Then, it went without saying, when he got out on bail, things only got worse. It had been set at half a million. I never thought he would be out before things went to trial. But then he was. And I knew. I knew it right down into my marrow.
He was coming for me.
And he wouldn't make it short and mostly-painless like he had done to the man in the alley. Oh, no. Because, first, I thought I could take him down. And second, well, because I was a woman.
The detectives hadn't exactly been shy in telling me all the evils he had done when I went to report him. I think their goal was to make me so outraged that I was committed to putting him behind bars.
When you heard the brutal, ugly details about the wildly sadistic rapes they had suspected him of, but never pinned on him, always attacking the wives and daughters of the men who wronged him - or even just the ones he thought might wrong him - yeah, it did solidify your civic duty to get him off the streets.
But when you knew he was free on them again... and coming for you? To do those awful, sickening, brutal things to you? Yeah, it made you jump at shadows, at knocks on your office door.
The next morning was when I had sat in my office, oddly thankful for the glass walls, knowing I could see him coming from where I was situated in the back of the building, I opened up a new tab. And I did a search. For the city's most well-respected bodyguards and private security firms.
These men, when I had interviewed them, these hardened, rough, well-trained men, looked almost pale when I told them who was after me. It had been real before then, but somehow it felt vitally so then, with these very capable men looking at me like I was maybe a goner, even with their help.
I hadn't understood the grasp Rodrigo Cortez had on the drug trade until then. The detectives had told me he was into selling meth. But I knew nothing about that. I knew about cocaine, and the men in suits who discreetly handed it off to the models and designers and investors at lavish private parties. I knew about the guy who sold pot out of his trailer in the park I grew up in, goofy and braindead.
That was all I had been exposed to in the drug world.
I didn't understand the reach a drug lord could have.
I didn't know until he got into my apartment and stabbed me that he had friends in the police department. Who handed him my file with my name and address.
And if I wasn't safe at home, I damn sure wasn't safe at work. Or anywhere.
That was why I was here, in this cabin, with this man, talking about who I was going to be, what paperwork I was going to have, where I was going to live, what I was going to do as soon as I moved in there.
Because me, Sloane Blythe-Meuller, was never going to be safe. Ever. For the rest of my life.
So I could no longer be me.
I had to be someone else.
Sloane Livingston.
Who wasn't on the brutal-rape-and-murder list of a vicious drug lord.
"You look sick," Gunner commented, shocking me back into the moment. "I know it is all..."
"It's not that," I said, shaking my head.
"What is it then?"
"I was thinking about Rodrigo Cortez," I admitted, swallowing back what felt like bile rising up my throat.
"What about him?" he asked, calm, expectant.
"Everything," I told him. "The night I saw him kill a man. What the detectives told me he did to women... to punish the men they were connected to." Ugh, even saying that made my stomach twist and slosh around ominously.
"Stop," he said, reaching across the bed, putting a hand on my ankle, giving it a squeeze. "Don't do that. Don't imagine that shit. Does no good. Just makes your mind an ugly place to be."
"You sound like you know from experience."
"I do," he admitted, but didn't elaborate.
"I see," I said, nodding, pulling my legs up to sit cross-legged, losing his touch, trying to remind myself why that was a good thing when all I really wanted to do was crawl across the bed to him, wrap around him, kiss him, demand more, demand it all.
But, I tried to convince myself, that was just my sex drive talking, and my loneliness, and my fear. I was just looking for comfort.
I didn't believe that for a second, but I was trying to.
"I was in the military," he went on, surprising me. When my head looked up, though, his gaze was on the wall, not on me. I guess I wasn't the only one who had issues opening up.
"I can tell," I agreed when he said nothing else. When his gaze went to me, brow lifted, I shrugged. "Your posture. People who were in the military stand a certain way."
"Fair enough."
"Were you in for long?"
"Joined up at eighteen. Was there most of my twenties."
"And you saw things," I guessed.
"I did things," he corrected. "Not like Cortez. Not to women," he specified, voice emphatic, though there was no reason. I would never have thought such a thing of him. "But I hurt men. I killed men. Some who likely didn't deserve it, who begged me not to, who told me about their wives and children, and how they would starve without them when they felt the muzzle of my gun. I had orders, but it doesn't make that shit right. It doesn't take the memories of that away."
"Is that why you left?"
"You don't really just leave the military, duchess. At least not the special operations forces."
"Did you get hurt?"
His lips curved up slightly, but it wasn't a smile. If anything, it seemed like it was self-deprecating. "I failed my psych eval."
"Genuinely?" I asked. "Or did you fail on purpose?"
"Guess I was a bit too honest about how I felt about what I was told to do. They don't like that much honesty. They prefer you bury that shit down, serve your time, go home when your skills are no longer the best, and then implode where they don't have to give a fuck about you anymore."
"That's... dark."
"It's honest. Half of the men I worked with ended up eating a bullet or swinging from their ceilings. Of the others, maybe only a handful could go back to their lives, back to their people."
"You did."
"I didn't have people," he supplied. "To go back to. I had my pops. He was a vet. But he died while I was overseas. Didn't have anyone else I was close with. Makes it easier. And harder, I guess."
"How so?" I asked, liking this too much, wanting to keep him talking, needing to know more about him, this enigma of a man.
"Harder because you have no one to keep an eye on you, to give a fuck if you go off the deep end. But easier because you have no one to disappoint, to pretend for. You feel like a dick one day, you can be a dick. Without worrying about hurting someone who loves you."
"You're not a dick. What?" I asked when a smile broke across his face, bigger than one I had seen there before.
"Did you actually just say 'dick'?" He asked, eyes dancing. "Miss Prim and Proper using such filthy language."
Okay, so I didn't curse much.
I didn't curse much because it was base, crass, made me think of my parents, their friends, the shithole I grew up in where people didn't know basic grammar, who said Intensive purposes instead of Intents and purposes. I didn't want to sound like them, to let my upbringing show. Not in the world I ended up in. I mean, it's not to say that wealthy and cultured people never cursed. In fact, from my experience, many did. But I just didn't ever want to. It wasn't the image I wanted to project.
I couldn't remember if I had ever actually uttered the word dick in my life.
Though I had certainly thought it a couple hundred times about some people I had come across.
"I curse sometimes," I insisted, knowing it was only partly true.
"Just so you know, fiddlesticks doesn't count as a curse."
"I'm not an eighty-year-old southern woman," I said with a smile. "I don't say fiddlesticks."
"Fine. Say fuck then."
"What? Why?"
"To prove a point."
"That's silly."
"Yep. Do it. You can't, can you?" he asked,
lips twitching at my expense.
"Fuck," I supplied, lifting my chin a little, not wanting to be proven wrong.
"How about shit, bitch, cock, pussy?" He paused, then threw his head back to laugh. "You're fucking red," he declared, loving my discomfort way too much.
"Shit, bitch, cock, pussy," I spat back at him, narrowing my eyes. "Happy?"
"Maybe those weren't the best choices of words," he told me, and it was just then that I realized the smile had left his face, and the dancing around his eyes was gone, replaced with something else. Something hotter, making his eyelids heavy.
Desire.
It had been a while, but I was pretty sure I knew it when I saw it.
Maybe those weren't the best choices of words.
He certainly didn't mean shit and bitch.
He meant cock and pussy.
Which meant I wasn't the only one having a difficult time trying not to think about what happened in the bathroom, what could have happened in the bathroom.
"Gunner..." I started, knowing my voice was a bit thicker than it usually was. Which was likely because knowing that he was thinking about what happened too - not just shrugging it off like I wondered if he might - it was doing things to my system again.
"I'm gonna go take a shower," he told me, standing suddenly. "If you left any hot water," he added, clearly trying to lighten the heaviness between us.
He closed the bedroom door quietly, then went into the bath.
And me, the creep that I apparently was, pictured him in there, stripping off his clothes, exposing those strong muscles I knew he was made of, getting to see the tattoos he covered himself in fully.
Maybe I even thought about what he was likely doing in there. Once he got under the hot water. Once he knew he was alone.
Reaching down to grab his cock.
Thinking of me.
My body sizzled to life at that, the thought of his hand stroking his cock because of me, because he couldn't get me out of his mind.
My own hand slid down my body, reaching between my legs, trying to get rid of the tension that had been like a coil turned too tightly in my core most of the day.
I was only aware that the shower had turned off after the orgasm ripped through me, making me have to bite into my lip to keep from crying out. But even so, I knew I hadn't been totally silent.
And I couldn't shake the idea that there was a chance that he had heard me.
Which made me stay in the bedroom like a freaking child all day.
"Coffee's fresh."
It was probably around dinner time when his voice called down the hall saying those beautiful, beautiful words.
Maybe the only words that could get me out of bed, and make me face him, all the while praying I was wrong, and that my embarrassment wasn't right there on my face.
"Are you all cooked out?" he asked into the silence between us as I made my coffee, taking a long sip of the too-hot liquid, feeling it burn all the way down. "Just want to know if I should be throwing a sandwich together," he added.
"I'll cook," I offered, knowing it was a good distraction. And a way to make it look like I wasn't hiding all day. "It will likely be my last chance for the rest of the trip."
"Fuck that. You're cooking me something in your new place before I leave. As payment," he added when I shot him a raised-brow look over my shoulder.
"I've already paid you a lot," I told him as I went into the fridge, finding he had fully stocked it again.
"Call it a tip then. For being such a patient, good-natured companion," he added, making me laugh as I turned to him, wondering if he was being serious. He wasn't. His lips were curved up too. "There it is," he said, giving me a nod. "Told you it isn't all so dire," he added. "I'm gonna go fill up the generator. It's gonna go dark for a few. But then we should get through the night."
"Okay," I agreed, pulling out half of the fridge's contents onto the counter, deciding to make something big, even if I was really just winging it.
"Alright," he said about an hour and a half later when I finally got dinner in front of him. "What am I eating?" he asked, moving some of the food around on his plate. "It's covered in cheese, so I already know it's gonna be banging."
"It's eggplant parm. Hopefully," I added, making an unsure face. "It's my first attempt. And I didn't have a recipe, so I was winging it most of the time. And then just some roasted brussels sprouts and a salad."
"Went all out," he observed, and I wondered if he knew I had done so because I needed something to distract me from the idea that he maybe, possibly overheard me earlier.
But he said nothing.
He implied nothing.
We just ate dinner, talking about Ranger and his job as a "babysitter," about this cabin, about the small farm Gunner grew up on with his veteran father and even older veteran grandfather, chopping wood, bailing hay, fixing things, exploring the woods, fishing, all the outdoorsy stuff that seemed to help shape him into the man he was today.
He didn't ask me about my childhood, didn't poke and prod the way most people would do to take the brunt of the conversation off their shoulders. He simply... shared. If you met this man, this rough-and-tumble man, your first thought wouldn't be that he was the sharing sort, the talking sort. But there in a small cabin in the middle of nowhere, just the two of us around, he gave me all the little pieces of his childhood, even going over the loss of his grandfather, but then cutting off suddenly at his entry into the military.
There was damage there; that much was clear. He had even told me about it earlier. But I think it went even deeper than he had implied. Maybe he didn't talk about it because - like my past - it was too ugly to waste time on. Or, possibly, it had to do with the fact that he had been in the Special Forces, and that a lot of his work was likely classified.
How stifling that must have been, to have to suffer in silence because you weren't allowed to talk about it. It was very different than my own past where I just didn't want to talk, didn't want people to hear of all the nasty things I had put up with as a kid and judge me on it.
My prison was of my own making.
His, maybe not so much.
"This was fucking good for a first attempt," he told me after clearing his plate, then picking off the parts of my meal I hadn't finished. "I can't imagine how good it'd be after some practice."
I wanted to say that I would show him eventually. I wanted to say I would have him over when I perfected the recipe. I wanted to let him know that I enjoyed this - cooking for him, that I would like to keep doing so.
But I couldn't do that.
I couldn't tell him because I couldn't invite him.
I couldn't invite him because, in just a few short days, I would never be able to see him again.
That thought sent a little pang through my body, making my hand press into the sharpest part of it in my belly.
"Stitches still hurting?" he asked, misinterpreting the moment.
"A little," I lied, suddenly thankful for the convenient excuse to cover what was actually going on inside me right then.
"Let me do this. You get to bed, get some sleep. It would be good for you, so tomorrow's ride doesn't bother you as much."
Needing maybe some time alone to get myself together, I took myself off to bed, changing into the last set of pajamas I had, wondering how badly I would ruin the material of the other pairs if I washed them when they were dry clean only.
Then I got in bed.
And didn't sleep.
Then didn't sleep some more.
It was likely sometime around two in the morning when my eyes couldn't take the pressure anymore, and drifted closed.
I didn't wake up to Gunner barking at me that we were burning the nonexistent daylight.
I woke up to his hands on my shoulders, shaking me, demanding I Wake the hell up already.
"Easy," he said when I gasped for air, the nightmare still clinging to the larger part of my consciousness, making my heart pound, head spin, skin feel
prickly and foreign. "It's just a dream," he added, hand shifting from my shoulder to cup the back of my neck, pulling my body forward toward him, wrapping his other arm around my back.
I won't lie.
Not even to save the pride I was always so fond of.
I totally clung to him in that moment, with those images fresh in my head.
Evil eyes in a laughing face as he ripped my clothes off, telling me he was going to fuck me... then fuck me with the knife in his hand. Like he had done to others.
My belly twisted, making bile rise up as I buried my face in Gunner's neck, taking deep breaths as my hands gripped his shoulders, like I needed to be grounded, like I needed to anchor myself to him, or else I might get pulled back into the nightmare.
"It's alright," he said, one hand stroking up my back. Not exactly gently, his hand pressing in, giving the tense muscles underneath a little break. My air sucked in on a small sob as I fought to keep the images from flashing behind my eyes still, finding it harder than usual to remember that those things weren't going to happen to me. "I got you, Sloane," he added.
This time, when my belly twisted, it wasn't pain or fear. No. It was something else. Something softer, sweeter, almost hopeful.
He had never said my name before.
My first name.
It was always Miss Blythe-Meuller when he was being a bit of a jerk, picking at me because he thought I was being persnickety or cold or whatever it was he thought of me in those moments.
All other times, it was duchess.
Sometimes as an insult, sometimes as an endearment.
But never anything else.
My name sounded too good on his lips, too intimate, too... everything.
And something in me, something buried, something I didn't even know existed, reacted to those words. I got you, Sloane.
I had never really wanted that, needed that.
I took care of myself, in all the ways that entailed. I worked myself to the bone. I invested carefully. I made smart financial decisions. I also was my own sounding board, my own counselor, my own, well, everything.
I didn't need people.
I certainly never needed a man.
But hearing him say he had me, implying that I could just do it, surrender to it, let him take care of me, it was doing something to me.
The Ghost (Professionals Book 2) Page 9