by Stacy Gail
His smile was so sad it broke her heart. “I know you never want to see me again, but I’m the one who triggered you. I have to take care of you, make you all better.”
Trigger? That made no sense. And the only way she could feel better was if she could suddenly drop dead. Then everything would be over, and she would no longer feel so sick and frozen and mortified.
So fucking mortified.
“I’m. Fine.” She shivered so violently it chattered her teeth. “J-just can’t be c-confined, is all. N-no b-big deal. Just can’t be t-trapped. It’s a… a phobia.”
“Yeah, you told me about that. I’m a forgetful fuck for not remembering it, and a sonofabitch for not listening to you when you were trying to remind me. Won’t happen again, and I’m sorry it happened now.”
The magic word—sorry—slipped over her like soothing, warm water, and some of the tension trickled out of her shoulders. He seemed to see that as a good sign, and moved so quickly she didn’t have time to protest when he swung her up into his arms and headed toward her bedroom at the end of the hall.
“Jesus, you’re a block of ice.”
“I-I’m s-sorry. I’m s-sor—”
“Don’t.” There was a rough edge to his tone, and with a heart that sank like a lead weight she recognized that edge as anger. She couldn’t blame him. Things had been going so well when she’d flipped her fucking lid like a psycho bitch and ruined not just their unexpected day together, but everything. Being an insane freak wasn’t something she could easily explain away, so this was the end.
She’d fucked it up completely.
No. She should be glad this happened, goddamn it. Considering she’d tried breaking it off with Rude earlier that day—albeit halfheartedly—this had to be for the best. She hadn’t wanted to get involved with him, so she shouldn’t feel so devastated now that she’d destroyed any possibility of that happening. She shouldn’t feel…
Grief.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Rude.
Familiar lavender-scented softness surrounded her. With hope seeping out of her like it was her life force, Sass didn’t fight when Rude pressed her back against the small mountain of pillows she’d fluffed earlier that morning. The purple sheets and comforter were icy against her skin, and she curled her knees up into her chest, her chin dipping into them so she could hold onto whatever meager body warmth she could. Though she wasn’t sure why she bothered. She’d never be warm again.
Maybe she’d die from the cold.
There was always hope.
Then, to her utter confusion, the mattress dipped behind her, and the sheet, blanket and fluffy down comforter that he’d draped over her shoulder shifted. Suddenly a wall of warmth pressed against her back, and arms curled around her with a gentleness that stunned her.
What…?
“Tell me if you feel trapped and I need to hold you another way while getting you warm.” His mouth was right against her ear, and she was shocked into statue-stillness when he turned his head so he could nuzzle it with his lips. “With the exception of leaving, I’ll do whatever makes you happy.” With that, he gently bit and kissed her neck, his tongue caressing her.
Flabbergasted, Sass stared at her knees, frozen in a fetal position as the ice in her veins began to do a slow thaw. “I’m…fine.” Confused, but fine. If he’d decided she should be dropped like a hot rock because she was a total fucking nutcase, he sure had a funny way of showing it.
“No, you’re not, but you’ll get there.” Again he kissed her before he settled his face into the curve of her neck, and loosed a long sigh. “Try to close your eyes and rest, Sassy. Relax against me, feel how much I want to take care of you, and let it sink into every part of you that when you’re with me, you’ll never, ever have a reason to be afraid.”
When you’re with me…
“It’s okay, baby. You can close your eyes now. It’s okay.”
With a carefully released breath, she forced her eyes closed, and tried not to think that instead of sounding like he was anxious to get the hell away from her, his words seemed more like a promise of better things to come.
Of all the crazy things that had happened today, that was the craziest of them all.
Chapter Twelve
Rude sent up thanks that Sass had fallen into a fitful sleep when the knock he’d been listening for finally sounded. With great care, he slid out of bed, tucked the blankets around her and headed on noiseless feet out of the room and down the hall, slowing to edge around the corner of the miniscule foyer.
Dark gray eyes looked back at him.
Rude put a finger to his lips and nodded at the door that had obviously been breached with ease.
He’d have to look into changing her locks.
Without a word, they went out into the hall that was deserted except for Havlik, who leaned casually against the brass-topped post at the head of the stairs some thirty feet away.
“Keep it quiet.” Rude’s voice was pitched low, no louder than the hum of the EXIT sign close by. “I couldn’t call in, and I won’t be in until tomorrow morning. Let Mary Jane know. I’ve got personal shit to deal with, and I’ve earned the downtime.”
“Rules are in place to keep you safe.” The voice that came out of that knife-slash of a mouth was cold and gravelly. At one point in his life, Ezekiel Steele had probably been what Rude would have called a pretty boy. But shrapnel from a mortar attack had fucked up one side of his face. Several reconstructive surgeries had put it back together for the most part, and Mary Jane swore that the scar going through Steele’s eyebrow made him resemble some muscle-bound actor that she thought was “hot.” Rude couldn’t see it, but that was probably because he preferred tits and ass to dudes with scars. “When you break the rules, we have to drop what we’re doing to check on your sorry ass to see what the fuck was so earthshaking you were prevented from calling in. For all we knew, we were going to walk straight into some serious shit. That means we’re loaded for bear and ready to bring any and all levels of hellfire down onto whoever would dare to mess with our brother, because we know that you know how important it is to fucking call in. So here we are.”
Rude waited patiently for the scolding to run its course. In all fairness, he’d be pissed off too if the shoe was on the other foot. “You done?”
Steele tried to murder him with a glare. “Fuck you.”
“You’ve been forced into the role of babysitter, and that sucks. But you know me, and you know I would have called in if I’d been able to.”
“Yeah, asshole, I do know you. At the risk of repeating myself, that’s why we’re here.”
“It won’t happen again.” Because he would never again fuck up so badly he sent his woman into a total meltdown. As bad as he felt about dragging Havlik and Steele all the way over to where he was, it was nothing compared to how he felt about what he’d put Sass through.
Something must have shown in his expression, because Steele stopped trying to see if looks really could kill. “So… you’re okay?”
No, he wasn’t. Not by half. “Yeah.”
Steele studied him a long moment before his attention veered to the door. Automatically Rude shifted, shielding the woman inside.
“And she’s okay?”
“Yeah.” Of course Steele knew who lived there. He didn’t doubt that they had already checked on everyone else on that floor—maybe even the whole building. His phone was still in there, knocked aside in the living room and acting like a beacon for them to zero in on. It was how he’d known they’d come searching for him when he didn’t call in. “I’m looking after her.”
“Does she need looking after?”
Rude went very, very still. “You got something else to say, Steele, or are we done talking?”
“I know six days ago she went to the police about a guy named Cadwallader after he worked her over and tossed her down some stairs. I also know this asshole wound up as a floater while you were away in Canada.”
His jaw knotted
along with his fists. Rude had known of Cadwallader’s death the moment that fuckwad’s body had been identified by the Chicago PD. Once he’d learned Cadwallader’s name, he’d gone to the trouble of flagging that bastard, just to keep an eye on him. When he’d gotten the notification that Cadwallader had met a grisly end, he hadn’t been able to get back to Sass fast enough. It was the reason he’d made a beeline straight for her, instead of getting some very necessary shut-eye.
But he didn’t like that Steele knew about it, too.
“That asshole had his right hand chopped off, the hand he punched her with, if the injuries to her mouth are any indication,” Steele went on, like he genuinely believed it was his fucking place to school him. “Several bones in his face were broken before someone finally put him out of his misery and double-tapped him in the head. Then this same someone got artistic and carved nedostoynym trus—unworthy coward—into his chest, stripped him and dumped him like garbage in the river. Cops are thinking it’s a Russian mob hit, and I don’t see any reason to contradict them. This piece of shit was worked on for fucking hours, and no one saw or heard a thing.”
Goddamn it, he knew all this. “Do you have a point?”
“My point is that this might have nothing to do with your lady. This Cadwallader dipshit might have worked over some other girl, and that’s what he paid for. Or it might have nothing to do with any girl at all. Maybe he had gambling debts or was into drugs. But we don’t know about some other girl, or about anything else. The only thing that shows up in Liam Cadwallader’s shitty little life is how he tried to see how well your lady could bounce down a fucking flight of stairs. And now he’s dead.”
“That’s one of the reasons why I’m here.” With his face so cold it felt like a mask, Rude reached behind himself for the door handle. “Do me a solid and let everyone know I’m sorry for the trouble, and that I’ll be in by nine tomorrow morning. But for now, I need the downtime.”
Steele slow-blinked once before he let out a short breath and looked away. “Fine, Panuzzi. Understood.”
As Steele headed for the stairs, Rude looked beyond him to Havlik and gave a quick nod. Havlik returned the gesture, then hoarsely whispered from his post, “Is she hot?”
Not even bothering to roll his eyes, Rude headed back inside the apartment. The silence closed in on him as he secured the door and retraced his steps through Sass’s apartment. Normally he would have enjoyed the set-like décor of the place. Without a doubt, Sass had a flair for the dramatic and the opulent; her place was a den built for such obvious seduction that he doubted anyone even thought to look past the plush velvets and leathers and exotic animal prints. Even as he’d wrapped her up in her bed, part of him had taken note of the rich purple velvet and sateen down comforter and sheets, the cheetah throw and blanket, and a mountain of purple and cheetah-patterned pillows.
A fucking purple bed. Only nine year old girls and Sass could get away with such a thing.
Graceful, Gothic carriage lamps hung on either side of a bed that was clearly decked out for the purposes of pleasure. The other trappings of the room were meant to wow as well, like the thick white sheepskin rug next to a delicate cheetah-padded Roman chair. Everything was over-the-top lush, and he was pretty sure he knew why. Any man would count himself lucky just to be there; he’d be so distracted by the opulence that he’d stop thinking. That was what Sass wanted, he was sure of it. Her home was her camouflage. She seduced by stunning the senses hard and fast, making it virtually impossible for any man to think of asking questions about her, of getting to know her, or of looking deeper for the woman hidden underneath. Then she’d be done with him, and all a man could do was be grateful for the out-of-this-world experience, and move on.
With the exception of that Liam asshole, that shock-and-awe system had worked like a charm for her.
But it wasn’t about to work on him.
Maybe it wasn’t fair that he’d known her before she’d gotten her system down pat, making it possible for him to see past it. But he didn’t give two shits about being fair. All he cared about was getting through the layers of fluff, flash and distraction, and uncover the real woman who hid at the center of it all. That was his mission—a mission that had suffered one hell of a setback today. But that was okay. Setbacks only made him dig in harder, and kept his focus more firmly locked on the prize.
When it came to his mission, failure was not an option.
The second he walked back into the bedroom, he knew she was awake. That didn’t surprise him, but he had hoped she’d get a little more rest before he started pushing at her defenses. There weren’t many things that intimidated him, but her fragility had knocked him flat on his ass.
“Being the nutritional guru that you are, you’re probably not a fan of delivery pizza,” he said as casually as he could while rounding to what he deemed his side of the bed, and settled in beside her. He made a production of propping himself up on some pillows to give her plenty of time to get used to him being there. “But I’m getting hungry and we skipped dinner, so how ‘bout it? Pepperoni, peppers, sausage—that’s what I like on my pizza. What about you?”
“Mushrooms are pretty good.”
He closed his eyes in the falling dark. Her voice was small but unwavering. “I could do mushrooms.”
“And spinach?”
“Absolutely not. And I also draw the line at pineapple, babe. I just… I just can’t.”
The faintest sound escaped her, and the weight crushing down on him vanished as if by magic when he realized it was an almost-laugh. “You sound like you’re in pain.”
“Sassy Pants, I’m a Panuzzi. You put pineapple and spinach on my pizza, and I drop over dead.”
“Okay, no spinach, and I don’t like pineapple on pizza, either.” She rolled over onto her other side, so that she was facing him and looking up at him with eyes that glimmered in the gloom. “Rude?”
He laid a hand on her hip. “Yeah?”
“I should have let you make your call.”
His hand tightened along with everything inside him. “I should’ve let you go.”
“I can’t explain why that call bothered me,” she went on, inching closer under the covers. But he noted that while he’d reached out and touched her, she hadn’t made any kind of move to reciprocate. “I mean, I’ve answered the phone plenty of times when I’ve been on dates with other guys. Plenty of times.”
He absorbed that for a moment. “FYI, Sass. I’m not really loving the mention of other guys when we’re in bed together.”
“What I mean is, if it’s Scout or Tonya, or Frankie or your parents, I’m dropping my date like he’s radioactive and I’m taking that call. They’re more important to me than any dude I’ve decided to hook up with.”
“Still talking about other men, Sassy.”
“I’m just saying some phone calls are important.”
“Uh-huh.” Irked that she seemed determined to stay in her own personal space, he pulled her right up against his side, took her arm and draped it across his middle. When they were in bed together, there was no such thing as personal space. “Remind me to turn off your phone whenever we’re together.”
“My point is that I had no right to be offended because I didn’t have your complete attention. For crying out loud, I once played a game of Solitaire on my phone behind the back of a man when he was whispering sweet nothings in my ear.”
About to get after her for again bringing those boy-toys she used to play with into the conversation, he instead burst out laughing. “No shit? Geez, that poor bastard.”
“I’ve never needed anyone’s attention before like I needed yours. I just… I don’t know what went wrong with me.”
He didn’t see a reason to hide his grin as he looked down at her. “My Sassy needed all my attention, huh?”
“I’m not needy. I’ve never been needy.” She shook her head as if disgusted with herself. “I can’t explain what my problem was, but I’m sure it won’t happen again.
”
“Sassy, it won’t happen again because I’ll take the time to explain what the hell’s going on and why I have work obligations that can’t be avoided. And the one thing you’ve got to do if anything like this ever happens again is to have some faith in me. When we’re together, there’s nothing in the world that could turn my attention away from you. Nothing.”
She looked up at him. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. And you can bet the last thing you’ll want to do is play fucking Solitaire when I’m talking dirty to you.”
Her breath caught, loud enough for him to hear, and her arm tightened around his middle. “Maybe that’s where he went wrong. Sweet nothings won’t get my attention. But dirty talk? That’s another matter entirely.”
His blood heated so fast he wouldn’t have been surprised if the sheets had caught fire. “When I fuck a woman, I like it wild and dirty and honest. No games of any kind. And when we’re done making each other scream for the night, I’m all about finding out how you like to sleep, how best we fit together, and whether or not going to sleep with the TV on is going to bother you, because I always put it on sleep timer and then just conk out.”
“I…” She propped herself up on one elbow, her arm withdrawing from him. Then she looked away, biting her lip.
He frowned. “What?”
She worked that lower lip a while before sliding him an uncomfortable glance. “Okay. The fact is, I’ve never… slept…with anyone.”
He stared, not sure he heard right. “What?”
“Sex is fine. Sex is great. But once you’re done, you’re done. You’re out.”
“Out?”
“Of my bed. Of the apartment. Out. I’ve never slept with anyone in the same bed with me. Ever.”
His jaw almost dropped. “Seriously?”
“It’s a thing with me. Even now with you, I was only dozing and never lost track that there was someone else in the room with me. I can’t just…be completely unconscious for any real length of time when there’s someone close by. It’s impossible. I can’t do it.”
