by Isabel Wroth
Saint immediately burst out laughing and just as quickly lost his breath on a choked groan as the motion of his diaphragm clenching clearly made him turn green from pain.
Ripley was up and running for the pain meds still in her tote bag on the kitchen counter, cursing at herself for being so stupid has to have forgotten about them the whole way. When she came rushing back into the bedroom, Saint had shifted and made himself more comfortable, but he was still green.
“Here, I’ve got your medi-”
Saint cut her off with a hiss of obvious agony. “Not taking the pain meds.”
“What? Why not?”
“Can’t be drugged up and unable to react if Ghost takes this opportunity to hit us when I’m down.”
Ripley was so stunned that she just stood there for a minute, blinking like an owl at the man in her bed. She couldn’t help but to ask,
“Are you serious?”
“If I was hunting down someone with the intent to kill them, I wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth when that someone was shot and incapacitated by pain meds.”
“So you won’t take these doctor prescribed medications to assist in the healing of your body, because this unknown hitman might, might, bust down my door to ‘take you out.’ My door that is wired with security, which you claim rivals the pentagon, with two members of your club a few doors down ready to respond. Am I understanding you right?”
Saint didn’t respond immediately, stubborn as the day was long.
“If that’s what you’re saying to me, I’m going to go sleep in the guest room.”
If he could scowl any harder, he might be able to make his eyebrows into a unibrow. “What? Why the hell would you sleep in the guest room?”
“Because I’m exhausted, Saint! And I don’t want to be freaking out worrying that if I roll over or move around, I’m going to wake you up or hurt you.”
“Ripley, unless you’re flailing around-”
She shook her head and put her foot down. “Nope. Not arguing this with you. Take the pills or I’ll sleep in the other room so we both rest comfortably.”
“Rip-”
“These pills are not going to incapacitate you, and god forbid that someone does come busting in here tonight, you’ll still be able to shoot them.”
So declaring, Ripley turned on her heel to march into her closet and came back with the shotgun her grandmother had given her when Ripley had bought her house. She set it right beside Saint’s side of the bed, fighting not to smile when he looked at it like she had just set a pile of fresh cat poop on the bedside table.
Ripley waved her hand at the shotgun. “It’s loaded.”
“It’s…pink.” Saint was clearly horrified by the pink stock and pump action grip.
“It’s a twelve gauge shotgun. I’m sure it doesn’t feel pink. Am I sleeping in the guest room or not?”
Saint grudgingly took his pills and Ripley crawled back into bed, obeying when he demanded she cuddle up to him, asleep almost as soon as her face hit the pillow.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Another week of being mostly house bound, with Ripley doing her best to keep Saint off his feet and relaxing, had driven them both to the brink of madness.
Day one: Both of them had awoken to find the state of the art security system had not been breached. Ripley handed Saint another pain pill with an, ‘I told you so,’ and went to make breakfast.
She had heard Saint calling Raid and demanding he bring a shotgun that was not pink. Ripley was pretty sure Saint was going to be hearing about her pink shotgun for years to come. Raid had been laughing his ass off all the way out of the house.
Day two: Ripley spent the entire day on the phone with the owner of the company Nasa had hired to repair the damage to her spa. Arguing over paint colors, drywall costs, basically she was having to rebuild the interior of the entry all over again. Luckily she had all her old samples and floor plans, but it was still a nightmare.
Day three: Ripley cleaned out the spoiled food from the refrigerator and had intended to go grocery shopping. When she had informed Saint of her plan, he had lost his mind. His first response to her desire to go to the store?
“Send a fuckin prospect.”
“Saint, I’m not sending a prospect to the store.”
“Well, then we’re eatin take-out. You’re not leaving this house.”
“Saint-”
“No, Ripley!”
The vehemence in his shout hadn’t been what caught her off guard. It was the look in his eye that had her skating the edge of being terrified.
For about five minutes, Ripley stood there trying to find reasons why Saint would so adamantly deny her a trip to the grocery store. She wasn’t a toddler to be stolen out of a car seat or a shopping cart by some psycho mother. She wasn’t stupid or ignorant of the threat, and he had no reason at this time to be so angry, which pushed her towards a terrifying assumption.
“Has your Ghost made a direct threat against my life that you’re not telling me about?”
From the way Saint gnashed his teeth and glared at her, Ripley thought for one breath-stealing moment that maybe the shooting had been a targeted attempt to kill her. Or him. Or both.
“No.” he finally growled.
He said no, but something was bad enough, beyond what had happened to Susan and Pike, to have Saint reacting so…frantically.
“Then why are you so insistent on me not leaving the house?”
For a long time she thought he wasn’t going to answer her. His features were tight, his jaw clenched hard enough to make the muscle above his eyebrow tick. Enough to have the small, neatly groomed triangle of hair just beneath his lip jutting out.
Sort of like how Top’s neatly groomed beard would do when he was pissed. It would have been funny if she hadn’t been so frightened by the intensity of Saint’s anger. The silence stretched on long enough Ripley felt the need to fill it.
“I’m not going to be a prisoner in my own home, Saint. I have a business to get back to. A life. One that involves me going to the grocery store like a normal human being.”
Saint remained mute, just glaring at her, though it didn’t seem he was seeing her. Or listening. Exasperated, figuring Saint must be having some kind of post-shooting, completely understandable wig-out, she grabbed up her purse and sent a quick text to Nasa to tell him she was leaving.
Just in case she tripped the alarm or something, she didn’t want the entire club descending upon the house armed to the teeth. The neighbors were freaking out enough as it was, what with the regular roaring of motorcycle pipes disturbing the otherwise very quiet street. Ripley was almost to the front door when Saint finally spoke.
“Her name was Jamie.”
There was something about his tone that stopped Ripley cold. Something that had chills racing up and down her spine. The corresponding look on his face had her mouth running dry.
“What?”
“First girl I loved.” Saint swallowed so hard, she could hear it all the way across the room.
Ripley didn’t know what this person had to do with Saint losing his mind over her leaving the house, but from his stilted words and how difficult it seemed for him to even speak this woman’s name, it was information Ripley needed.
“She was in the same foster home as me when I was sixteen.”
Saint drug his hand down his face and leaned heavily on the counter, staring at it as though seeing his memories playing across the granite. Ripley was drawn to him purely because of her need to comfort him when he was in pain. And this kind, unfortunately, the doctor hadn’t prescribed a pill for.
“CPS took Jamie at two weeks old when a neighbor called the cops because she heard a baby crying. They found Jamie’s mom face down in a pool of her own vomit, needle half full of heroin still stuck in her arm, baby in the crib with a filthy towel on her ass instead of a diaper.
“Jaime’s mom was one of those crazy bitches who would get clean enough to prove to Child Services that
she was mentally competent enough to be a mother. She’d get Jamie back, get her welfare checks, and a few months later Jamie was back in the system. I don’t know how many times, but it was supposed to be permanent by the time I met her.
“She was my first everything, but that girl was fucked up. Almost as much as me. She smoked, got high with the eagerness of someone wanting to forget everything. I loved her because I had someone I could protect. Because she needed me to tell her no more weed, that she’d had enough to drink.
“Jamie needed me to take care of her because no one else ever had. Raid and Roar could take care of themselves most days, but she needed me. To a teenage boy led around by his dick, she was a dream come true. The damsel in distress guaranteed to make me feel like a hero.”
The beginnings of what Ripley was sure was a very unhappily ever after was interrupted by the trill of her phone. Nasa texting her back to ask why she hadn’t left the house yet. She quickly shot him back an answer then turned her phone off and put it away. Saint went on like he hadn’t heard or noticed.
“Somehow, Jamie’s mom got one last chance. I was pissed, scared for her. For myself I think too. I would have taken Jamie and run with her to keep her from going back to her mom, but Jamie was a junkie in her own way. She smoked and did drugs, but that girl could walk away from all that shit cold turkey.
“It was her mother’s love she craved. One good hit and Jamie was convinced that crazy bitch actually loved her and was trying to clean up to get Jamie back for good. It was her fairy tale, everything Jamie needed to believe to keep from accepting what a piece of trash her mom was.”
Saint shook his head, his hands fisting on the countertop as his voice got rougher and rougher with emotion. With anger and regret.
“Raid and Roar chipped in the money we’d been saving to drag ourselves up the other side of the foster kid stigma, money we wanted to put towards some fantasy bachelor pad in a swanky high-rise down town, for a pair of cell phones. Cheapest pre-paid cell phones on the market back then.
“Between us, we had a hundred and fifty bucks, which to foster kids is about a million. Took every penny of that hundred and fifty, all of our ‘get out of dodge’ money. But they did it for me so I could give one of the pre-paids to Jamie for an emergency. In case she needed me, all she had to do was call and I’d be there. Like some fucking knight in shining armor.”
Ripley set her purse down and cautiously approached Saint. She lifted her hand to his jaw, smoothing the jut of his little Van Dyke beard down with her thumb, hoping she could offer him some kind of comfort. Relieved when he hooked his arm around her waist and let his forehead fall forward to rest on hers.
“Raid and Roar covered for me when I’d sneak out of the foster home to go see her. She’d tell me everything was fine, that she was happy to be back with her mom in some shithole apartment. I didn’t believe her, but I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to piss her off.”
His hands kneaded at her body like he was fighting to hold onto his composure and her at the same time. Mindful of his injury, Ripley hugged one arm around his waist and pulled her other hand down over his hair, listening with tears starting to burn in her eyes. Imagining the man Saint was now, as a young boy trying to protect the girl he loved.
“One month and two days of having been back with her mom, she called me. Phone only had one number in it and up until then she hadn’t used it at all, so I knew it was her. Knew something was wrong. She was at some shitty flea motel in Dallas, crying, scared out of her mind.
“I could hear some fucker shouting at her through the door, yelling at her to get her ass out of the bathroom. That he’d paid good money for her and she was only making it worse for herself. Heard the door bust open, heard her scream, heard everything that happened after.
“Raid called the cops, but by the time they got there Jamie was dead. The John Jamie’s mom had pimped her out to, to pay for the heroin she was shooting up two rooms down, raped and murdered her.
“Because I was just a kid, no one would tell me exactly how she died. They thought it would be too traumatic for me or some shit. But hearing the sounds without context just gave my imagination fuel to play it out over and over in my head.
“I’ve hated the sound of a ringing phone ever since. Every time I hear it, for about two seconds my blood turns to ice. Every time I saw your name on the caller ID, on a text, I felt sick wondering what I might hear if I picked up. So I didn’t.
“After almost a year of doing everything I can to nail the sick fucker who killed Pike and Susan, I get intel this Ghost is after the people I love. I sat there in a shitty motel room staring at the wall and it wasn’t Raid or Roar, or Nasa, or Top that had my guts up in my throat, choking on fear. It was you. I heard your voice instead of Jamie’s on the other end of a phone. Scared, screaming at me, dying. It messed me up so bad I can’t even articulate to you what it felt like.”
Saint turned his lips to her throat, his mouth resting on her pulse while she struggled to absorb everything he had just told her. Struggled to listen to the pain in his voice and the story of his first love who had died in an all too similar manner to his friends.
“I’m not telling you this to make excuses or to hurt you, but there have been other women. More than my fair share, and I couldn’t tell you their names or remember their hair color. Let alone find it in me to care whether or not I remembered them.”
To further soften his words of all his other women, Saint kissed his way up her throat and across her cheek, pulling back just far enough to be able to look her in the eye. Going so far as to brush a carefully styled curl out of her face.
“Then here you come out of nowhere, all pink and princessy, and I lose my fuckin mind every time I see you or get a whiff of your perfume. Gardenias are supposed to be for old ladies, but the way you wear it makes my dick hard. I live in terror for the day some old woman walks by, sees me with a hard on, and gets the wrong idea.”
He gave a shudder that made Ripley almost smile.
“I couldn’t forget a thing about you even if I tried. I fought it hard, recognizing the symptoms as I started to fall, but that phone call about the Leviathans sending a hit man up here and your lack of texts all within the space of a few days…I lost my shit all over again.
“I have nightmares about it sometimes. The phone ringing and you being the one dying on the other end. I was a dick that night at the bar and my only excuse for having made you feel like you weren’t worth every single breath in my body is that I was terrified. I am terrified to love you and not be strong enough to keep you safe.”
“Saint-”
“I can barely haul my ass out of bed without passing out from the pain and, yeah, if I took the meds it wouldn’t hurt so bad. But then I’d be even more incapacitated, my reaction time slowed down even more. I know you’re gonna get back to work eventually, and I don’t want you to be a prisoner in your own house, but right now I can’t even begin to explain-”
Ripley shook her head and rocked up on her toes to press her trembling lips to his. She felt the muscles in his shoulders unknot, his hands firming on her body to hold her as close and tight as he could without hurting himself to turn their kiss from gentle to a voracious mating of mouths. When the urgency faded and the tension bled completely out of him, their kisses gentled to sweet, tender brushes of skin. He kissed the tears from her cheeks, frowning at her when she sniffled.
“I get it. It’s okay. I don’t have to go out, I just didn’t want to have to instruct one of the prospects on my preferred brand of tampons.”
Saint huffed, the hard glint in his eyes softening to one of amused relief. “They’ve done far more embarrassing things than put a box of tampons in a shopping cart. Trust me.”
After everything Saint had just told her, after basically baring the most damaged pieces of his soul to her, his fear, Ripley couldn’t hold back.
“I’m afraid too, you know.” she admitted softly.
His fr
own dug grooves between his brows. “Why?”
“You have this habit of leaving. I feel like the only reason you’ve been here for so long this time is because you’re wounded and unable to crawl out a window, or however it is that you got in and out of my house all those times before without me knowing. I’m afraid if I say it back to you, you’ll disappear and I’ll spend the rest of my life waiting around for you to come back.”
Saint didn’t say anything back for a long time. He just stared down at her and lifted his hand to brush his thumb across her bottom lip.
“I never came in through the window, I used the key I had made from the spare you keep in your junk drawer. I never answered your texts, because I was a dumbass afraid of things that hadn’t happened and are old news. I’m done bein a dumbass, princess. I’m not going anywhere. Tell me.”
Ripley sucked in a breath to answer, her body one big mass of jittery nerves, and nearly came out of her skin when someone banged forcefully on the front door.
“It’s Frankie, open up!”
Saint scowled in the direction of the door, muttering darkly about ‘the worst fuckin timing’ and dropped a kiss to her hair before grimacing as he left her in the kitchen.
“What?” he shouted as he threw open the front door.
Frankie was a tiny bull of a man, stubby arms and legs and no taller than she was, but according to Saint, Frankie could dead lift five hundred pounds. He pushed past Saint and into the house, a gun naked in his hand as he frantically looked around the interior, relaxing as soon as he saw her.
“Jesus, man. Why the hell is no one answering the fuckin phones?”
Ripley reached over to pull her cell from inside her purse, wrinkling her nose when she saw she hadn’t actually sent her reply. Resulting in three missed calls and about twenty texts with increasing profanity from Nasa waiting for her on the home screen.
Saint grunted as he slammed the door closed behind Frankie. “Mine is in the bedroom on the charger. What’s wrong?”
“Ripley texted Nasa to say she was goin out, then she didn’t come out and wasn’t answering when he asked why. He’s losin his shit.” Frankie looked back and forth between them, eyebrows up in his hairline meaningfully as he waved his gun around. Saint slapped him upside the back of his head.