by Sophia Gray
“What?! You can’t really believe that, Lilah,” he argued. “I would never conspire against you.”
“But that’s how it’s working out. That’s exactly how it’s working out.”
“No,” he said, taking a few more clumsy steps toward me. “Not at all.”
“Don’t come any closer,” I told him, holding a hand out.
“Don’t do this to me, Lilah,” he pleaded. “I can’t leave you alone, baby. I care about you too much. I’m starting to have feelings for you.” He kept walking towards me… until his chest pressed against my outstretched hand.
I relaxed my arm and let him come closer to me. He took me in his arms. The smell of whiskey enveloped me. He didn’t reek of it now, and it had dulled to an enticing aroma.
“I want you in my life. I’m afraid if I let go, you’ll leave,” he continued.
“You should have thought about that before,” I told him. “After I told you about my ex, you should have realized that I didn’t want another controlling man in my life.”
A low rumble roared gently through the woods.
“Was that thunder?” I asked him. I hadn’t noticed a cloud in the sky all day. Then again, I wasn’t the type to pay attention to the forecast. I didn’t know what the weather was doing until it did it.
“Sounded like it,” Cole said, backing away from me and turning his ear toward the door, as if he was listening for more.
About that time, there was a bright flash of light and an almost immediate peal of thunder. I groaned. I couldn’t believe I was going to be stuck in here with him.
“You need to go if you’re going to go,” I told him. “Before the rain hits.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he replied. Instead, he walked over to the door he’d left open and looked outside.
I heard a few drops here and there as the storm moved in and the rain began. The slow drumming of the rain soon gave way to a downpour. I looked past him out the door and saw the rain coming down like one solid wall out there. There was no way I was going to try to convince him to ride back on his motorcycle in that.
“Do you need to bring your bike in?” I asked him.
“Nah, she’ll be fine out there. She’ll dry overnight,” he said, closing the door and coming back in.
“My words still stand,” I told him. “You can stay here only because you can’t leave right now, but you stay away from me.”
“Fine,” he said, holding his hands up in surrender.
He walked over to the couch, standing almost next to me but not touching me. He made sure I saw that he was keeping himself apart from me.
“Where am I sleeping?” he asked.
“I’ll show you the rooms,” I said, leading him into Troy’s room and then the other bedroom. The second bedroom was supposed to be Micah’s whenever he stayed up here with Troy, so the bed was much smaller, a twin. Troy’s bed, of course, was a king, which made absolutely no sense if he was only ever up here by himself.
“I don’t see any reason why we can’t both sleep on the king-size bed. There’s enough room we don’t even really have to share it. We can sleep on our own sides and never touch each other,” he said. His voice was heavy with exhaustion and the effects of the alcohol he’d had earlier, slowly wearing off.
I wasn’t sure if I was buying what he was selling, but the bed was a lot more comfortable than the couch. That much I did know for sure. While I considered his suggestion, he kicked off his boots and climbed into bed, sliding underneath my ex-husband’s sheets.
“Well, I guess that decides that, doesn’t it?” I mused out loud. “Goodnight, Cole,” I said, turning to walk out of the room. He was already snoring as soon as his head hit the pillow.
I was going to try to stay awake to wait for Troy’s return, but it was late. If he hadn’t come back by now, he was probably spending the night somewhere else. I cut out the living room light and lay down on the couch, pulling the thin blanket that lived on the back of the couch over me. I listened to the rain waging war on the cabin. Then, I heard crashing sounds outside as the wind took old limbs down from the trees surrounding the cabin.
Sleep eluded me until I finally decided to join Cole in the master bedroom. I climbed into bed on my side and pulled the covers up, careful not to disturb him. I lay there and stared at the wall, trying to focus on anything but the man who had followed me out into the woods to tell me that he cared for me, despite the mistakes he’d made. It was those mistakes that made me so angry.
I closed my eyes and listened to him breathing on the other side of the bed. It was calming enough to lull me to sleep finally, despite the distance between us. I couldn’t control my feelings. I wanted to be angry at him, and I was, but it didn’t change how I really felt.
Chapter Eighteen
Cole
“Good morning, sunshine,” Lilah said with a wiseass tone to her voice.
I cracked my eyelids and groaned. The light bombarding my vision made my head ache. I shut my eyes tighter and put a hand over my face.
“How much did I have to drink last night?” I croaked out. I couldn’t remember.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there when you started drinking,” she replied. Her voice sounded like a shrug, like she was saying she didn’t know and really didn’t care how much I’d had.
I rolled onto my stomach and buried my face in the pillow. I lay there while the details of the night before came back into my memory. I could remember bits and pieces, like drinking and spilling my guts to Axel in front of her. Then, there was driving out to the cabin, and the rain. That meant I was still in the bedroom at the cabin.
“Anyway, I brought you some coffee and a couple of Advil. I’ll leave them right here by the bed. You can come out when you’re ready,” she said, and I heard the cup touch the nightstand.
“Can you turn the light off on your way out of the room?” I asked, my voice muffled by the pillow.
“It is off. That’s the light from outside,” she informed me. “It’s a beautiful morning.”
“You gotta be kidding me.” I reached over and grabbed the Advil and the cup of coffee. I sat up and popped the pills back, then washed them down with the hot, heavy coffee. I knew the only way I was going to get past my splitting headache was to get up and get moving.
A moment later, I was standing in the living room, looking down at the floor and listening to the sizzling sounds coming from the kitchen. The cabin was full of the smell of sausage cooking. Coupled with the coffee, it seemed to be settling my stomach and soothing my headache.
“There are sausages and toast,” Lilah called from the kitchen. “It’s all Troy had in here, so that’s what we’re having for breakfast.”
“Sounds good to me,” I croaked out. I walked to the windows looking out at the woods behind the cabin, facing away from the morning sun. The sky was a perfect blue, the kind of blue that only appeared after a good, cleansing rain, as if it didn’t just wash away the grime of the world but the grime in the sky as well.
With each sip of coffee, my head felt better. There was no way I could have had that much to drink the night before. There hadn’t been enough time for that much to drink, but I remembered being pretty sloppy by the time she showed up at the clubhouse. I thought I had sobered up a lot by the end of the night. My head didn’t care.
“So it looks like that storm just roared through last night and left us a beautiful day today,” I mused out loud, still looking outside.
“It would seem that way. I hope all the storms from last night have passed.”
I glanced into the kitchen to see her staring back at me. Even when she was mad at me, she was still gorgeous, especially standing over the stove like she was. Her perfect, pure little body poised over the food she was cooking. That sweet little ass, those perky tits, her beautiful red hair, and that delicate pale skin. I bet she had something better than Advil and coffee under those clothes.
“I think they have,” I told her, walking around the
bar separating the living room from the kitchen.
“You think they have, huh?” She smiled down at the sausage patties sizzling in the pan. “How about you get some toast going and let me know what you think after that,” she added.
I put my coffee down and started helping her with breakfast. Soon, I forgot all about my headache or my stomach twisting in knots from all the liquor I’d had. It felt good, and oddly comforting, to be working in the kitchen with her. I remembered her being angry with me the night before, so it was nice to see that it was behind us so that we could work as a team.
“Alright, breakfast is ready,” she said, pulling the sausage patties off the pan and sliding them onto the plates with two slices of toast each.
“Is there any butter for the toast?” I asked her.
She opened the fridge and looked in. A moment later, she came back out, shaking her head. It wasn’t the end of the world. It was a nice, scaled down breakfast.
“So sorry,” she said. “Guess you’ll have to do without.” She grabbed her plate and walked into the living room.
“It’s not a big deal.” I furrowed my brow. How the hell did she go from being slightly flirtatious to being cold again? I followed her into the living room.
“So, about last night…” she said after I sat down next to her.
“I’m really sorry about last night. Not about following you out here, but about the way you learned everything,” I clarified before she could say anything else.
She nodded. “Yeah, that could have been handled better. I wasn’t too terribly impressed with how last night went.”
“I know, but look, I promise you that I will help you find your son. We traced Troy’s computer back to this cabin yesterday, so he was here at some point. We’re on his trail.”
“Yeah, when I got here, there were clothes laid out on the beds. It looked like they hadn’t been gone for long.”
I thought about it while I ate. Where would he have gone? Did he know we were coming? I wondered if someone had given us up or if he’d known some other way. Regardless if he knew about it, he’d been able to get a head start by leaving ahead of us.
“He’s got some time on us now,” I said finally. “But I’m still going to do whatever I can to find them.” It was the least I could do to prove I cared about her.
“When you find Micah, I want to be there,” she said. “I have to come with you.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” I argued. “When we go after this guy, it’s not going to be a safe situation. You need to stay back and let us bring Micah to you.”
“It’ll never work,” she said confidently.
“What do you mean?”
“He’ll never go with people he doesn’t know.” She cocked an eyebrow, as if to emphasize that she had me there.
“Smart kid.” I took another bite of my toast.
“And don’t you forget it,” she said, setting her plate on the wooden coffee table.
I was going to have to take her along to confront Troy and get Micah. There wasn’t really any way that I could see to get around it unless I wanted to traumatize her kid. That was one hell of a way to be introduced to someone’s kid, though – grabbing him from his father’s arms and sending him to be with his mom so his father could be taken care of.
No matter what, since he was Lilah’s son, Micah deserved my protection. He had it. I was already looking after him by trying to help her find him. There were still the questions of tracking Troy down and what to do with him once we found him, but those questions were going to have to be answered as we got to them.
“Where do we start?” Lilah asked me after I finished my breakfast. She grabbed my plate with hers and took them both into the kitchen. She turned on the water in the sink and washed them by hand. I wouldn’t have done his dishes. It wasn’t like Troy was going to be coming back to this cabin.
I sipped my coffee and followed her into the kitchen. I leaned against the counter opposite her. “First, we need to go to the clubhouse. I don’t have any resources here,” I told her.
“Resources?”
“People. I need to send someone to cover the shop while I’m out working on this with you, and I need to put some feelers out to locate your ex,” I explained.
She nodded. “Okay, so you’re going to use the MC?”
“I’ll use what’s available to us,” I told her. “Everybody we use isn’t necessarily a member. There are people on the street who help us out from time to time, and a few people in other places as well.”
“You mean, like, official people? People in legitimate positions you guys have on your payroll basically,” she guessed, not turning around from the sink.
“Something like that.” I smirked. She was trying to wrap her head around the scope of our reach, and it was pretty hot. Her mind was opening to a different world, and that was such a turn on.
Now that she wasn’t trying to push me away or telling me to get out of her life, I wanted to take her again, to prove to her that she was mine. Because she was mine. She may not have realized it. She may not have said it in so many words, but that sexy little redhead belonged to me. I was going to convince her to admit it before it was all said and done.
If she weren’t mine, she would have been more convincing in trying to kick me out. She wouldn’t have joined me in bed. Things would have been different. There wouldn’t have been coffee or breakfast, or any of that.
“I guess it’s better I don’t know everything you get up to, huh?” she asked.
She cut the water off and put the plates on the dish rack next to the sink to dry. She turned around and grabbed the pan from the stove, eyeing me with a playful, suggestive little smile as she walked by.
“There’s more coffee if you want it,” she offered on her way back to the sink.
“Thanks. I think I will,” I told her. I turned around and poured another cup of the black liquid. “We need to go as soon as we can,” I added over my shoulder.
“I’ll be ready to go as soon as I finish cleaning up breakfast.”
“Then I’ll go ahead and get ready.”
I left my cup on the counter and went back into the bedroom. I sat on the side of the bed as I pulled my boots on my feet. Everything felt so normal and routine all of a sudden, the complete opposite of all the confrontation the night before. It was comfortable, familiar, like we’d been doing this sort of thing for years.
We were a team. She brought out the nice guy in me, and she seemed more confident around me now than she had the first time we met. I laughed, thinking about how nervous she’d been the first time she came into the shop. That reminded me that we still hadn’t settled the issue of that tattoo.
I still wanted to cover her in ink and turn her into my masterpiece. I also wanted to enjoy that bare pale skin a little longer before I started inking all over it. She was more than just a blank canvas that needed to be filled. I hoped she knew that as well.
“Alright, you ready?” I asked when I walked into the living room a few minutes later.
“Almost,” she said. She was still straightening up, putting the blanket back over the back of the couch, where it had been when we came in the night before.
“Look, that’s enough,” I told her. I put my hands on her arms, pressing them down gently so that she couldn’t keep cleaning. I turned her to face me and looked her dead in the eye. “You don’t owe Troy anything. Certainly, not a clean cabin. The only reason you were here last night was because that bastard ran off with your son. And when you got here, he’d run off again. You don’t owe him shit. You got that?”
She nodded, not taking her eyes off mine. She looked like a child who’d just been caught doing something they shouldn’t have been.
“Okay. Let’s go,” she said before throwing the blanket on the floor.
Chapter Nineteen
Lilah
“Alright, nothing? Thanks, brother. Yeah, let me know if anything pops up,” Cole said into his phone
before hanging up. He rubbed his temples and took another sip of the coffee he’d made once we got to the clubhouse.
I knew he was doing everything he could to find Troy and Micah. I knew I should have been grateful, but there was part of me that couldn’t help being resentful that he’d hidden so much information from me before. We still hadn’t really talked about it. I figured he thought he was going to be able to make it all right again by helping me find them. Maybe he could have.
I didn’t have any other choice but to go along with him. There was no one else to call, no one else I knew who could help me. If there were anyone who knew how to handle situations like this, it would have been Cole or another member of the MC.
