by Sybil Bartel
He did the worst thing he could’ve done. He apologized. “I’m sorry, chica.”
Biting the inside of my cheek to keep from losing it, I forced the only word out I could. “Candle.”
Cuban Boy moved. He threw my bag in the back of my Jetta, and in two strides, he’d pounded on the door to the house, then was back in front of me with his hands out. “I’m not gonna hurt you.”
The door to the house swung open, and Candle’s gaze met mine.
“Jesus fuck,” Candle muttered, before glancing at Cuban Boy. “You fucking touched her back again.” He shook his head.
“Oversight,” Cuban Boy stated, the soft tone to his voice gone.
Candle threw his bloodied T-shirt down and took me in his good arm in three seconds flat. He cupped the back of my head, forced my face into his chest, and his lips landed on my head. “Breathe it out, baby. Come on, you’re stronger than this.”
I inhaled, and his familiar scent filled my head, but right along with it came the bitterness of the past six months. Candle had left me without a safety net, and now he was hurt. “You’re shot,” I accused, but I knew where the real blame lay.
I’d been drinking because Candle was gone, then I was drinking because he was coming home, but all of it was just an excuse. I was pissed at myself. Life had been shit for six months, but it’d been quiet. No LCs, or booze or fights. Just six months of my own damn thoughts festering about the fucking life I didn’t want anymore.
I dangerously slid into a fantasy where a sexy-as-sin Cuban could be mine, and hope wasn’t a four-letter word. But reality surfaced three days ago when I’d gotten a text from Candle, and I’d been drinking ever since. Now there was a dead body in the living room, shoving the truth of my past in my face, and I was panicking like I hadn’t done in three goddamn years.
Candle’s chest moved with an inhale as he softly stroked my hair.
“I’m okay.”
I turned my head and my gaze landed on Cuban Boy. His jaw locked, his stare intent, his expression gave nothing away. For the first time in my life, I gave a shit what someone thought of me. It bothered me that the six-foot-two, muscled ex-marine with warm brown eyes could be thinking less of me.
I pushed away from Candle and focused on his shoulder. “You need to stop the bleeding.”
“You need to get out of here,” he countered.
I opened my mouth to refuse, but Candle moved. He stepped in to my space, blocked Cuban Boy from my view and grasped my chin so hard, my spine went straight and my eyes trained over his shoulder like I’d been taught.
Then he did what he hadn’t done in years.
“Decima.” My whispered birth name passed his lips in a violent storm of regret. “Heed my warning. Take his shelter.”
My name, the old familiar pattern of speech, his dominant grip on me, it all swirled together with the shock of a life I’d desperately tried to forget.
Fear crawled up my spine. “Tarquin,” I pleaded, using his real name.
“He’ll protect you better than I ever could.” Tarquin’s hand dropped, and with it, the past. The unflappable Army-Ranger-turned-motorcycle-club-sergeant-at-arms exterior slid back into place like a well-worn pair of jeans wrapping around every hard muscle. “Leave. I’m dead to you.” The man I knew, the Tarquin I’d grown up with, he disappeared, and Candle walked back into his house.
“Passenger side, chica.”
I turned and looked up at Cuban Boy. Except he didn’t look like the sexy Cuban I’d first met. He looked exactly like what he was. An impenetrable Marine who could just as easily kill me as protect me.
I got in the passenger seat of my car.
He waited until I closed the door, then he slid behind the wheel and pushed the seat all the way back. With precise, calculated movements, he threw the car in reverse, put his arm behind my seat and backed halfway down the driveway.
My head filled with his scent—soap, deodorant, sweat, musk, I crossed my arms. “Don’t fuck my car up.”
He braked and threw it in park. “Wait here.”
The first rays of the rising sun caught his golden skin and cut across his huge biceps as he got out of the car. Striding purposely toward a black SUV, he scanned the front hedge and the street. His eyes everywhere and nowhere, he took in his surroundings as he retrieved gloves from the SUV, then he pushed two motorcycles around my Jetta and into Candle’s garage.
I stared intently at every flex and bunch of his muscles. His body was so conditioned, I forgot about what he was doing and why until he yanked a tarp off a shelf in the garage and cut toward the bushes fronting the house.
Without an ounce of emotion on his face, he rolled a body into the tarp and hefted it over his shoulder. Five strides and he dumped the plastic-wrapped body onto the garage floor. The thud sounded in the idling quiet of the Jetta, and I flinched.
André shut the garage, then pulling his gloves off inside out and tucking one into the other, he walked back to my car. The soiled leather gloves were shoved into a pocket on his cargo pants before he got back behind the wheel and threw the engine in reverse.
I stared at the veins in his forearms. “Why did you do that?” He didn’t have to help Candle, let alone make himself an accessory. I knew how the law worked.
“Efficiency,” he stated, as if that explained it.
“What does that mean?”
He threw the car in drive and gunned it down the street. “I only got one goal right now, chica, and that’s getting you out of here.”
A relentless pounding started between my eyes. I shielded a hand over my forehead to block the rising sun. “Not very efficient to waste five minutes on cleanup duty.”
“Candle’s only got one good arm. Dead bodies and LC Harleys in the front yard of a middle-class neighborhood draw attention. The three minutes and twenty-eight seconds I took to clean up ensured a less conspicuous exit plan and gave me a leg up on getting you out of here.” He took a corner with more speed than I would have before sparing me a quick glance. “Who are you?”
“No one,” I muttered.
“That LC recognized you.”
“There’s nothing to recognize.” I’d lied so long, it almost felt like the truth.
André exhaled. “Listen up.”
I turned toward the window. I didn’t have to listen to shit.
“Hey,” he barked.
I ignored him.
“Look at me,” he demanded.
He had no clue who he was dealing with. My world crumbling or not, barked orders had zero effect on me. “Go fuck yourself.” I didn’t care how spiteful I was being. My anxiety had morphed into anger, the anger I held on to day in and day out. The bitter, familiar taste fueling my every breath kept me sane.
The car jerked to the side of the road and abruptly stopped as angry male tension filled the small interior.
“Turn around or I’m going to put my hands on you,” he warned.
My heart threw itself against the inside of my ribs and my mouth went dry, but not from fear. Confused, angry, I turned and bit a single word out. “What?”
Warm brown eyes measured every inch of my face before he dropped his voice to a low cadence. “I’m not going to hurt you, but I can’t protect you if I don’t know who I’m supposed to be protecting you from.”
“I don’t need protection.” Candle had changed my name, my hair color and my location. I’d taken care of the rest. I didn’t need a misguided ex-marine to barrel into my life and take control.
“Who are you?” he asked with quiet desperation.
From the second I lost my old life, I’d never looked back. I couldn’t. I’d embraced Kendall Reed. I became her.
But in that moment, with a hard-edged, soft-spoken, muscled giant looking at me like he cared about who I really was, I wanted to utter my real name. Just once, I wanted to hear it cross his lips like it’d crossed Candle’s not ten minutes ago.
And that was the trigger to my shot of reality.
Decima was dead.
I was Kendall Reed.
And she was no one.
I DROVE TO THE AIRPORT. Whatever the hell was in her head hung thick in the air. I didn’t try to coax it out. I saw the moment I asked who she was that she wasn’t going to tell me. I knew women. Mi madre, my sisters, they were all a handful, but none of them like this. You always knew what a Luna woman was thinking. None of them had a secret like the woman sitting next to me. Of that I was damn sure.
I pulled out my cell and dialed Tyler.
My right-hand man answered on the first ring. “What’s up, boss.”
“I’m leaving a late-model, dark gray Jetta at the airport up here. I need it brought down to my garage.”
Tyler paused only a fraction of a second. “Your garage?”
He knew my condo was off-limits to everyone. He was the only one on my team who even knew where it was. “Copy.”
He inhaled. “Okay. By when?”
“As soon as possible.” I needed him up here.
Tyler exhaled. “I’m on assignment until—”
“ASAP,” I interrupted.
“I’ll see about transport.”
I glanced at her, but she was still staring out the window. “Negative.”
“All right,” Tyler hedged. “You want me to make a ten-hour round trip to retrieve an old car from Daytona?”
I didn’t answer. He would get it.
“There’s more,” he stated.
I turned the volume down on my cell. “Affirmative.”
“But you can’t talk. Okay, text me the details, and I’ll head up there.”
“Copy that.” I hung up.
She finally broke her silence. “I don’t fly.”
“I need to get back to Miami, and this is the quickest way possible.”
She didn’t move, but her muscles tensed. “I don’t like airports.”
“We’re not flying commercial.”
She glanced at me. “You have your own plane?”
“Not yet.” I half smiled at her to cut the tension.
Her gaze dropped to my mouth, then she turned back to the window. “I should’ve guessed you were a pilot also.”
“Not a pilot, chica.”
“You must’ve missed that check box on your overachiever’s to-do list.”
“Not that either, woman. I’m just an immigrant’s son trying to make a living.” I was raised on hard work, and the Marines taught me discipline.
She scoffed. “You more than make a living. I’ve seen your penthouse.”
“As I recall, you couldn’t wait to leave.” And I’d stupidly let her go.
“You didn’t want me there.”
Ever since I’d laid eyes on her, the thought of getting her in my bed had been burned on my brain. I didn’t take women to my condo. I had apartments over my office space that I used if I needed them, but no woman before Kendall, not even my mother, had been to my penthouse. Only a few of my closest Marine buddies even knew where it was. When I left the Marines and got in the business of personal security, I made it a point to keep my private residence secure. I’d spent too much time downrange behind a scope not to know exactly how fucking vulnerable anyone was to attack.
I glanced at her profile as I pulled into the airport. “Never said I didn’t want you around, chica.”
Her chest rose with an inhale, then the Kendall I’d first met surfaced. “Cut the shit, Cuban Boy. You don’t hang on to women any more than I’m someone who’d get off on that.”
I opened my mouth to dish it right back, but she wasn’t finished.
“And we both know you wouldn’t know what to do with me if you did catch me.”
This time, I smiled. From ear to fucking ear. “Oh, chica, I’m pretty sure I could think of a few things.” I parked next to Roark’s plane and leaned toward her, then I dropped my voice. “Some you might even enjoy.” I got out of the car, but not before I saw the chill bumps race up her neck.
Roark came down the steps of his new Cessna Citation. “We ready?”
Kendall got out of her car and slammed the door shut. “The Irishman,” she said dryly.
Roark’s hands went to his hips. “Scottish,” he uselessly corrected, unaware of her game.
“At least she has the right continent.” I made the joke to ease the tense set to her shoulders, but it didn’t make a difference. When she got out of the car, I saw the shift. The girl who relied on Candle had disappeared. The hellfire I’d first met was back.
“I see six months hasn’t changed you,” Roark replied dryly. Helping me out that night, he’d first met her when I did.
All attitude, Kendall walked up the plane’s steps as she tossed a disinterested glance at Roark. “You know how to fly this thing?”
Roark didn’t miss a beat. “You’re about to find out.”
I grabbed her bag from the back of the Jetta and hid the key over the rear driver side wheel. At an airport full of multimillion-dollar jets, no one was going to steal a ten-year-old car.
Roark circled the plane, doing his preflight checks, then stopped and gave me a look. “No retrieval, huh?”
“It’s complicated.”
He glanced at my chest, then the side of my head. “Same way the blood splatter on your shirt’s complicated?”
Mierda. I looked down at my Luna and Associates polo. “Damn it.”
“Your head okay?”
“I’m fine.” It was hard to see, but Rip’s blood splatter was there. I’d chosen black for the uniforms for my company for a reason, but nothing was foolproof.
Roark tipped his chin at the Jetta. “You need to wipe that down?”
I shook my head. “Tyler’s coming to retrieve it.”
“Not like you to be so sloppy.”
“Wasn’t my doing.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“You don’t want to know.” I untucked my shirt. “You got a spare on the plane?”
“Last cargo hold in the rear. Help yourself.”
I went aboard and grabbed a clean T-shirt from Roark’s stash, pulled it on, then dropped into the seat across the aisle from her.
Her body turned toward the window, her legs crossed, her face was almost impassive except for the small vertical crease between her eyebrows.
“You doing okay, chica?”
“I didn’t need to be carted away.” The words were biting, but her tone was tired.
I studied her a moment. “Not sure I’d categorize this as carting.”
“Right.” She carelessly gestured at the plane with one hand. “On a million-dollar jet, it’s flying.”
I didn’t correct her low-ball price as Roark pulled the door shut then headed to the cockpit.
“You have someone picking up my car?” She asked the question like she didn’t give a shit, but she crossed her arms.
“One of my men.”
“Because your men aren’t busy enough.” She turned and gave me the sharp gaze of someone dead sober. “Why did you come here?”
Half truth or full disclosure, it was a split-second decision. I made it with little regard for self-preservation, because for months, she’d been the only woman I could think about. “I wanted to see you.”
Her chest rose with an inhale, but her locked expression didn’t budge. “What made you think I’d want to see you?”
I smiled. “I was willing to take that chance.”
She didn’t return the smile. “All for a night’s fuck. How quaint.”
My smile dropped, but I hid my anger. “One night?”
She smirked. “Like you’d want more.”
“Like you think you’re not worth more.” I threw it back on her, but she had a point. My business kept me more than busy. I didn’t have time for a relationship, let alone one with a fucking handful like her.
She amped up the attitude, hard core. “SUVs, planes, your precious time away from your business, helping Candle.” Every successive word was more bitter than the last. “W
as that supposed to impress me? Did you think showing up at my house before the crack of dawn was going to make me spread my legs and beg you to give it to me Latin-lover style?” She scoffed. “Don’t flatter yourself.”
My jaw ticked. Leaning toward her, my elbows on my knees, my hands clasped in restraint, I kept my voice even, but I threw her self-indulgent bullshit in her face. “You don’t show up for work for a week. You don’t return your boss’s calls. You don’t bother to let a single person know you’re fucking alive because you’re too busy drowning in a bottle of self-pity. But then you question my intent when I took time out of my day to check on you?” I glared at her because now I was pissed as hell. “Don’t flatter yourself, chica.” I leaned back in my seat. “You’re no fucking picnic.”
Roark fired up the engines.
“You don’t give a shit about me,” she muttered.
“What?” I’d heard her. I’d heard her loud and clear, but I wasn’t gonna play that game. She was a grown-ass woman, she should cop to her shit.
She raised her voice above the sound of the engines. “I said, I call bullshit.”
I looked over at her as we started to taxi. “You think that little of yourself?”
She glared at me like she wanted to cut me up in pieces.
I didn’t know why the hell I was bothering to reply. “Maybe having a felon for a boyfriend isn’t good for your self-esteem, chica.”
Her eyes narrowed. “How many women do you call chica?”
All of them. Any of them. But for her, I said it differently. She just didn’t pick up on it. “Every one.” I dropped my eyes to her mouth then to her legs. Purposely taking my time, I dragged my gaze back up to hers. “Must be the Latin lover in me.” I pulled my phone out and texted Tyler.
“Oh, I’m dismissed now?”
Dios mio. It wasn’t even nine a.m., and I was already tired as fuck. I paused midtext and looked at her. Cristo, she was a hot mess. And fucking beautiful. “What do you want from me, chica? You just trying to push my buttons, or you aiming for something?” I was tired of trying to guess who the fuck she was, let alone what motivated her. The second we landed, I was gonna dump her in one of my apartments above the office and cut my fucking losses. Candle could retrieve her sorry ass.