by Stacy Gail
It was like he’d become the embodiment of all things wonderful, and to be around him was like being around pure joy.
Except there was a problem.
He didn’t look happy. And it wasn’t just that he’d slipped on his mask of professionalism, either. She’d seen what that was like, and the expression he now wore wasn’t it.
If anything, it looked like he had the acute discomfort of having a stick jammed up his ass, and he blamed them for putting it there.
“Hi.” When in doubt, go for a friendly tone. “Were we being too loud? Sorry about that.”
“Don’t apologize.” To her surprise the admonition came not from Steele, but from Max. She glanced his way, only to find his gaze locked on Steele with an almost maniacal intent. “This isn’t a library. We can be as fucking loud as we want.” He all but yelled the word, startling Essie, before he grinned like a crazed ax-murderer at Steele, as if daring him to do something about it.
Essie stepped forward. In every way possible, she didn’t want to find out what that something would be. “Or we could be a little quieter as we—”
“You’re fine, Essie.” Steele didn’t move at the other man’s unexpected increase in volume, not even an eye twitch. The only thing that changed was his expression. It slid from annoyed to bored as he regarded Max, who was a few inches shorter than Steele, but exuded an aura of mercurial volatility that made Essie’s survival instincts twitch. “I don’t give a shit what you do, Mr. Kulagin, as long as it doesn’t bother the House’s clientele.”
Max’s teeth suddenly showed in his beard, but it had nothing to do with a smile. “Mr. Kulagin. That was my father.”
“Wrong. Your father was Lt. Kulagin, first of the KGB and then of the FSB. You’re Mr. Kulagin. And if you yell at me again I might have to break your jaw just so I can have the pleasure of knowing you’re destined to have it wired shut.”
For a handful of seconds crackling with wire-taut tension, Essie was sure Max was going to attack. But before he could make a move that would no doubt be the end of his jaw, Steele went on.
“I merely came over here as a favor to Scout, to let you know your client is here and has been sent up to your tattooing booth to wait for you. Essie, I need a private word with you.”
“Sure.” Not at all sure what the hell just happened, but positive all the way to her bones that they’d just dodged a bullet, she offered a farewell nod to Max before following Steele toward the end of the gallery. But when Max called her name she looked back, sensing that Steele had stopped beside her as well.
“You want to look at more of my work, you say the word.” His ax-murderer’s smile was still in place as his gaze bounced from Steele to her and back again. “You’ll discover I can be very accommodating.”
“Thanks, Max.” Every instinct she had told her that Max had made the offer just to have the final word, but she smiled gamely even as Steele took her by the arm and guided her around the last of the gallery’s modular walls and out of Max’s sight.
“Okay, that was both weird and intense.” Essie kept her voice low as she looked up into Steele’s grim, scarred face. “I take it you and Max have some serious bad blood going on between the two of you?”
He seemed to have trouble getting his teeth unclenched. “No.”
That was a shock. “Really?”
“This is the first time that crazy prick and I have spoken to each other.”
“You’re kidding. I would have put money on the two of you being mortal enemies.”
“No, I’m not kidding.” His expression hardened, when she hadn’t thought that was possible. “Do I look like I’m kidding?”
Great. Now the hostility was oozing its way over to her. “Actually, from the moment you showed up you’ve looked kind of rabid. As a fashion expert, I feel I can safely say it’s not a good look for you. Is something wrong?”
“You could say that.” His pale eyes had been doing that surveillance sweep thing—going from one end of the building to the other. Then he focused on her, and it was like he wanted to see if he could burn her alive with his gaze alone. “The next time you have a meeting with that asshole, you’ll tell me about it so I can be there when it happens.”
“What?” Baffled, and not completely in love with his highhanded tone, she frowned. “Why do I have to do that? Payne said we can speak with any of the tattooists as long as we make an appointment.”
“You don’t know what you’re dealing with when you deal with Maximo Kulagin, you understand? You’re not going to talk with that guy on your own. He’s not right in the head.”
“He’s not the only one,” she muttered, giving him a speaking glance. “I’m not sure that I’ll need to speak with Max again—”
“Good.”
“—but if I do, or if he needs to speak with me, I don’t have a problem with that. I also don’t need a chaperon for it. I can handle Max just fine.”
“Yeah, you’ve thought that once before, and look what happened.”
Her intake of breath was just as sharp as the smack of his words—his unfair, horrible words. Damn it, she thought bleakly, even as the outrage and injustice of it all mushroomed inside of her. Damn it. She’d never get away from it. It didn’t matter how much time had passed. It didn’t matter how enlightened society became. There was always some jerk waiting to throw stones at her—for fuck’s sake, her—for getting attacked.
Goddamn to hell, it just…wasn’t… fair.
“You’re right to say that I never should have trusted a monster that worked so hard at appearing trustworthy,” she gritted out, and the anger that shook her voice made the rest of her body tremble so hard she wouldn’t have been surprised if she exploded right there on the spot. “That’s something I’ve never forgiven myself for, and I hate that. But I also hate how someone always blames me just as much as I blame myself. There’s always some asshole who wonders what it was that I did that made me look like I was asking for it.”
The edgy pissiness in his expression began to drain away. “Whoa. Wait.”
“I opened a door when the doorbell rang, Steele. I take full responsibility for that terrible action. I did it, and it was the worst mistake of my life. I’m sorry, okay? I’m so damn sorry I opened that door. You’ll never, ever know how sorry I am.”
“Essie, don’t apologize—”
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to apologize for anything else, you got that? To accept any more responsibility than that is to take the burden of blame off the shoulders of my attacker, and there’s no way in hell I’m going to do that. He doesn’t deserve that, and neither do I, so you can shut the fuck up about what I thought once before.”
“Damn it, that’s not what I—”
“As a guy, you probably have no clue that we live in a culture that’s totally fucked up,” she went on, refusing to let him mansplain his words away. They weren’t just words he’d thrown at her. They were a reflection of how he truly saw her. It probably wouldn’t do any good, but she’d damned well do her best to correct his vision. “It’s always up to the woman, the physically smaller, slower and weaker of the species, to somehow fight off whoever’s out to get her, and not get raped. It’s never up to the man, the more brutal and powerful predator in that dynamic, to not rape. Well, I’ve got a news flash for you, pal—I did nothing wrong then, just as I did nothing wrong now. And,” she added when he opened his mouth, “if you’re about to say that you were only bringing up my personal history to prove the point that I can’t be trusted to take care of my own helpless little self, that’s fucked up too. Violence can happen to anyone, at any time, woman or man. When that violence happens, it should never be the victim’s fault, and it sure as hell doesn’t make them a permanent victim, forever fated to be someone else’s prey. I’m not a victim now. I’m a survivor. And the only person I trust and depend on to take care of my safety is me.”
With that, she stalked away, trembling with a rage so deep she had to get away from him before
she gave in to the urge to knock his damn head off.
The sun was an angry red ball in the west when Steele climbed the stairs to Essie’s floor. When he knocked on her door, he didn’t have a hell of a lot of hope she’d answer, so he was pleasantly surprised when it swung open seconds later. But his greeting died a silent death when he saw her neighbor, and not Essie herself, standing in the doorway.
“Oh, hi again.” The woman served up a bright smile and swung the door open wide. “Thought you were the pizza guy. Come on in.”
Steele had to stop himself from asking why she hadn’t looked through the peephole. He’d shoved his foot in his mouth enough for one day, and he wasn’t so fond of the taste of it that he wanted another go.
Instead he distracted himself by looking around the single, catchall room Essie had been calling home since she’d returned to Chicago. There was barely enough space in between all the sewing equipment for anyone to comfortably move around in. Hanging in a corner near a sofa, he spied the gray-on-black slim-fit cobra hoodie she’d shown him in her sketchbook, along with a matching T-shirt. The snowflake top she’d shown him was done as well, plus she’d made a women’s leather jacket, in icy blue, with the arms covered in that same snowflake overlay. A dressmaker’s dummy was draped with a man’s long-sleeved gray pullover shirt. Black fabric in a basket weave pattern had been placed over the shoulders, and again past the elbows and forearms to emulate some badass bracers.
His gaze lingered on the bracers. Her brother Twist had come up with that design as a sleeve tattoo—a tattoo Steele had been tempted to get, because it resembled medieval leather armor. The pattern had won awards for both Twist and House Of Payne, so it wasn’t a surprise Essie had chosen to showcase it. Slung around a high-backed stool was a leather biker jacket with an asymmetrical zipper and that same leather basket weave pattern on the front panels. On closer inspection he saw that every other strip of leather had the House Of Payne logo branded into it.
Damn, that was cool.
Essie was hunched over a big flat table that ate up most of the space in the microscopic apartment. She’d been busily pinning a large appliqué of a mandala onto some black fabric, but the moment he’d entered she’d stopped what she was doing, mid-pin, and stared at him as if his presence stunk up the place.
He’d had warmer welcomes from enemy combatants.
“So… anyway.” The neighbor who had let him in stood beside him, looking from one to the other as if this was a play and she was expecting them to recite lines. When that didn’t happen, she cleared her throat and forged ahead. “We almost met the other day. I’m Carla, from across the hall, and you’re Steele, right? Is that really your name?’
“Ezekiel Steele, but I go by Steele.” Since it didn’t look like Essie was going to thaw out any time soon, he offered a nod to the other woman. “It’s nice to meet you, Carla.”
“Yeah, same here. When the pizza gets here, we’re going to hop on over to my place and chow down, since Essie refuses to let any kind of food get near her creations. You’re more than welcome to join us.”
Somehow he doubted that. “Thanks, but I’m just here for a short visit.”
“Well, if you change your mind—” Another knock on the door swung Carla’s attention around. “Okay, that’s got to be the pizza dude.”
“Check the peephole this time.” Essie came to her feet as if her knees had suddenly stiffened up, and she gave him a significant look before nodding toward the door. “Since I’m about to head over to Carla’s for dinner, why don’t I walk you out?”
“Tell you what, you two go ahead and take a walk around the block or something, give the pizza a chance to cool off. I always worry my kid’s going to take after me and burn the shit out of her mouth whenever she eats pizza, so I always wait a good fifteen minutes before letting her have any,” Carla explained as she headed out the door. “Essie, see if you can’t talk Steele into joining us, okay?”
He doubted Carla was surprised when Essie didn’t answer.
The world was suddenly a flurry of activity, from paying the pizza delivery guy, to loud and happy greetings from Carla’s little family as she opened her apartment door, to Essie finding her keys and locking her door behind them. But through it all he never lost track of her, and when she began to slow down near the head of the stairs in preparation to tell him to keep walking without her, he took a chance and grabbed her hand.
“This won’t take long,” he promised her, even as he felt her flinch at his touch. He waited for her to pull completely away, ready to let her go if that was what she really wanted. Instead her hand relaxed in his, not holding onto him but not squirming away, either.
That was good, he decided, leading the way out the apartment building’s front door and across the street to Logan Square. He could work with not squirming away.
“So. You still mad at me?” Beating around the bush was never his thing. He could only hope she was okay with that.
“No.” Her voice was flat, but not the angry kind of flat he’d been prepared for. This was a lifeless kind of flat that he hadn’t heard from her before, but he understood it the moment it hit his ears. He understood it, because he’d felt that way himself at one point in his life.
She sounded defeated.
“Essie.” The waning sun was still trying to blister the world before it took its final dive in the west, so he steered them onto a shady path that edged around the eagle-topped Centennial column at the center of the grassy square. “Any man with a brain knows that no woman in the history of the world has ever fucking asked for it. That phrase needs to die, right along with boys will be boys. Spineless assholes say shit like that to minimize behavior that’s off-the-charts evil, yet they don’t have the balls to tackle the horror of it. I’m not that weak, or that much of a sonofabitch to refuse to see the damage that kind of violence creates, so don’t put those words in my mouth. I’d never think that you asked to be violated by a monster.”
She expelled a tight-sounding breath, and he watched her reach up to her throat to massage it under the scarf she wore. “You made it sound like I was at fault. I’ll admit some responsibility is mine. I’ll never be able to tell you how sorry I am for opening—”
“Stop.” He brought them to an abrupt halt, and framed her face with his hands to force her gaze to his. “Don’t you ever say those words again, Estella. Don’t you ever even think them, because they’re wrong. They’re a terrible lie, and if you keep buying into it, that lie will eventually kill your soul.”
A frown appeared between her brows, while her hands came up to curl around his wrists. “A lie?”
“Yeah. That lie is something we’ve all told ourselves when the shit hits the fan. It makes us think the chaos that crashed into us was something we could have controlled if we’d just done something differently. Gone left instead of right. Up instead of down. Left the house fifteen minutes later, or earlier. But that’s all bullshit, sweetness. You couldn’t have controlled the epic shit bomb that hit you. The bastard who attacked you came to your house on that day, at that time, for one reason only. He knew you were home alone. He knew you were a little girl that he could overpower. One way or another he was going to get inside, violate you, then kill you so you wouldn’t rat him out. He was the chaos, and that kind of chaos can never be controlled. None of that responsibility is on you, so you’ve got to let that lie go. It’s poisoned you long enough.”
Echoes of pain—a nightmarish pain he could only imagine—rippled across her expression until she looked tortured. “So… you weren’t implying that because I showed bad judgment when I opened that door, I got what I de—”
Enough.
He wanted to crush the words coming out of her, they were so fucking wrong. But shutting her up with anything that even smacked of violence was just as wrong, not to mention pointless. Stifling her wouldn’t change what she thought of him, or what she felt about herself.
The only thing that was going to get through to her n
ow was action. Which was probably for the best. She’d made it pretty damned clear she wasn’t in the mood to listen to anything he had to say.
For a long beat he did nothing but held her mouth under his, letting her get used to the feel of him, and he almost smiled when she stopped trying to talk. He didn’t have the time or patience to listen to crap. The only thing he had an infinite amount of patience for was opening her eyes to what was real.
That he wasn’t the enemy.
That she deserved respect.
That she had his respect. Full-on. No doubt.
The softening of her mouth almost made him back away in shock. He’d been braced for resistance, and her sudden surrender stunned him. It felt so good, that sweetly surrendered mouth. It was as though her lips had melted like wax under the heat of his, and the sensation knocked the world right out from under his feet.
Damn, she felt good.
He’d had countless kisses in his life, from the time he’d played Spin the Bottle when he was twelve and he’d gotten lucky enough to nail Apolline with an enthusiastic wet one. But he couldn’t remember when a kiss had ever wrapped around his mind, body and soul the way Essie’s did. Her kiss closed a velvet fist around every nerve in his body and gently crushed him, and that crushing was the sweetest damned thing he’d ever come up against.
His hands left her face to slip into the tempting thickness of her hair. He’d wanted to sift through those long, gorgeous coils from the moment he’d first laid eyes on her. To have that thick, silken weight gliding through his fingers now made something inside him roar with triumph.
But he wanted more.
Cradling the back of her head, he tilted her face up to meet his intensifying pressure even as his lips opened hers. The barrier of her teeth gave way as he caressed her lower lip with his tongue, and his world rocked when the tip of her tongue danced over his.
