by Maria Luis
He thought he was doing me a favor.
He thought he was helping me.
In reality, by turning down Joshua Hampton’s offer, he’d just sealed my fate.
And I was as good as dead.
4
Lincoln
She wouldn’t talk to me.
Hell, she wouldn’t even look at me.
If I’d been alone in this SUV, I would have bellowed out my rage. Buried my fist in the dashboard. Hit the gas, burning rubber so fast that I could forget everything that had happened tonight as the outside world sped past me.
None of those were options with Avery sitting in the passenger’s seat.
No, not Avery.
Laurel Peyton.
Christ. I shoved a hand through my hair, tugging on the strands relentlessly.
It made sense that I’d have no idea who she was—I was nine years older. Had spent my entire youth bouncing from foster care to foster care after being dropped off with the Ursuline nuns as a toddler. Until Jason Ambideaux had stepped into my life, I’d had little understanding of my parents or why I’d been unwanted. Even then, there’d been no mention of Jay Foley. Not until much, much later.
I’d gone to the Ursulines with nothing—not even a surname, or so they said.
One of the nuns had named me “Asher,” after a man she’d once fancied herself in love with, long before joining the cloister.
I wasn’t a Foley, like my father.
I wasn’t a Meriden, like my mother.
And I’d never been treated as such, always the forgotten bastard son left to his own devices.
Squeezing the steering wheel, I fought to see the road out of my good eye. Did my best not to let my frustration seep through like an infectious poison when I muttered, “We’re stopping for the night.”
That got her attention.
Her shoulders twitched though she didn’t turn to look at me. Only sat there, face forward, shoulders squared off. “It’s only an hour or so drive back to N’Orleans.”
My muscles tightened at the distrust I heard in her voice. “You know how to drive?”
At that, she turned to glare at me, her chin lifted stubbornly. “No.”
“Thought so.” She’d told me nothing, but I’d survived thus far in life because I paid attention to the details. And the details were obvious: when I cut a hard turn, when I took a second too long to start easing off the brakes, Avery remained at ease. She never reached for the oh-shit handle or pressed down on a nonexistent foot pedal on the passenger’s side. Another driver would be terrified; Avery was completely unaware.
And it all made sense.
Laurel Peyton had died from suicide in her early teens, that much I remembered from reading the newspapers. Long before she would have studied for her learner’s permit. Long before she’d have had the chance to steal her parents’ car and go for joyrides.
Long before she would have learned to trust anyone enough to give up her virginity.
A visual of her backside as I thrust into her body hit me, and—fuck. I couldn’t go down that road, not right now.
Grip tightening on the steering wheel, I focused on evening out my breath and not squeezing my eyes too hard. The swollen one hurt like a bitch, and regret swarmed me for not ending that asshole’s life when I’d had the chance.
One word from Avery, however, and I’d dropped his ass to the floor.
I’d heard the terror in her voice.
Had seen the fear in her hazel eyes.
Good. That was . . . good. No matter the fact we were barely related, Avery—Laurel—didn’t deserve to deal with my bullshit. I’d never win an award for upstanding citizen of the year, even on my best day.
Rough. Brutal. Deadly.
Those were the words which best described me.
Poisonous, too.
Ill-timed laughter filled my chest because wasn’t that the damn truth? Nothing good in my life ever lasted for very long. Like an infectious disease, the sinner in me had a way of converting everything I touched.
Avery didn’t deserve that.
Especially not after the life she’d lived.
Trying to soften my voice, I took the next exit and veered left at the merge. “There’s not a chance in hell that I’ll be able to make it back to the city.” Spotting the first bright neon motel sign on the quiet interstate, I pulled into the parking lot and found the first available spot. “I can’t see worth a damn. We’re lucky I haven’t already driven us into a ditch.”
There was a small pause and then, “Your eye does look like shit.”
“Yeah, well, it feels even worse.” Turning off the ignition, I sat back in the driver’s seat, head resting on the cushion behind me. My good eye fluttered shut and I drew in a deep breath. “I can barely see,” I muttered, “and I’m in no mood to teach you how to drive. Staying the night is the only option.”
Six hours ago, we’d been fucking in the Basement, not a care in the world.
Now, she couldn’t even relax beside me, like she was worried that I might launch myself at her and tear her limb from limb.
I was a monster. I was cruel. But only to those who deserved it.
Letting my head fall to the right, scarred cheek pressed to the headrest, I stared at the woman who’d made me believe, even for a moment, that more existed in this world than what I’d always believed possible. And she’s your stepsister. Sort of. Barely.
I palmed the car keys in one hand, squeezing so tight that the serrated edge tested even my roughly calloused palm. The pain, unlike the one in my heart, felt good. A reminder that, at the end of the day, you could always count on reality to dump you on your ass and level out the playing field.
Happiness wasn’t in the cards for me.
If I didn’t understand that now, at the age of thirty-four, then there was seriously no hope for me.
Opening my mouth, I hesitated on the words I so desperately wanted to say:
You can trust me.
I wouldn’t hurt you.
Please don’t be scared.
In the end, I didn’t say a damn thing. Cranking open my door, a grimace on my face, I stepped out and slammed it shut behind me. Crossed around the hood of the SUV to Avery’s side, just as her bare feet connected with the dirty, glass-ridden concrete.
She could hate me again in ten minutes when we had a set of rooms and there was nothing but carpet everywhere.
Without any warning, I scooped her up in my arms, tugging her in close to my chest, hating that the instant her body collided with mine, my cock twitched in my pants.
“Put me down!”
Her voice was throaty, audibly exhausted.
I ignored her protests. Ignored the pain in my right knee, thanks to one of those bastards coming at me with a crow bar when I’d least expected it outside that damn shack.
Avery’s hands scrabbled for purchase as I limped my way to the front door of the shitty motel. Dead potted plants sat on either side of the door, and a junkie reclined on the circular front drive, a matchstick in one hand and a spoon in the other.
Nothing said romance like staying the night in a shithole like this.
Not that romance should be anywhere on your mind after tonight.
“Asher,” Avery snapped, sharply tugging on my shirt, “put me down. I can walk on my own. I don’t need you.”
Propping the front door open with my elbow, I angled us in. “Your feet are worse off than my eye.”
She snorted derisively. “You’re only saying that because you haven’t seen your eye yet. It looks—”
“Oh!”
“—like shit.”
The receptionist behind the front desk blinked up at Avery in my arms. Except that her eyes weren’t on Avery. They were trained on me—on my swollen eye.
Guess it is that bad.
Readjusting Avery in my arms, I returned the receptionist’s stare. Short and with skin weathered like worn leather, the woman had to be over eighty. On a good day.
<
br /> I forced a grim smile. “We need some rooms.”
“Oh.” The woman’s smile dipped, losing some of its luster. “I . . . Listen, sir, but I’m sorry to tell you that we”—her cloudy blue eyes refocused on Avery—“are booked solid for the evening.”
Booked solid, my ass.
“Is that why you got a junkie on your front doorstep? Because you’re booked?”
“Lincoln.”
“No, Avery.” I didn’t believe for a single second that there wasn’t even one room available for the night. We were in Bumfuck, Louisiana, not New Orleans, and if the druggie outside was any signifier, then this motel was hurting. “Two rooms,” I ground out, feeling Avery’s eyes on me. “If you’ll sell to a junkie, then you’ll sell to us. I need two rooms, second or third floor, with windows facing the parking lot.”
The receptionist stiffened. “I don’t like demanding guests.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t like—”
A hand clapped over my mouth, silencing the rest of my sentence.
Avery threw me a harsh look, eyes narrowed into slits, before turning back to the woman. “You’ll be doing us such a huge favor,” she murmured softly, “and we’d be so appreciative. Unfortunately, we were camping when Lincoln here came in contact with a black bear . . . let’s just say that the bear won. He’s a little embarrassed about it.” She cupped a hand around her mouth and dropped her voice to a barely audible murmur. “Actually, he’s a little emotional. We’ve been driving for hours and we simply can’t go on any longer tonight.”
Black bears?
If the state had any black bears at all, they weren’t south of Baton Rouge, that was for sure.
The woman’s straight brows eased, unpuckering until the crease at the center of her forehead finally smoothed. “That’s horrible, dear,” the receptionist whispered.
“It was. It really was.” Avery nodded, her cheek brushing up against the planes of my chest. “You know what’s worse? The fact that . . . well, the fact that the bear somehow managed to steal all of our clothes. Including my shoes . . . and my underwear.”
Christ.
The receptionist gaped at Avery’s fabricated tale, and I didn’t know whether to applaud or jeer, demanding that she tell the truth about her missing panties. The panties I’d torn right off her before dominating her body.
With a shaky smile and a quick glance around me to the front door, the woman behind the desk turned to grab an old-school key fob off a hook. “Two-twenty-one,” she edged out, “second floor, facing the parking lot.” Her blue eyes went to Avery again. “I live here on site. I don’t know if . . . I don’t know if you’d be interested, but I do have an extra pair of underwear. They might be a bit big—”
“She’s fine,” I bit out, letting Avery slide down my body so that I could pull out my wallet. It was almost a miracle it’d survived tonight’s activities. “We’ll just take the rooms.”
Avery’s hands latched onto the lip of the chest-high front desk, holding herself steady as she settled her weight on her heels. “That is such a kind offer . . .” Leaning forward, her hazel eyes drifted over the elderly receptionist, pausing at the woman’s pinned name tag. “Sue. I’d love a pair.”
“They’re clean,” Sue said, all brilliant smiles and crooked yellowed teeth.
Avery returned the smile with one of her own. “Even better.”
God save me from—
I slapped my credit card down on the counter, startling both the receptionist and the woman hell-bent on driving me insane. “We’ll take the two rooms.” Beside me, Avery bristled, and I gave in with a grunt. “And the underwear.”
Sue shifted her weight, taking my card. “Just the one room, Mr. . . .” She peered down at my name embossed on the credit card. “Asher. Two-twenty-one, as I said. It’s all I got.”
One room.
Something told me that I’d have a pillow smothering my face before the night was over—Avery did not look pleased. Even so . . .
I nodded curtly. “We’ll take it.”
“We won’t.”
I ignored Avery’s protest, grimly picking up the key and tucking my credit card back into my wallet. “Knock when you have the panties, ma’am. It’s much appreciated.”
Bending at the knees, I let out a tight breath at the twinge in my right leg, and then—
“I can walk, Lincoln,” Avery snapped. “No, seriously, I’m fine—”
She bounced high on my chest as I stepped away from the front counter and headed for the hallway off to the right. I needed a shower and a bed, the sooner the better.
Catching the flowery scent of Avery’s shampoo, I swallowed.
Maybe it was a good thing we were sharing a room. We had a wide array of shit to discuss, starting with the fact that she was Laurel-fucking-Peyton. You knew she’d been bullshitting you when she gave up her name.
Yeah, I’d suspected that she’d fed me lies.
But there was no way I could have suspected this.
My good eye narrowed at the computer paper taped to the elevator with chicken scratch scrawled across it. Broken—of course.
“This has got to be the shittiest motel in the history of motels,” I growled, turning my head in search of the stairwell.
In my arms, Avery snorted. “You chose a place called Bedding Down. Beneath the logo was the tagline, ‘No more than twelve people per room.’ What else did you expect?”
“That’s not a tagline. That’s a calling card for orgies.” I hooked my thumb through the door handle to the stairs and drew it open with a low groan. “If I’d actually been able to see that, I would have kept driving until we hit a Motel 6.”
“You should have kept driving until we hit N’Orleans.”
“Then we wouldn’t have made contact with the only pack of black bears in this part of Louisiana. Who knew they liked women’s lingerie so much?”
“You should feel lucky they don’t fancy dicks even more.” With that comment, Avery squirmed in my grasp when my foot hit the first stair rung, muttering, “I can walk. Stop treating me like I’m an invalid.”
She wanted to walk? Fine.
I checked back my grimace when her mouth twisted in pain as her feet made contact with the cool tile of the stairs. I wanted to swing her back into my arms, but she was right.
She was capable.
She was independent.
And I was smothering her like a man obsessed.
Resigned to letting her crawl up the steps if that’s what she really wanted to do, I turned back to the stairwell and stifled a groan at the pain in my knee. She wasn’t the only one feeling the course of the night, and with each step I took, my mood soured several more degrees.
By the time we reached the second floor, Avery’s face was three shades paler than normal and I was minutes away from coming unhinged. I’d spent twelve years separating my life from the corruption of our city’s finest leaders—unless it directly involved work for the NOPD.
Twelve years of keeping my head down and trying to do the right thing.
Twelve years of staying in my lane and off the radar of men like Jason Ambideaux.
Twelve years of trying to build a life that wasn’t blood and terror day-in and day-out.
I didn’t miss the way Avery skirted out of reach when I let her slide past me into our shared room for the night. And I sure as hell didn’t miss the way she slid a distrustful glance in my direction when I drew the blinds shut over the windows, as though she questioned my need for privacy.
Frustration welled up, suffocating in the way it clawed at my chest, until I finally let loose the words that had been on my mind since she’d watched me shove that man into the wall at the shack.
“If I wanted you dead, Laurel,” I growled, “you’d already be lifeless.”
5
Avery
Funny how more than one person had called me Laurel tonight, and not a single time did I feel like they were talking to me.
I’d always
thought that hearing my real name would come with a sense of freedom, like I’d broken free from my jail cell after so many years of being locked away in the darkness.
That wasn’t the case.
In reality, it felt foreign. Strange.
I wasn’t Laurel, not anymore. Laurel Peyton was a thirteen-year-old girl with starry-eyed fantasies of becoming a well-known vet and saving any animal that entered her practice. Avery, on the other hand, was simply content to foster strays and give them enough love so they never felt unwanted while they waited to be placed with a permanent family.
Laurel knew nothing but family picnics, an obsession with Brad Pitt in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and that her momma, despite her affinity for drinking a little too heavily, never put up a fuss about random karaoke jam sessions with her only daughter.
None of that even related to me as Avery.
“Nothing to say to that?”
Asher’s deep timbre yanked me from my reverie, drawing me back into the shadows of my reality. “Don’t call me Laurel.”
With the blinds drawn shut, I could barely make out his features and his scars were completely obscured. His dark chuckle, however, was perfectly crisp in the otherwise quiet room. “You’ve got to be kidding me—the secret’s out and you’re still trying to keep up the act. Listen, Laurel, there’s no reason to pretend anymore.”
I bristled at his sneering tone. “Do you really want to play that game?” Biting back a howl of pain, I took a step closer to him. “At least my biggest sin is pretending to be someone who I’m not. How many people have you murdered, Sergeant? How much blood truly stains your hands?”
His chest heaved, mouth twisting harshly. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“No?” The memory of him squeezing that man’s throat was not one I’d ever forget. It made me sick to think of it. Sicker to think, even for a moment, that I’d enjoyed Asher’s hand around my neck as he’d fucked me. What did that say about me? What did that say about the kind of person I was? My stomach churned at the disturbing thought, threatening to upend the dinner I’d eaten hours earlier.
