by Kit Rocha
At least she’d have the chance to tell Ace to go easy on her pours. But when she stepped behind the bar, Dallas was the one who reached for the first bottle, one eyebrow raised. “Are you gonna give me shit if I only pour you one line of shots?”
“Not at all.” She knew her limits—but she also couldn’t resist a little dig at him. “You’re the boss.”
The look he gave her screamed suspicion. But he lined up the eight glasses and started pouring. “How’s Nessa holding up?” he asked in a lower voice.
She matched his tone. “She’ll be fine once she pukes. But you should have held your ground. She’s too young to be drinking like that.”
“I know.” He sounded mildly perturbed. “Turns out there’s a few flaws in a business plan that rests entirely on a hormonal teenager not locking herself in her room.”
“Your secret’s safe with me.” She drank her first shot and turned the glass upside-down on the bar.
Solemn-faced, Dallas picked up the second shot and held it out to her.
Her fingers brushed his as she accepted it. “So how come Nessa and Rachel and I aren’t getting the speech? You know, all of that stuff about standing with our brothers and dying for them if we have to?”
“Because Nessa’s sixteen fucking years old and, as I was saying, the key to our business plan.” He picked up the tequila. “And I made a promise to Rachel’s father that I’d keep her safe.”
“Right.” She reached for the salt shaker and the bowl of lime wedges beneath the bar. “Your wrist, please.”
“What?”
“I’m not pouring salt on a new tattoo.” She lifted his free hand, licked the inside of his wrist, and sprinkled it with salt. “So what about me?”
“What about—” His fingers curled into a fist. “You want the speech, Lex? You want me to tell you to fight for your brothers and fuck with your brothers and live and die for your brothers?”
“No.” She squeezed his hand tighter. “We both know that’s not why I have these cuffs.”
“Yeah,” he rumbled. “Because what the fucking hell did I take over this sector for if I can’t use my power to keep my people safe?”
“Uh-huh.” Instead of licking the salt off his skin efficiently, she glided her tongue over his wrist, following it with one of the quick little flicks he liked so much.
His breathing hitched, and a hint of a growl rattled his chest. Lex downed the tequila, popped a lime wedge in her mouth, and smiled at him around it.
Dallas jerked his wrist free and offered her the fourth shot. “You wouldn’t listen to the damn speech anyway.”
Everyone was watching them with varying degrees of awareness. Ace’s expression was shocked and knowing, all at the same time. Jasper stood there, stone-faced. Bren seemed to hover perpetually on the verge of a wince, and Mad looked ready to intervene in case of bloodshed.
Only Nessa seemed truly oblivious, probably because of the liquor. She chattered happily with Natalie, Dallas’s girlfriend, who looked on with resignation—and something dangerously close to pity.
Lex threw back the next few shots, one after the other. By the time she picked up the last one, Natalie was gone.
Just as well. Lex raised the last shot to salute Dallas. “You’ve always wanted to own me, and now you do.”
He glowered as she swallowed the liquor, then shoved the empty glass into his hands. He was still glowering when she turned to walk away, but the scowl was already starting to give way to something...
Hotter.
She didn’t stop to hug anyone. She didn’t have that luxury, because the tension brewing between her and Dallas was getting too fucking close to the breaking point. She had to put enough space between them to give it a chance to cool, or something irrevocable would happen.
If that much space existed in the world.
»»» § «««
Dallas’s blood was pounding with thwarted adrenaline by the time he headed back to his room.
Nessa was tucked into bed next to Rachel, both of them having—as anticipated—thrown up in spectacular fashion. The new waitress, Amira, had agreed to sit with them to make sure puking and a hangover were the worst souvenirs they ended up with from their big night.
By the time he’d taken care of that mess, Lex had vanished.
Which was fine. Which was good. He could still feel her tongue on the inside of his wrist, wet and hot and far too familiar. He knew how that tongue felt other places, all sorts of places—
The blood started pounding its way back to his cock.
Growling, Dallas slammed open the door to his room, intent on finding a way to work through all this tension.
And stopped cold.
The collar he’d given Natalie as a symbol of their relationship sat on the table just inside the door, its black leather a silent accusation. But not as much of one as the fact that she had a bag open on the bed and was silently, efficiently folding her clothes up to shove into it.
“What the hell?”
She glanced up. “How are Nessa and Rachel?”
Dallas shut the door and snatched the collar up from the table. “They’re fine. Amira’s watching over them. What the hell is going on?”
She hesitated in her folding, but only for a moment. The shirt went into the bag, and she took a deep breath. “I’m leaving you. It’s something I should have done months ago.”
It shouldn’t have hit him in the gut like this. Most of the women he collared stayed for a few weeks or a few months, enjoyed the perks of warming a sector leader’s bed, and moved on. But Natalie had stayed longer than any of them, and they’d fallen into a routine. The guys liked her. The girls liked her. She was cheerful, she was down for as much domineering shit as he cared to bring in the bedroom, and she was blessedly uncomplicated.
And she was packing her shit. “Is this about tonight? About the ink?”
Her gaze didn’t waver. “You mean am I jealous? I used to be, a little. I saw the way you looked at her, and I couldn’t help it. But after tonight—” She broke off and looked away. “It’s not about Lex.”
He hadn’t even been talking about Lex. Giving Rachel ink was a savvy political move—it solidified his relationship with Liam Riley. Giving it to Nessa and Lex made sense, too. They were fixtures, part of the O’Kane empire, and not likely to go anywhere.
But it hadn’t even occurred to him to offer the cuffs to Natalie. Because he’d known this day was coming.
“I can’t say no one warned me.” Instead of folding clothes neatly, she began quickly shoving them into her bag. “Adelaide told me. She said it always goes down like this.”
Adelaide had breezed out of his life with a bag stuffed full of jewelry and a merry kiss to his cheek. Dallas had assumed that meant all was well between them. Off-balance and irritated, he jerked out a chair from the table and straddled it. “Okay, tell me what Adelaide said.”
“That we’re all temporary,” she muttered. “A way for you to pass the time until you can’t stay away from Lex anymore.”
“That’s bullshit,” he snapped. “And I didn’t fucking do anything with Lex.”
“Not while I’m here—that’s a line neither of you will cross.” A tear slipped down her cheek, and she dashed at it impatiently. “I thought I was gonna be different, Dallas. We’d be real. I would love you, and that’d be enough.”
The tears were too much. He cared about Natalie—he never fucked anyone he couldn’t care about—and the flip-side of his possessive urges had always been bone-deep protectiveness. He shoved out of the chair to pace away from her, just so he wouldn’t have to look at her crying. “I thought we were doing fine. I know you like the sex, and I take care of you. I find you all the old cameras and lenses you want, and I had the guys build you a damn darkroom.”
“I don’t want fine, Dallas, and I don’t care about the money or the stuff.” She sighed. “Do you love me?”
What the fuck did that matter? What did it even mean? Money and stuff was
easy to write off when you had enough of it—and Dallas had worked goddamn hard to make sure he had enough of it. That was how you proved you cared—you got the job done so other people could live soft, easy lives. “If everything I do isn’t enough, words aren’t gonna help.”
“It seems so reasonable to you, doesn’t it? All I’m allowed to want is what you’re willing to give.” She hefted her bag with a curse. “I’m lucky, I guess. All I had to do was take off that collar. God help Lex, because she’s fucking stuck with you now.”
Guilt careened back into anger. “Watch your mouth, Natalie. And you sure the fuck talk about Lex a lot for someone who’s not jealous of her.”
“You still don’t get it. I wouldn’t trade places with her for a million goddamn credits.” She brushed past him, not bothering to keep her bag from slamming into his shoulder. “She’s a cautionary tale—this is what happens when you try to love Dallas O’Kane.”
“Natalie—” He reached for her arm and caught the strap of her bag instead. Better, probably—the bag wouldn’t mind if he closed his fist around it tight enough to throttle it. “Wait. Just—give me a fucking second, all right?”
“I’ve given you too much of my time already.”
“You can’t go out there in the middle of the fucking night, woman. It’s too dangerous.”
“I’m willing to take my chances.”
“Natalie.” He tugged hard enough on the strap to pull her back a step. “I will leave the fucking room, okay? It’s all yours. Don’t go get yourself mugged in a gutter because you’re pissed at me.”
She stopped and stared at him, her eyes wide and red. Slowly, she started to laugh helplessly. “That—that’s it, isn’t it? The only reason you can possibly think of that I might want to get the hell out of this room. Fuck the memories and the temptation to just take it all back and let us be fine. Fuck six months of my life. What is wrong with you?”
She needed a lot of things he didn’t have to give. But he could give her this—safety until dawn and a clean break.
And a bad guy. He was real good at being everyone’s bad guy.
He went to his desk and jerked open a drawer. The key ring he kept there rattled as he picked it up and dropped the collar. It disappeared with a swat of his hand. “There’s no taking it back now,” he said, working a key with a white dot off the ring. “Here, take this. It opens that new bedroom on the second floor, to the left of the stairs. Crash there until you find a safe place to go. If you need help, tell one of the boys.”
Natalie took the key, regarding him as she ran her thumbnail over the ridges cut into the blade. “Do yourself a favor, Dallas. Next time you put that collar on a woman, get ahead of this. Make sure what you’re willing to give is all she wants, okay?”
“Okay.” A bad guy couldn’t reach out and wipe that last tear from her cheek, or tell her he was sorry for fucking up, so he jerked his chin toward the door. “Go get some rest.”
She gripped the key. “I’m sorry. I think I could have done this better if...”
But she didn’t finish, and the words were still hanging in the air when she hauled open the door and hurried out.
Dallas didn’t chase her. He counted to three before closing the door, then counted to ten before heading back to his desk. The other drawer yielded a bottle of liquor—not the good stuff. The moonshine went down rough and burned through his stomach, but he kept drinking it.
Some nights, he didn’t want the good stuff. Some nights, he wanted to remember how far he’d come.
And how far he could fall.
»»» § «««
Only two things came knocking on your door at three in the morning—heaven or hell.
Dallas O’Kane was both.
“You’re drunk,” Lex told him, a statement of fact. Not that he needed it, judging from the way he leaned heavily against the door frame.
“Everyone’s drunk tonight, aren’t they?” He had a mostly empty bottle of rotgut in one hand—the kind that was going to leave him thinking something had died in his mouth tomorrow. “I was feeling left out.”
“Evidently.” She left the door hanging open in invitation as she reached for her discarded shorts and pulled them on. “What’s up?”
“Natalie dumped me.” He strolled in and kicked her door shut. “Kicked my ass to the curb. Went home and found her packing.”
“No kidding.” She couldn’t even feign shock. Natalie was a sweet enough girl who’d made one fatal error—falling for Dallas. “I’m sorry, that sucks.”
“Yeah.” He dropped to her couch and cradled the bottle between his hands, his gaze following her. “It sucks.”
He wasn’t just watching her the way you pay attention to someone in a conversation. He was watching her, studying her like there might be something new to discover. Uncomfortable with his scrutiny, she turned to her night table to find her cigarettes. “What?”
“Natalie says you’re in love with me.”
Thank Christ she wasn’t facing him. It was the closest thing she had to a shameful secret. Not because being in love with Dallas was wrong, but because it was foolish. And Lex had been called a lot of things in her life, plenty of which she deserved, but foolish had never made the list.
“Hmm.” She bought herself a little time by pulling two cigarettes out of her case. By the time she walked back to the couch, she had her mask back in place—amused but not laughing, vaguely curious but not quite interested. She sprawled casually on the other end of the couch, lit both cigarettes, and handed him one. “And what do you say?”
He took a long draw and blew smoke toward the ceiling. “I say hate and love are probably confusing from the outside.”
Typical Dallas. She should have kept drinking. “You want my advice?”
“Not really. I’m kinda over advice for the night.”
This time, there was nothing fake about her amusement. “Probably a smart move. It’s not like I have my shit together, either.”
Dallas snorted. “You’re a mess, Lex. I’m a mess. We’re fucking messes. We’re just really fucking good at hiding it, so it keeps surprising people when we turn out to be big fucking, ugly, dumb-as-shit messes.”
That stung. “To be fair, O’Kane, you’re way worse than I am.”
“That’s ‘cause I do everything bigger and better.”
“Yeah, I don’t think that’s how that works.”
“Sure, it is.” He passed the sloshing bottle of moonshine over to her. “I don’t want you to hate me, Lex.”
“I don’t,” she said automatically, then admitted, “Most of the time.” The liquor was pungent, strong enough to make her eyes water. If he’d drunk even half of what was missing from the bottle, it was no wonder he was here, being maudlin on her couch. “The thing about you, Declan, is that you want people to trust you with everything—their loyalty, their safety. Their lives. And you honor that trust...but you don’t return it.”
“I trust my people in the ways that matter.” He snatched the bottle back, his eyes dark and his expression foreboding. “But you wanted a king, Alexa. And now you’ve got one.”
“There, see? I hate you a little right now.” She leaned closer. “You like things in boxes. When they don’t quite fit, you get snotty and pull rank.”
“Snotty?” He snorted and twirled the bottle, making the moonshine slosh. “Maybe I like boxes because I’m trying to clean up my mess.”
“You like them because they’re safe,” she argued. “You can keep things—and people—neat and separate.”
“I can try,” he retorted, glaring at her. “Some of you hate boxes.”
She’d moved closer somehow, close enough to feel the heat of his skin even though they weren’t touching. And maybe she was foolish, after all, because she sure as hell wasn’t being smart right now.
Smart meant backing off. Smart meant running for her life. But Lex wrapped her hand in the front of Dallas’s shirt, twisting it tight in her fist. “Some of us aren’t afra
id of accidentally feeling something.”
His eyes narrowed. His gaze dropped to her lips. And though he wasn’t leaning in, he wasn’t pulling away, either. “What are you feeling?”
Angry. It wasn’t enough to do all the things he asked of her, she also had to do the things he pretended didn’t happen. She advised him, supported him, reassured him. And he always left convinced that she’d given him hell, made his life more difficult somehow.
Worse, she had to stay angry, because sadness lurked beneath her fury, ready to claw its way free. He had to be drunk off his ass to come to her room in the middle of the night, and even then it was just to tell her what a giant fucking mess she was.
“Tired,” she said finally, untangling her hand from his T-shirt. “That’s what I feel. It’s been a long day.”
“Yeah.” He caught her wrist and held it, running his thumb over one twisting vine and the sharp edge of a thorn. “Thank you for doing this.”
A lump formed in her throat, and she forced herself not to snatch her hand away. A single deep breath did nothing to head off the sob that welled in her chest, so she used an old trick she’d learned in Sector Two—she bit her tongue until she tasted blood.
At least that still worked. Her throat was clear by the time she shrugged. “It was time.”
“Past time.” His thumb found the skull at the heart of his logo. “I know I’m the bad guy. Running a sector takes a bad guy. I’m glad they have you, too. You’re good. Even when you’re mean, you’re always just...good.”
Forget tears. She was going to throw up. “It’s under control, Dallas. I can handle it.”
“I know.” He released her abruptly and leaned over to snuff out his cigarette in the ashtray. “You’re always gonna hate me sometimes. But can’t we be friends the rest of the time? I’m a better leader when we’re friends.”
As if that was something they could simply decide. What was he really asking her to do? Put forth a greater effort? Forgive him more easily when he shut her out?
It didn’t matter. She crushed out her untouched cigarette and nodded. “Sure, no problem.”
