that he’d had to make a run for it so damn fast.

  I got the feeling that this was serious. And I was going to get to the bottom of just what was so serious about it.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Jesse

  I PULLED UP OUTSIDE the Rosewater, my blood pulsing in my head, and I knew that whatever I was about to walk in on, it wasn’t good news.

  There was something up. Luke had called me—or, at least, I had gotten a call from his phone, that was for sure. But it had been dead silent on the other end, and I knew that whoever had been calling me was making sure that I knew that he wouldn’t be able to speak to me. Or maybe he couldn’t.

  Luke’s car was in the lot, but the lights were out in the restaurant—normally, he’d be in there at least until this late, counting cash and making sure that everything was exactly where it needed to be. The fact that he wasn’t there right now was bad news, but I didn’t know just how bad it was going to turn out to be.

  I made my way through the restaurant toward the stairs at the back that led to the apartments upstairs. Usually, at this time of night, I would be able to hear people chatting—people going about their business, cooking dinner after a late shift at the restaurant, stuff like that. But it was silent. Dead silent. And there was something seriously wrong with the way that was making me feel. I just wanted to find Luke...

  I made sure to skip the steps that I knew squeaked. I didn’t want anyone to know that I was here, especially not the people who had made that call to me. I knew that they wanted something, and I just had to pray that they hadn’t used my little brother to get it.

  Surely, they wouldn’t come out too hard right off the bat. They had to warn me first. And taking out Luke—taking out Luke was going to be too much for them, I was sure of it. I knew that they had a lot to prove to me right now, but that didn’t mean that they were dumb, that they were going to do something so dangerous in the hopes of making sure that I got the message.

  I paused at the end of the corridor that led down to his apartment. Was there anyone there? Waiting, in the stillness? I thought about calling his name, but I changed my mind. My instincts from back in the day were beginning to kick in, and I knew that I needed to use the element of surprise here to my advantage. Make sure that nobody knew that I had made it here in such a hurry.

  As I snuck down the corridor, I couldn’t help but think of Sarah. I had just left her in the apartment, no explanation, just a warning to be safe. What the hell must she have been thinking about me now? I wanted to turn around and tell her that I would be back to protect her as soon as I got the chance, but right now, I had to focus on what mattered here—and that was getting my brother out of this place in one piece.

  If he was even still in one piece, that was.

  No, I couldn’t let that get to me, not until I knew for sure. Yes, I was scared—yes, I could feel my pulse throbbing in my veins, my throat aching to call his name just to hear his voice once more. But I had to keep myself together. He was relying on me for that. Whatever had happened, he needed me. And I wasn’t going to fall through when he had called me to his side.

  I reached the door to his apartment and saw that it was open a crack. Not good news. Anyone could be waiting inside there for me right now. Whoever had called, they were likely expecting me, and I had some serious questions about who it might have been. How many of them there were, too. It had been a long time since I’d had to use the skills that I had cultivated before, but I was trying to pull them to the front of my brain once again. It wasn’t working. My mind was too blurred with stress, with fear, with wondering how they had found him and why they had decided to go after him and not me.

  I slowly pushed the door open. I didn’t know what I was expecting, but the place was cast in darkness when I stepped inside. I flicked the light, and as soon as I saw what was in front of me, my stomach turned.

  The place had been fucked up. Completely destroyed. Whoever had come through here, they had wanted to make sure that everyone knew that this was worthless to them. That they wouldn’t have to worry about blowback for doing what they had done. Curtains were torn from the windows and tossed to the floor, the TV had been smashed and left in pieces on the ground, the sofas had been flipped, and the doors to the kitchen cupboards had been ripped off, leaving nothing but these empty, dangling caverns in their place. It looked as though a hurricane had whipped through here.

  But I knew that only people could have done this much focused damage. No natural disaster could have left this trail of destruction. No, only human beings could have hated something or someone this much to tear through it like this, and I knew that they wouldn’t leave it at that, either. This was a sign. A warning. A promise of more to come.

  But I didn’t know how much they had already committed to already—I needed to find Luke. I headed into the bedroom, taking my time, scanning every corner for a sign that someone was going to jump out at me, but there was nothing and nobody here. They had already left. I didn’t know where they might have run to, but I had no doubt that they h
adn’t gone far—and that it wouldn’t take long for them to turn around and come right back here if they found out that I had returned, too.

  I hated this. I could feel the panic pulsing in my guts. I tried to calm it, tried to remind myself that I had dealt with shit a million times worse than this a million times or more before, but something about this was...it was different.

  And I knew why. Because, before, my brother had never been involved in any of this. I’d always managed to keep him safe from this mess, but now he was in the middle of it, and I had no idea what I needed to do to change what had happened. I wanted to go back in time and fix it, but I had been too busy with Sarah, too busy trying to stop my past catching up with me...

  The irony wasn’t lost on me. But I could dwell on that later. Right now, I needed to find my brother. And I needed to make sure he was alive.

  Suddenly, I heard a groan from the bathroom. The lights were off inside, but I pushed the door open and saw the vague shape of my brother on the edge of the bathtub, hunched over the sink. I flicked on the light—and my heart stopped when I saw the state that he was in under the harsh lights of his bathroom.

  “Holy shit,” I muttered as I strode toward him hurriedly. He looked as though he had been hit by a truck. Several of them, actually. His nose was gushing blood, his lip was burst, and his face and torso were covered in bruises and contusions.

  “What the hell happened to you?” I demanded, but he just shook his head.

  “I don’t even know,” he replied, sounding like he was in shock, as I would have expected. “I just...I was in my apartment, and then they kicked open the door, and then...”

  “Who was it?” I asked as I ran some cold water into my hand so that I could start cleaning up his wounds. I had dealt with enough shit like this over the years to at least have a good guess at how to get him fixed up again, but I was still reeling from the shock of seeing my own brother like that. I should never have left him on his own. I should have been here to protect him, just like I had always promised my mother that I would be.

  But I had been with Sarah instead. And now I was paying the price for daring to take a step back and letting something like this shake out of my head.

  “I don’t know,” he replied, and I tipped his head back so that the blood could pour back down again. He was concious, barely, and I knew that I was going to have to get him to a hospital. But I needed to find out everything that I could from him while I still had him here—I knew that he wasn’t going to last much longer before he passed out in my arms, and I needed to be certain that nobody was about to jump out and kill both of us before I took him anywhere else.

  “There were three of them,” he continued. “Three guys. They kicked the door in when I was making dinner and they came for me. I don’t remember a lot of it. I managed to get to the bathroom and lock the door and they just destroyed the rest of the apartment while I was in here...”

  “Shit,” I muttered, shaking my head. It was too horrible to be true. But I had seen the state of him, the state of this place, I knew that he was being honest with me.

  “One of them said that Joe had sent them,” he continued. “At least, I think that was the name they used. I couldn’t really make it out...”

  “That was the name they used,” I murmured back to him. There was no way that anyone else could have done something like this. Not a chance in hell. Whoever had hurt him, they had done it to get to me, and I knew only one person who would have used a plan that twisted to get what they wanted.

  “And they said that he had told them that nobody could run forever,” he continued. “I don’t know what they meant, but...”

  He trailed off. He didn’t need to finish what he was saying. Because I knew damn well what they had been getting at, what they wanted me to know. They needed me to hear that—they needed me to understand that they weren’t going to let me keep running, even though it felt like I had gotten far enough from them to earn that by now.

  As I watched my brother slump over the bathtub, clearly barely hanging on to consciousness, I knew that I was going to have to start fighting. Everything that I had prayed I would be able to leave behind till now, it was back, and there was no way that I could escape it.

  The world that I had left behind was coming back for me. Not just me, but my brother too, and the lives that we had managed to build far away from it for such a long time. I had to face up to the man I had been, to the things that I had done to escape.

  Because I knew just who was coming after me right now. And I knew, clearer than anything else, that there was nothing I could do to keep him at bay.

  THE END

  Evading Secrets

  Stop cheating on the future with your past. It’s over.

  Secrets & Lies Series

  Book 1 – Strange Secrets

  Book 2 – Evading Secrets

  Book 3 – Inspiring Secrets

  Book 4 – Lies and Secrets

  Book 5 – Mastering Secrets

  Book 6 – Alluring Secrets

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  More by Lexy Timms:

  FROM BEST SELLING AUTHOR, Lexy Timms, comes a billionaire romance that'll make you swoon and fall in love all over again.

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  ** The Boss is book 1 in the Managing the Bosses series. All your questions won't be answered in the first book. It may end on a cliff hanger.

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  Faking It Description:

  HE GROANED. THIS WAS torture. Being trapped in a room with a beautiful woman was just about every man’s fantasy, but he had to remember that this was just pretend.

  Allyson Smith has crushed on her boss for years, but never dared to make a move. When she finds herself without a date to her brother’s upcoming wedding, Allyson tells her family one innocent white lie: that she’s been dating her boss. Unfortunately, her boss discovers her lie, and insists on posing as her boyfriend to escort her to the wedding.

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  THE ONE YOU CAN’T FORGET

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  Will destiny let them find each other again? Or what happens in the past, best left for the history books?

  ** This is book 1 of the Hades' Spawn MC Series. All your questions may not be answered in the first book.

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  The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it…