“Liana, you’re not making any sense. You can’t—”
“No, for the first time since I came back here, I am making sense. You never forgave me. You said you did, but you didn’t. All you wanted was revenge. You were playing the long con. You were trying to get me to open up, but only so you could make me pay for hurting you all those years ago.”
“How could you even think I would—”
“I’m telling you that because I’m not afraid anymore – not afraid of your being able to hurt me. Because you’ve hurt me enough. There was a time when I believed I deserved it – that anything you did to me, I deserved, and that I would lay back and take it. But I’ve paid now. I’ve paid a million times over, and I can’t pay anymore. I can’t apologize anymore. I can’t undo what I did. I can’t ever undo it. So I’m not going to try anymore. Goodbye, Nick.”
When it came to Liana, he never had the words. He always seemed continuously tongue-tied, continuously at a loss, and continuously fucking up, over and over again. He’d done it for her, to make sure Helena wasn’t playing her, to make sure the woman wasn’t in league with the man he was convinced wanted to crush the girl standing in front of him, body and soul. But he knew all Liana was seeing was him coming out of the garage after kissing another woman, merely hours after she had opened up to him like a flower in the woodshed. After opening up her channels, after stripping herself bare, after his telling her that after all the time they were apart, she had been what had kept him going.
It didn’t matter that he and Helena had gone no farther than he had ever gone with Liana. The fact that Liana felt betrayed was all that mattered. And she deserved to feel betrayed. Because he should have said no. No to Tryg, no to Helena, no to the whole filthy situation. When Tryg told him he’d sell his soul, he should have said no. And even if he could never explain, he at least had to show her that he would try. That he owed her, at least.
“Liana.” She stopped; didn’t turn around. “I don’t expect to be able to explain, and I’m not going to try. But before you go, I want you to know that I did it for you.” She turned around, slowly, giving him hope. “I did it wrong. I always do it wrong. But I did it for you.”
“Did what for me, Nick?”
Nick raked both hands over his hair. Nothing could fix this, and he was an idiot to try.
“Kissed her? Let her stick her hands all over you, and God knows where? Get her to take her panties off, to open up her legs for you, the same way I did?”
“No, I—”
Liana was fearsome now, animalistic. “Look, I know you’re an opportunist. You always have been, and I convinced myself it was the same way anyone would be if they grew up in the trash dump of a life that you did. I sympathized, or tried to. But now—” she paused, taking a deep breath. She closed her eyes, as if his brightness were something she couldn’t bear to look at—as if he were the sun, and she were about to fly into him, beautiful and terrifying and deadly. “Now I think it’s just you, that you don’t know how. You don’t know how to be good. You don’t know how to be true. You can’t learn. And you never will.”
And Nick couldn’t believe that this, of all things, would be his last glimpse of Liana, as she walked away from him in anger and helplessness. He’d always believed, even when he wouldn’t admit it to himself, that he’d be able to redeem himself in her eyes, to be better, to be worth sticking around for, that if he could show her how much he considered her rare and precious, a treasure worth defending, that, someday, she’d consider him worth defending, too. And then, if they were still fighting, at least they’d be fighting together.
And now that he watched her walk away, disappearing as quickly as she’d appeared, he knew he had blown it for good, and he’d never get another chance, that the only glimpse of her he’d ever get again was behind glass, out a window as she walked away from him. He sank down to the dusty ground, his back against the chipped paint of the side of the garage, staring at the back of the Ryan house, wondering what Kirrily would say, wondering what they would all say, now that he’d fucked up again. It wasn’t that he wasn’t used to be judged, and tried, and convicted, and thrown away. But he’d always held up hope that he deep down, he was better than what they said he was. Now he knew they’d been right all along.
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
Liana heard someone call her name; it must have been Tomahawk. He’d slipped away to the front yard in order to give her and Nick some privacy, but she knew he must have been able to tell from the way her face looked that her confrontation with Nick hadn’t gone the way she’d planned.
“Take me away from here,” she shouted, grabbing the side of the redhead’s leather jacket so tightly she felt him squirm out of her grip. “Just take me somewhere and leave me there.”
“Liana, tell me what happened,” he said. “Did Nick—did he—”
“It doesn’t matter, Tom. It’s over. I was an idiot to ever come here. I was an idiot to ever leave. I was an idiot to ever believe that anything could ever be better after what I’ve done, that I deserve for anything to be better.”
She just wanted to run, to ride, to fly away, until she knew nobody could see her, where she couldn’t be mocked for everything wrong she’d ever done. In hindsight it was no surprise that Nick had chosen to hurt her in retaliation for the way she had hurt him years ago. Of course he’d told he’d forgiven her, but forgiveness could only take someone so far.
But he couldn’t have possibly known just how well his plan would work. Sure she might find him difficult to resist, in the way that any young man with a rock-hard body who rode a Harley would be. He couldn’t have possibly known how his kiss in a dilapidated shed, how his earnestness in protecting her despite how she’d done nothing to deserve it, how the way his hands had traversed her body like she was the most precious thing he had ever been allowed to touch had awakened something in her, a part of her soul that hadn’t breathed in ages.
“Well?” asked a voice.
“Helena,” she breathed, taking a step back, for the older woman looked downright terrifying as she emerged from around the side of the garage, punching buttons on her expensive phone and pressing it to her ear.
“Fuck the speed limit,” she was telling someone heatedly—her driver, perhaps. “I don’t care who you saw. Just get here and get me the hell away from this place.” When she caught sight of Liana, she dropped it into her purse. Her neat blonde bob had come loose from its careful product-enhanced coif. She was barefoot, carrying her Louboutin heels, their red soles seeming to glow like embers in the dark. “So it’s true,” she said primly.
“What’s true?” Liana stepped forward cautiously, out of the shadow of the garage, into the moonlight.
“He’s exactly as dumb as I was afraid he was.”
“What?” Liana said, resisting the urge to jump in and defend him.
“He still believes in you,” she said shaking her head. “I open myself to him, I offer him the world—everything any self-respecting dirt-poor biker boy could possibly want—and he says no.”
“He said no?”
“That’s right, cupcake,” said Helena, reaching out to gently tweak Liana’s nose. “Gives it up for the girl who screwed him over before. Some people never learn.”
“But I didn’t—”
“Oh,” she said, pursing her lips in a strangely girlish way, “It doesn’t matter what you did. It’s about who you are. And you’ll always be the girl whose face he’ll see, no matter who he’s actually looking at.”
“You mean—” Liana’s brain raced to make sense of what she was hearing. She’d seen the way Helena had draped herself possessively over Nick’s body as they entered the garage, the pose of pure seduction. There was no mistaking that. And, yet, what Liana was telling her was something entirely different – that it wasn’t what Nick wanted, that it hadn’t been his choice.
“You know, Liana, I’m afraid your stepfather was right about you,” she said, creeping closer, looming over her.
Liana stepped back and swallowed, reminded her of the high-powered corporate women she used to bump into at Starbucks during lunch hour. They towered over her in their five-inch Jimmy Choo heels, shoving by her to get to the napkin dispenser, as if she were invisible in her scuffed flats and frayed jeans, hems torn up from walking the streets all day. There she’d be, stopping in for a jolt of caffeine and a brief rest in a threadbare armchair, on her way to yet another long-shot audition, having served drinks at the bar until four a.m. the night before. And there they’d be, their whole aura seeming to scream, I am everything; you are nothing.
And here was Helena, clearly of the same breed. They were face to face, the wind rippling their hair equally. And yet, against all odds, against all logic, it seemed she was being told she’d won, that something about her had stayed with Nick. Something about her, Liana Ryan, of all people, had proved to be worth turning down the world for. And the cool breeze that snaked around her was suddenly warm, balmy.
Helena was the first to turn, but as she minced away barefoot, she whispered, “You are dangerous.”
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
“Nick?”
He stood on the edge of the roof of the garage, in front of one of two battered lawn chairs, hands stuffed in his pockets, part of his copper-colored locks hanging down, hiding his face in shadow, a shaft of moonlight cutting through. This looked like a spot where he had often come to think. When he whipped his head up at the sound of her voice, she was momentarily startled by the look that flashed across his face: a perplexing combination of fear, surprise, happiness, and something she couldn’t name, wouldn’t even dare to try. Perhaps it was unnameable.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
That wasn’t quite what she expected him to say. But she knew he spoke out of fear of what could happen to her, exposed and unprotected.
“I’m not afraid.” She thought she saw the trace of a smile pass his lips, a gleam of…pride, somehow.
Already, a little curl of his lip seemed to beckon her closer. Managing, somehow, despite everything, to look cool. Despite sadness, despite pain. Even now, there was that little part of him that knew he was irresistible to her, and always had been. It had brought him to grief more than it had ever brought him happiness, but it didn’t mean it wasn’t still there.
“I came to say I’m sorry. For not listening to you.” He opened his mouth, to tell her she didn’t need to apologize. “Stop. Don’t say anything. For not being better. For not being…” she delicately sucked in the lump that was forming in her throat, willing herself to hold herself together while she made the speech she hoped would redeem her. Would redeem them. She stepped closer, and he did not retreat. “The girl you needed me to be. Either back then, or now.”
He ducked his head sheepishly. “Li, you have to know. With her, I never—”
“Shhh. It’s my turn to speak, young man,” she said bossily, stepping closer, a hand raised to his lip.
His eyes went wide at her touch, and a little thrill went through her, starting in her chest and curling down deliciously through her torso and down in between her legs. His gray-green eyes seemed to widen farther, as if to let the starlight in, as he looked her over head to toe, from the wind-whipped honey-blonde strands around her face, down to the way her old black sweater skimmed over the still-girlish curves of her body and the whiskers of her faded skinny jeans. She knew her body as unexceptional, functional, as pedestrian as the measurements she put in the résumé she gave to casting directors, or the expressiveness she tried to force into her eyes when she had headshots taken. But Nick had known her before any of that; and that was what she wanted to cloak herself in now – in the starving, longing look in his hurt eyes as he took her in, as if she were a feast he had never been allowed to taste, to look at, to even touch. And now he reached out his hand to her hesitantly, as if he didn’t dare to hope she would come to him. But in a second, their lips crashed together, his arm around her waist, and, at last, they had the kiss she had dreamed of since she was seventeen.
“You have no idea how long I’ve wanted this,” she murmured as she withdrew her lips.
“Since you caught me coming out of the shower before school that one morning,” he teased into her ear.
She tipped her head back and laughed, but his hands were already stroking her navel beneath her sweater, running up past the hem. But then, to her pleasure, he asked for no one’s permission as he tore her sweater off suddenly, almost wildly, then her t-shirt, his fingers sliding over the bones of her hips and across the slightly damp skin of her back, stumbling on the hook of her bra. Because this was what she had always wanted, perhaps, to be taken—not by the lanky, self-righteous boy he had been then, but the strong, brave man he was now.
She raised her hands to let him in, his hands and lips fighting to touch more of her, more. He crouched and dropped down, his hands fitting into all the grooves and contours of her bare torso, naked and exposed to the chill of the spring night. She felt her sensitive nipples harden as his lips grazed ever-so-gently over first one, then the other, and she drew in a sharp breath, invigorated by the combination of the slight wetness of his tongue. He raised his head in concern.
“I’m okay,” she snapped breathlessly, a hitch in her voice. “Keep going. Lower.”
Massaging his slightly calloused hands over her hips more deeply, he dug his thumbs beneath the waistband of her jeans. He was careful, deliberate, curious, his brow furrowed in concentration, and she loved to watch how the muscles beneath his shoulders flexed as he moved, his fingers finally reaching the mound where her hair started growing, giving a push, and she practically gasped at the sensation it sent shooting through her. There had to be more of this where that came from. Her hand shaky, she reached for where his hand rested on her hip and guided it down to where even the mental image of his hands on her had already awakened her. He grabbed at her jeans, and she helped him by kicking them off the rest of the way, shoes and panties, too.
She reached up to fumble with the buttons on his shirt, eager to glimpse fully what lay underneath; she wanted to take it all in with her eyes, then her hands, then her entire body. He smiled and awkwardly tossed off his jacket and unbuttoned his shirt the rest of the way, guiding her hands up to the smooth surface of his chest, where she could almost see the abdominal muscles flex beneath the tautness of his skin. There, the tattooed Black Sparks logo on his arm, the Celtic cross on his shoulder that when she had first seen it, seemed so strange, now seemed so right. Like something he should have been born with, but had had to make himself. The mark of a warrior; the mark of a protector.
The open air licking at her nude form was both delicious and dangerous, but she wasn’t cold. The heat they had generated was already enough to light a bonfire. Placing his lips again on her neck, his hands trailed languidly over the strip of hair that covered between her thighs, then dipped lower, pressing on the tiny button of skin that nestled there, delighting the nerve endings, setting them spinning. He must have known she liked it, because she noticed his smile of satisfaction as he applied more pressure. Her legs buckled, but he caught her, and in a second, she had collapsed in his arms as he brought her gently down to lie on the cement of the roof.
He paused for a second. She watched his collarbone flexing as he breathed and swallowed, as if he couldn’t believe what he was looking at—Liana, alive, awake, aroused, shimmering in starlight. And this was enough to make her feel as if she was floating, far above the hardness of the concrete, on something silk, something rich and decadent. Of course, she knew Nick couldn’t give her a rich carpet to lay on—not now—but he could give her something even better: the chance to blossom under his touch.
She reached up her hands to wrap them around his impossibly broad shoulders, reveling in the smoothness of his back, delighting in the way he closed his eyes when she drew small circles into the tenseness of his shoulders, urging him to let go. It seemed as if he had already sensed what he wanted her to do
, and he kept exploring with his fingers. She felt moisture gathering within as her innards pulsated, anticipatory, in time with her breathing, rushing out to greet him. She closed her eyes against the darkness as the warmth between her legs seemed to grow into a swirling halo, sending licks up into her thighs and torso in alternating, wavy paths, until they plateaued, wavering, teetering.
“Please,” she said, urging Nick onward, but another part of her prayed to stay on the ledge, poised on the edge of bliss, of oblivion, forever. This, under the stars, under his touch, was where she wanted to be. She spread her arms and reached her hands over his back to press him against her, to bring his entire weight down upon her.
He bent down to stroke her face and bestow a gentle kiss to her chin, halfway between where her face ended and her neck began, a featherweight nibble, and all of a sudden she was there. She opened her eyes, in hopes he was looking at her with as much awe as she was looking at him.
“Just when I thought you couldn’t even be more beautiful than you are, Li,” he whispered. “You come.”
“It was all you,” she whispered weakly, reaching up to brush his damp copper hair to when it fell in his face, as if he barely noticed, as if the sight of her were enough. “Is anybody going to come here?” she whispered, though she was distracted by the faraway look on his face, how aroused he obviously still was.
“Maybe,” he whispered with a teasing smile. “A prospect. Tomahawk. Tryg.”
“Good,” she said. “I have nothing to hide from.”
“You won’t be saying that tomorrow, when—” Nick paused, a catch in his throat as he looked behind him, raising himself to his knees, alert.
She cursed herself. She knew what he was thinking. When Tryg finds out about this. When Jack finds out you don’t have Helena’s panic room to protect you anymore. When absolutely everything falls apart.
Long Ride: A Motorcycle Club Romance (Black Sparks MC) (Whiskey Bad Boys Book 1) Page 16
