“And what was that?” I breathed, hope filling my voice. Not to mention my heart.
“Her being my fiancée,” he answered instantly. “She was never anything more to me than what she was, which was a means to get in with and watch her father.”
“Rafe…” I whispered.
“She’s not my fiancée,” he said moments later. “She never has been, and she never will be. The most we’ve ever done—at least before I lost my memories—was kiss.”
My stomach bottomed out.
“What did you do after?”
I didn’t want to know.
I really didn’t.
But I had to know. I had to know so we could put this behind us.
His eyes stayed steady on me, then a door opened down the hall behind us.
He yanked me into his hotel room and slammed the door shut, causing me to gasp in surprise at the suddenness of his movements.
Rafe’s eyes stayed steady on me as he pushed me up against the door.
“Wouldn’t want that slime bag husband of yours interrupting us,” he growled, suddenly very mad.
I opened my mouth to explain, but he stopped me.
“You should’ve told me,” he whispered. “You should’ve stayed strong. You should’ve waited. You should’ve believed in me.”
“I…”
“You didn’t,” he hissed. “You didn’t believe in me. Nobody ever does.”
I narrowed my eyes, again opening my mouth to say something, but he stopped me again before I could.
“I don’t want to hear it.”
I gritted my teeth.
“She lied about being my fiancée,” he said. “Then you lied by not telling me everything. By letting me believe that we didn’t have anything. Everybody lied. Trace. Your father. Sam. My sister. Everybody else, I would’ve been okay with. What I’m not okay with is you not telling me the truth, and then going and getting yourself hitched. I think, out of everything that’s happened to me, that hurts the worst.”
Before he could say another word, I pushed him away from me as hard as I could, anger making my blood simmer.
“I didn’t get married,” I growled. “I hoped, by me going through it all, that you’d remember. That you’d remember leaving me behind. But you didn’t. And I got desperate, okay? I got desperate, and I wanted you to remember. I wanted you back in my life. I wanted you to be there, and that was the only way I could do it under the circumstances.”
“What circumstances?” he hissed.
“You know,” I urged. “I know. You know. Everybody knows.”
“Humor me.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “What does everybody know?”
I opened my mouth to tell him, the devastation clear in my voice as well as the pain in my chest, but the pounding in the hallway temporarily halted what I was about to say.
“What…”
“Janie, open the door!”
Chapter 15
Females don’t want much. Except your time, attention, money, bank account information, all of your sweatshirts…I forgot where I was going with this.
-Rafe to Janie
Rafe
A smile started to lift the corner of one lip.
“Janie!” Tegan, the slime bag, screamed. “I know you’re in there, and we’re going to talk about this!”
Janie sighed and covered her face with her hands.
My smile went full-blown.
“I’ve been waiting three months to do this…” I breathed.
Then I let go of her, pushed her slightly to the side, and opened the door.
Janie grabbed onto my hand, but she wasn’t going to stop me.
This was about to go down.
I’d been waiting for this for a long time, and I couldn’t wait anymore.
Knowing that he was nothing to Janie, and probably never had been, it was time.
It was time for Tegan the Ass Hat to know what he was messing with.
“Rafe,” she hissed, giving one more yank to get my attention. “Please don’t do this.”
I pulled away from her hold and turned before she could jump on my back. Something I knew almost instinctively that she was going to try to do.
I caught her in my arms when she went to leap and moved until we were in the doorway, my back the only thing that was visible to the rest of the hallway.
“Listen to me,” I whispered, eyes locked on hers. “I had to go through three fucking months of seeing him with you. Two of those months knowing that you were about to marry him. You sent me a goddamn invitation to your wedding. I. Deserve. This.”
Janie’s lips thinned.
“I won’t hurt him,” I promised. “Much.”
She sagged. “Okay.”
I winked at her, pressed a hot kiss to her mouth, and then urged her to go to her feet. Which she did after a slight moment of hesitation.
I turned, leaving her there, and moved out into the hallway where Tegan was slowly picking up steam. Now he was pounding on the door, and he looked quite a bit more disheveled than he did a few hours ago.
“Yo,” I called loudly enough for Tegan to hear. “Stop.”
Tegan turned, eyes narrowing on me, and then bared his teeth. “You.”
“Me,” I nodded. “What are you doing here?”
“The lady at the front desk said my fiancé was here,” he snarled. “And she’s not answering.”
Then his eyes went to the woman who I could feel at my back, and his eyes narrowed even more.
“You lying whore.”
You know that little lie I told a few seconds ago, promising Janie that I wouldn’t hurt him… much?
Yeah, that was a big fat lie.
Janie, realizing that what Tegan had just said set me off, hooked her hand into my pants and tugged.
I stayed where I was, barely, and growled. “You will not address her as anything other than her goddamn name. Do you understand me?”
Tegan laughed, and that was when I saw that he had a half-empty bottle of some sort of liquor in his back pocket.
He pulled it out and took a swig, his eyes staying on the woman behind me, and not on me.
Which was his mistake.
I curled my arm backward and wrapped my fingers around Janie’s wrist.
“Let go, honey,” I said softly. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Oh, that’s just rich,” Tegan said. “All this time while she’d been seeing me, she’s been fucking you? I guess I should’ve known that she was a slut. She dresses like one. My mother told me that, but I refused to listen.”
“Your mother told you that Janie was a slut,” I said softly. “And you didn’t listen to her?”
“Have you seen her?” Tegan gestured to me, and Janie in return, with his bottle, causing the liquid inside to slosh. “I hit the jackpot with her. And the icing on the cake was that it would piss her father off, too. Win-win.”
My mouth opened to contradict that statement when Janie pushed past me. I caught her around the hip with one arm and pulled her back into my chest.
“What are you talking about, it pissing my father off?” she asked. “My father wasn’t upset about us getting married.”
Her ‘much’ was said under her breath, but I was close enough to hear it. Which caused me to grin.
That grin quickly fell away moments later when Tegan started to laugh.
“Daddy didn’t tell you that I investigated him?” Tegan jeered. “I almost pinned it on him, too, but those friends of his helped.”
Janie looked confused, and I took pity on her before she could try to extract any more convoluted information from a scorned, drunk man.
“Your father was put under IA—internal affairs—investigation because of a shooting he was involved in last year. Tegan was the IA investigator put in charge of your father’s case. Your father did nothing wrong, but Tegan was determined to find something. He made your father’s life
a living hell for almost four months while he tried to pin something—anything—on him,” I whispered into her ear so only she could hear.
That’s when Janie went deathly still.
“You tried to send my father to jail?” Janie asked Tegan carefully.
Tegan thought now was the time to smile.
He was so fucking stupid.
He knew nothing at all about women if he thought that was going to go over well.
It would be like lighting a cat’s tail on fire in the middle of a burn ban.
Everything was about to light up in flames, Tegan just didn’t know it yet.
No, he was too busy gloating about his inner victory to realize that he was in water up to his throat.
I let her go. “Can you rescind your request?”
She looked over at me, then nodded once.
“I’ll make it hurt, honey. Don’t you worry.”
Then I walked up to Tegan and took a swing.
Tegan fell to the ground like a log, his back, legs, head and feet all hitting at once.
He hit the floor with a sickening thud and then didn’t move.
His eyes were closed, and the bottle of whiskey in his hand steadily leaked out onto the carpet until the only thing left was the last little bit that couldn’t make its way over the lip.
I breathed out and glared. “Least you could’ve done was take more than one punch.”
The little shit didn’t answer.
“I guess you don’t need our company,” James’ voice came from behind me.
That’s when I looked over my shoulder to see not just Janie, but her father. As well as Max, Sam, Trace, Jack, Gabe, and Elliott.
All of them were staring at me—at least the men—with understanding dawning.
Janie looked like she wanted to throttle me.
I grinned at her expression, causing her eyes to narrow even more.
“This is so not funny,” she said stubbornly.
“Actually,” Elliott added. “It really is. Did you see what he did to him? I think I need to learn that move.”
I turned my eyes back to Tegan, who still hadn’t moved.
“Elliott,” Janie said tiredly. “He punched him. You already know how to do that.”
“Yeah,” Elliott agreed. “But mine always get back up. I think it’s because everyone else has bigger hands. Mine are big, but they’re not big. You know?”
I couldn’t help it. I looked down at my hands.
Then Elliott started to laugh.
“We’ll see y’all later,” James muttered.
“Wait,” Janie said, causing me to turn and watch them retreat.
None of them stopped.
“Wait!” Janie repeated, this time on a yell. “At least take him with you!”
I snorted when Max turned back, brushed past Janie and then me, and reached down to hook Tegan around the jacket collar.
“Are you sure you want them to be alone with a man that just called you a slut?” I asked carefully.
I mean, I was all for it. But Janie was a soft soul. It’d hurt her if she found out later that she was responsible for Tegan’s untimely demise.
“Oh,” she breathed. “Dad, wait!”
“Hurry up!” Elliott hissed.
Max drug the little prick the rest of the way into the elevator just as Elliott was busy pressing buttons.
I couldn’t help it.
I laughed.
Seeing all those men crammed into that elevator with a man at their feet as the last one in urgently tried to get the doors to close was quite comical.
Janie, however, didn’t find any of it as hilarious as I did.
Which she informed me of as she slammed her way into her hotel room, and not mine, moments later.
I followed her, easily slipping in my universal key card—which I’d obtained the last time I’d stayed in this hotel—and walked right in.
I found her with her dress tossed up as she tried to shimmy out of it.
I walked up behind her and helped her, lingering a little longer than was necessary on a few sets of buttons close to her ass.
“You’re not helping,” I heard her grit through clenched teeth.
I grinned—something I’d done more in the last half hour than I’d done in the last three months—and growled out a, “Turn around.”
She did, clutching the loosening dress to her chest.
“I don’t like this dress,” I said to her, trailing my fingers along her chest.
It was bare. Not a necklace or a skin imperfection dotted the line of her neck, and that bothered me.
I wanted to mark her as mine in some way, and I wanted every man in the world to know it.
“I don’t like it either,” she admitted. “I got it at a discount place in Tyler. It was on sale for ninety-nine dollars.”
I snorted. “The next one—the one you wear for me—is going to cost fifty times that.”
Her mouth fell open, and she forgot that she was holding up her dress, which worked for me.
“T-the next one?” she whispered, her eyes on me.
I nodded. “The one where you and I walk out man and wife. The one where you don’t fucking leave me at the altar, and the one where I make sure that you’ll forever be mine.”
“But Rafe,” she hesitated. “We don’t really know each other all that well.”
I winked. “I’ll give you a couple of months to get to know me. Then you can announce to your family that you’re engaged.”
“Rafe, that’s not how this works,” she whispered.
I trailed my finger down her side, lightly touching just the tip of my fingernail against her delicate skin, and snorted.
“This is how it works in Raphael Luis’s world. Soon, you’ll be Mrs. Raphael Luis. Soon, you’ll be mine. And I’ll make you forget that you were anything before me.”
She started to laugh then, momentarily distracting me from what I was about to do.
I looked at her with a raised brow. “What?”
“I don’t think you understand,” she teased.
“Understand what?” I questioned.
“The part of how I’ve never been anybody but yours. From the time I was twelve and I first met you, you had my heart. The only time you didn’t have it was when you forgot about me. But even then, you had it. You just didn’t know it.”
Grinning at the thought of her always being mine, I placed a single kiss on the inside of her knees.
“Rafe,” she breathed.
I looked up from where I was down on my knee and raised a brow at her. “Yeah?”
“Can you do it harder this time?”
I couldn’t help it.
I grinned.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I think I can handle that.”
***
“So how are you going to fix this?” she whispered against my chest two hours later.
We’d left the hotel since that would be the first place Tegan would think to look when he finally came to. Not that I thought Janie’s father would be letting him go anytime soon. Maybe a few days. If he was lucky.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I’ll figure it out.”
And I would.
Right after I got out of bed.
“Ok, what are we going to do?” she pushed, poking me.
I sat up in the bed and leaned against the headboard, knowing this wasn’t going to get pushed under the rug. At least, she wouldn’t let me get away with it.
“What are we going to do?” I grinned.
She flushed. “You already told me you didn’t want to get into it completely. You wanted me to stay out of sight from Layton. Which I will. But there’s no reason I can’t stay behind the scenes. Keep doing what I’m doing…”
I immediately shook my head. “I’d agree with you if I didn’t know Layton. You’re good, I’ll give you that. But Layton will have someone just as good.”
I pursued my lips. “I don’t know.”
I had a lot of theories, but none of them were substantiated.
“What do you suspect?” She caught on to my hesitation.
I sighed. “I suspect, based on Dante’s thing, that he’s involved in the military thefts. I was close to something before my accident. Ever since, I’ve been an outsider. They discuss nothing around me. Even Elspeth wasn’t helping me anymore. Which is why I’m not too upset about losing that in.”
She sighed. “You’ll tell me if you need help?”
I leaned over in the bed and pulled her toward me. “You will be the first to know.”
And as she fell asleep in my arms, I knew that I’d do everything in my power not to need her. I had a feeling that this was about to go very, very bad.
Chapter 16
I’m not a glass half-full kind of person. I’m more of a ‘where the fuck did I put my glass’ kind of person.
-Janie’s secret thoughts
Janie
The first hurdle was over.
Rafe remembered.
Everything.
It hurt, and it healed all at the same time.
I wanted him to remember me. I didn’t like how it felt when he didn’t.
Like what we’d shared had all been a lie.
And now that I knew that what he had with Elspeth was also fake, well that was just the incentive I needed.
I had to talk to my dad.
Which was why I was up at five thirty in the morning with my rifle in hand, and my dogs at my feet, waiting beside his truck for him to come outside.
He did moments later, stopping a few feet outside of his front door to stare at me.
“You’re up early.”
I shrugged.
I wasn’t a morning person.
I especially wasn’t a morning person when I spent the majority of the previous day not sleeping. And when I say, ‘not sleeping,’ I mean I did some intense cardio with very little rest in between sessions.
And Rafe, my broodingly sexy man, acted like this was just a walk in the park for him.
He’d been up over an hour and a half ago and had escorted me to my front gate before the sun even came up. He’d even had to go as far as to carry me out since I couldn’t seem to keep my eyes open.
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