by Pam Godwin
A fresh start.
With her.
His mind had gone there so quickly. The instant he thought she was dead was the exact moment he realized she was more than the best sex of his life. More than a throat he wanted to throttle. More than any word he’d ever written in an email.
He survived Caroline’s death. But he knew, deep in his fractured soul, he wouldn’t survive Rylee’s.
The simmering sensations at the base of his throat, behind his breastbone, and in the pit of his stomach were an accumulation of violence and desire, chemistry and possessiveness, fire and rage. The extreme passion she produced in him was the antithesis of the tender, doting innocence he’d felt with Caroline.
It was difficult to think about, but he couldn’t help but wonder if he and Caroline would’ve been as compatible as adults as they’d been as children. Caroline had been a gentle soul, sweetly passive, always smiling. If she hadn’t died, he probably would’ve still gone to Austin, grieving the loss of his mother, and ended up in Van’s attic.
That experience had fundamentally changed him. Ten years later, he didn’t want Caroline’s kindhearted brand of love. He wanted explosive, no-holds-barred, raging, brutal passion.
He wanted Rylee.
But she wasn’t ready to hear any of this.
“Where are we going?” She sat beside him in the backseat of the SUV with her hands balled on her lap.
Liv drove in silence with Luke in the front seat next to her.
“A safe house.” Tomas would eventually have to tell her it was thirteen hours away.
“How did you find me?”
“When you left with the detective,” he said, “I called in my team. We traced your credit card and identified the cash machine you used. It took us several days to track down the motel employee who helped you.”
“She told you where I was?” She heaved a frustrated sound. “I paid her an extra two-hundred to keep her mouth shut.” Her shoulders tensed, and her gaze flashed to him in the dark. “Tell me you didn’t hurt her.”
Rule number one in this business: Never leave loose ends.
But Rylee didn’t live in his world. She didn’t know.
“The motel clerk took her bounty of cash and drove to San Antonio,” he said. “A spontaneous vacation to visit a friend. If she hadn’t left town so quickly, we would’ve located you within twenty-four hours.”
“What did you do, Tommy?” She shifted to face him, her voice rising. “Answer me.”
He had a lot of bad news to give her. Christ, she’d already been through so much. He wanted to spare her this. For just a little while longer.
“She just butchered a man, Tomas.” Liv met his eyes in the rearview, her voice melodic yet icy in its command. “Don’t coddle the woman. She can handle it.”
He knew that. Fuck, he still wore the vicious marks of Rylee’s claws and teeth. He knew exactly how she handled things.
With a steeling breath, he turned toward her.
“The hitman located the girl before we did.” He reached for her face, her expression falling, collapsing in agony before his eyes.
“No.” She jerked away, shaking her head. “No, no, no!”
“She’s dead.”
Killed slowly. Body parts removed. All left for his team to find.
Her eyes glistened with tears, but she didn’t let them fall. “So the hitman learned my location and killed that poor girl.” She inhaled deeply. “How did you follow him?”
“Cole and I stayed behind, working it from a different angle.” Tomas hadn’t been much help, his technical skills no match for Cole’s. “It took days, but Cole managed to trace Paul Kissinger’s phone to multiple other devices. I still don’t know how he did it, but one of the devices he locked onto was traveling from San Antonio back to this area. We knew that was our guy and scrambled to catch up. When the phone stopped moving at your motel, we were still ten minutes out.” A hot clamp squeezed his airway. “Ten minutes too late. I’m so sorry, Rylee.”
“I got myself into this.” She leaned back and looked out the window. “I won’t forgive the way you treated me, but I know you didn’t send that hitman after me. That is a result of something I’ve done, evidently. Not your fault.”
“What do you mean?” Suspicion thickened his voice. “What are you hiding?”
“Nothing!” Her gaze shot to his, wide and urgent. “I don’t know what’s going on, but when I was stabbing that man, he mentioned the bridge.” She nervously glanced at Liv and Luke in the front seat and whispered, “He was smiling like he knew a dirty secret. But you’re the only person I’ve ever told about that night.”
“Start from the beginning. Tell me step by step what happened from the moment you saw the hitman talking to the motel clerk.”
She explained how she left the shower running and hid beneath the bed, hoping to distract him long enough to escape. She had the knife and her wits—two things that saved her life. While it was hard to hear the details of her struggle, he was so fucking proud of her.
“I asked him about the bridge. How did he know about it, and what did it have to do with him?” Her brows pulled together, and she chewed her lip. “He was pretty much dead at that point, but he mumbled something about Thur… Need? Like Thursday? Or thirsty? He never finished.”
Baffled and agitated, he drummed his fingers on his knee. He’d briefed his team on everything he knew about Rylee Sutton, including her ex-husband, the suicide bridge, and her sexual history, as well as her hate-fuckfest with him.
That had been a strange conversation. He never shared shit like that with anyone. But his secrecy in writing emails for ten years had started this mess. They deserved to know all the facts, no matter how personal.
The consensus among everyone was that this had nothing to do with Rylee. They were dealing with a team of sophisticated spies and assassins who were likely using her to get to the Freedom Fighters. Probably a loose end from a sex trafficking ring they’d taken out in recent years.
So how would her near-suicide on a bridge a decade ago have anything to do with this?
The emails.
That was the night he’d started writing.
“I called Mason yesterday,” she said into the silence.
Luke’s gaze snapped toward Liv, and every tendon in Tomas’ body went rigid.
He wanted to bend Rylee over his knee and show her luscious ass just how foolish it was to contact anyone right now. But the damage was already done.
Now he needed to understand the repercussions. “Tell me what was said. Every word.”
“I used a disposable phone.”
“Purchased from a corner store? It can be traced.”
Despite the darkness, her face paled. Then she breathed in and walked through the conversation—Mason’s confession that he loved her, kept tabs on her, and wanted her back.
“He reported me missing because Evan called him with claims that I was acting scared and disappeared.” She rubbed her temples. “That just isn’t true. Even weirder, Evan admitted to Mason that we were sleeping together. Why would he do that? To enrage Mason? To bait him?” She dropped her hands, her voice monotone. “I think Evan is behind all this. It doesn’t fit his personality, but there are too many things that don’t add up.”
He exchanged a look with Liv in the rearview. Her gaze crystallized, issuing an order that shriveled his balls.
Yeah, he knew what he had to do and didn’t need her controlling the situation from the front seat.
Fuck, this was going to hurt.
“Rylee, listen.” He clasped her hand, clenching tight as she tried to pull away. “Evan died at work today. He fell off a six-story building at his construction site.”
“What?” She yanked frantically on her hand, her breaths gusting hard and angry. “No. It wasn’t on the news. They would’ve reported it. He wouldn’t fall off a fucking building. He’s smarter than that.”
“His death is being investigated. They’ll rule it accidental, but you and
I both know it was foul play.”
“He’s not dead.” Her voice shook, her gaze brimmed with anguish and denial. “He’s not dead, Tommy. He’s not.”
He would give anything to order the caravan off the road and chase everyone out of the car so she could wrap her emotions around this in private.
Nothing like breaking down in front of strangers. He hadn’t been able to do it when he lost his mom and Caroline. He didn’t leak a tear at their funerals. Couldn’t open his soul to a therapist, either. He still didn’t know if he had it in him to show weakness in front of his closest friends.
He felt her fighting it, battling the sobs in her chest, and pushing it all down. She trembled with the effort.
She needed to let it out. He knew that from experience.
All those years of writing emails, pouring his fears, sadness, and loneliness into the ether, and to think, someone had been listening to him after all. While he’d mourned his dead girlfriend, Rylee had been there for him through every word.
Now the tables had turned. While she grieved her friend, her lover, he wasn’t jealous. He only felt an overwhelming, protective need to take away her pain.
Gathering her in his arms, he fought her snarls and weak attempts to break free. Once she settled down, he held her on his lap, cradling her, wrapping her up with his body, and kissing the tears on her cheeks.
“I hear you, Rylee.” He pressed his lips to her ear, breathing her in. “All of you. We’re still here. Our lives matter. Don’t shut down on me.”
She stared up at him, her eyes swimming in rippling silver waters. A choking sound strangled in her throat. Another smothered sob. Then she circled her arms around his shoulders, buried her face in his neck, and wept silently, softly. Each painful hitch in her breath ripped him open and pulled her in.
From the moment he met her, she’d sworn her intentions were innocent, claiming that all those years ago, she’d hurt with him, cried for him, and changed her major to psychology. For him. She’d taken a sabbatical and driven to his house because she wanted to help him.
And he’d treated her like an enemy. Now that he knew the truth, he had to live with his crimes. But he wouldn’t live without her.
Once they escaped the present danger, and they would escape it, he was going to smash through her intimacy issues and convince her she needed him as much as he needed her.
“Evan Phillips didn’t make that call to her ex-husband.” Luke twisted in the front seat and met his eyes.
“No, he didn’t.” Tomas didn’t have proof, but he knew at gut level her neighbor was an innocent casualty.
Either Mason was lying about Evan’s phone call, or someone had called Mason, pretending to be Evan.
The reason for Evan’s murder wasn’t apparent. It could’ve been retaliation of the jealous ex-husband, or a message sent to Tomas’ team, or just a loose end that needed to go away.
For the next hour, he spoke quietly with Liv and Luke, speculating about possible enemies. Rylee didn’t try to push off his lap, her soft whimpers sinking into stunned acceptance. He sat with her in her sadness, his arms tight around her, exactly where he belonged.
If he didn’t fuck this up, he could have more moments like this. Moments when he held her while she was happy, scared, excited, or just wanted to sleep.
He hoped she would sleep now, but he sensed too much alertness in her muscles. She was listening, always eavesdropping, as he and his friends reminisced about missions gone by and gossiped about family drama.
Liv had deliberately confined Van, Tiago, Tate, and Lucia in the same vehicle for thirteen hours.
“Forced proximity,” she said. “They need to work out their shit.”
While that was true, he didn’t believe Tiago’s crimes would be forgiven anytime soon. The crime lord had poisoned Lucia to keep her sick, forced Van and Tate to have sex, and scarred up Tate’s back beyond physical and emotional repair.
Some crimes just weren’t redeemable.
While Rylee sat lethargically on his lap, he used the opportunity to dig out the first-aid kit and treat the laceration on her back. For once, she didn’t fight him. A testament to the despondent state of her mind.
Three hours into the drive, she lifted her head from his shoulder and squinted at the blackness beyond the window. “Where is this safe house?”
“Missouri.” He braced for the backlash.
“What?” Her voice pitched with outrage, and she shoved out of his embrace. “I can’t leave Texas.”
“Too late.”
She scrambled toward the far door. To do what? Jump from the moving vehicle?
He caught her throat, wrenched her forcibly back to him by the neck, and took her mouth. She fought him. Hot damn, she always fought. He groaned against her teeth and kissed her deeper, harder, wordlessly ordering her to return the kiss.
With a hand cradling her ass, he pulled her roughly against him and held her nape in a firm lock.
“Let me go.” Straddling his lap, she seethed against his mouth and shoved at his chest. “You’re kidnapping me!”
“Shut the fuck up and kiss me.” His stomach heated, his mind spinning to untangle the knots of her venom.
Battling her rage with more rage wouldn’t yield a lasting relationship with this complicated woman. While his cock loved her ferocity, they were more than sex. More than her hatred.
She told herself she was done with commitment and love and all matters of the heart. But that wasn’t true.
“You fear intimacy.” He restrained her hands against her back and held her close, chest to chest, mouth to mouth. “But you’ve been in a relationship with me for ten years.”
“You didn’t even know I existed.”
“That changed the moment you walked into my house and upended my world.”
He covered her mouth with his, his tongue insistent, pushing past the stubborn line of her lips. He refrained from using aggressive, overpowering strokes and instead delivered a languorous caress, tipping her expectations into bewilderment.
Her mouth opened on a gasp, and she gave way to his adoring licks. He suckled and worshiped, pressing in and releasing her hands to cup her head and palm her tight, round ass.
For a moment, she melted into him, welcoming his tongue moving in her mouth, against hers. She gripped his shirt and angled her head, delving deeper and whimpering. Not sounds of hunger, but distress.
Intimacy was her limit, and a tender kiss came way too close to that. So when her hands balled into fists on his shirt, he was ready for the blowback.
She punched his chest and sank her teeth into his lip. More strikes. Rabid bites. He absorbed it for a few seconds, knowing she needed an outlet for the pain inside her. He also knew she’d have him covered in blood if he didn’t defuse her soon.
“Behave.” With his hands framing her face, he slowed down the kiss and earned himself a vicious bite on the tongue.
“Fuck you.” She went at his mouth, attacking him in a firestorm of feral heat and scorn.
He nibbled when she bit, caressed when she scratched, and hummed when she growled. He dominated her mouth with devotion, overpowering her hostility with sensuality and sliding her temper into a languid embrace of exploration and affection.
Until she shoved him back against the seat. He allowed it, soaking in her fury and grief, her fists pounding upon his chest, her fingernails scoring his flesh. He caressed her everywhere, softly, compassionately, his touch in extreme opposition of hers.
She tore her mouth away, panting. Angry and confused. Then she fused their lips again.
Her kiss was war and retribution. Punishment for everything he’d done to her. But it was also redemption, heaven, and desire. He loved the fiery taste of her, the all-consuming fervor in her breaths, and the curling of her claws in his hair, ripping, pulling, and holding him close.
He loved that she didn’t do anything half-ass, especially when it came to him.
“If you put this much energy into hatin
g me,” he breathed against her mouth, “I can only imagine the amount of intensity and passion you’ll put into loving me.”
“Never.” Her eyes glinted like steel blades. “I’ll never love you.”
“Oh, boy,” Liv said from the front seat. “I’ve heard those words before.”
“Me, too.” Luke sighed and shifted to glance at them over his shoulder. “Rylee Sutton, you just sealed your fate.”
An indignant cloud darkened Rylee’s expression, and Tomas wanted to kiss it right off her face. She didn’t like hearing that her fate was sealed. She’d fought too hard for her independence and was too protective of her heart to believe her efforts had been for naught.
Tomas, on the other hand, held tight to his newfound hope.
She was stuck with the Freedom Fighters, whether she forgave him or not. She knew their identities, their secrets, and once they arrived in Missouri, she would know the location of Cole’s safe house.
Even if Tomas let her go, his friends would not.
Loose ends.
None of that mattered. She was his now. If she tried to leave, he would go with her. She just didn’t know it yet.
Cole led the caravan on his motorcycle, shooting down the dark highway in the dead of night. Around one in the morning, four hours into the thirteen-hour drive, he pulled off at a vacant rest stop.
“Bathroom break.” Tomas nudged Rylee beside him, reluctant to wake her after it had taken her so long to fall asleep.
She rubbed her eyes and followed him out of the car.
Parked behind them, the second SUV rocked wildly on its frame.
What the hell?
The doors flew open, exploding in a whirlwind of swinging arms and heated voices. Lucia’s roar was the loudest, her rapid-fire Spanish shuddering the air.
With a snarl, she raced around the vehicle and attacked the smirking driver.
Tiago.
“Oh, shit.” Tomas gripped Rylee’s hand, prepared to toss her into the SUV if guns were drawn.
Tiago stood like an impenetrable mountain, chin up, feet braced apart, as he absorbed the force of Lucia’s punches.
“They need to knock that shit off.” Cole charged toward the commotion.