To belong?
How badly had he yearned to belong?
Had Gage yearned to belong the same way Jax Murphy had?
Hopelessly?
Hopeless enough to do anything?
Hopeless enough to follow a girl he didn’t know—a girl he’d be too drunk to remember ten years later—into his mother’s bedroom?
Onto his mother’s balcony?
Hopeless enough to be her number ten?
Veda nearly crumbled the photo in her hand. Her eyes fell closed. Before the shower water had a chance to grind to a halt from the bathroom, her eyes flew open and she drew in a breath, shoving the photo back in her bag.
For months, she’d forgotten that photo was even in there.
And right then, she made a silent vow to forget it all over again.
Because Gage wasn’t her number ten.
He couldn’t be.
14
Was it the fact that he was no longer heir to a billionaire fortune? No longer a filthy rich man, but simply a rich one? Was it the fact that their lives, their upbringings, were too far removed to ever truly mesh? Was it the bond she had with Detective Lincoln Hill, the one she loved to deny but was still very much there? Was he fighting for a woman he’d never truly have? Had he lost everything for a woman who would never truly love him the way he loved her?
Was losing Veda inevitable?
Gage pressed his forehead against the wall of his walk-in shower, letting the water soak his hair and drip down his skin, even as it began to grow unbearably hot, each splatter feeling like drops of oil poured directly from a piping-hot cast-iron skillet. He let the steam fill his nostrils and his lungs, rendering it harder to breathe each second.
He breathed it in, even as the steam seemed dedicated to choking him out. Even as the water felt like it was moments from peeling his skin from the bone.
He gritted his teeth. Absorbed it.
Because he needed to prepare himself for the real burn.
He needed to prepare himself for the burn of losing Veda. A burn he’d always had a feeling might come but felt more real, closer to fruition, with each passing day. Each day the look in her eyes, the one he still couldn’t make sense of, seemed to move deeper every time she looked at him. Each day when she made love to him with a little less fire, a little less passion, a little less heart.
He was losing her.
He knew it.
And he wasn’t ready.
So he let it burn, hoping it would help when that day finally came.
Hoping he’d be ready for the day he lost her forever.
——
Veda’s eyes felt like they were being held down by two-hundred-pound boulders. Her blue scrubs were wrinkled and so was the long-sleeved shirt underneath. It was early afternoon at the hospital and the day was already a blur. That scared her. The fact that she’d put three patients to sleep that morning and could barely recall the process of doing so. Outside the pharmacy window, doctors and nurses stopped by to request medications here and there, but for the most part, it was slow.
Slow enough for Veda to tell Jake all about how spectacularly her life had managed to fall apart in just a few short days.
“A ten-cent pistol,” Jake said, breaking Veda from her reverie. “It’s the only option.”
Veda stopped swinging back and forth in the rolling chair of the pharmacy and met Jake’s eyes across the room. She squinted one eye in confusion. “Linc used that same term once. I pretended to understand, because I crave his approval so badly, but I have no idea what the hell a ten-cent pistol is. Please help me.”
Jake sighed, as if disappointed in her. “It’s an opiate that’s laced with arsenic or some other kind of poison. The second someone shoots it, they’re shooting venom straight into their brain. They usually survive, but the person they were before that hit? That person is gone forever. Never the same again.”
Veda considered it. “I can’t risk it. Jax still has those photos. If I gave him a ten-cent pistol it would just piss him off. He’d reveal my secret as retaliation.”
“Not if it’s laced with enough poison to kill him.”
“Jacob Emmanuel Jones!”
“Wasn’t that your goal anyway, when you first came home? To kill them all?”
“Yeah, and seconds before I killed Todd Lockwood, needle in his neck, one hit away from ending his miserable life, I realized I couldn’t do it. That I could never live with myself.”
“Because castration is so much more noble?”
“Well… yeah. I also realized it’s a lot more satisfying. Being able to witness the outcome. To see them in pain. To see them realize just what it means to have your body taken against your will. And to have to live with that terrible feeling forever. Death would’ve been far too kind a gift to give Todd, Eugene, and the rest of those fucking monsters.”
“But with Jax, death is the only choice. He knows your secret. He can prove it. One false move and he can destroy you forever. Are you really ready to let a man with that kind of power over your life live to tell the tale?”
“I have no other choice, Jake. I’m not a killer.”
“I won’t be able to lift this kind of oxy forever.”
“I won’t ask you to. I just need it for now. Until I think of something else. There’s got to be another way.”
“I don’t see any other way.”
“And I don’t need your fucking negativity right now,” Veda cried, immediately collecting herself when she realized she was going off the rails. She pressed two fingers into her temples. “I’m sorry. I haven’t had sex in days. I’m so on edge right now I could scream.”
“I’ll need some time,” Jake said, not only unmoved by her outburst but appearing to have expected it. “I can have a week’s worth of oxy ready by the time you get back from the cruise.”
Veda sighed. “I can’t thank you enough, Jake. I don’t know how I got so blessed to have you as a friend. I’ll do anything to make it up to you.”
“Lincoln Hill naked in a bed of roses with nothing but a maple leaf covering his dick. That’d be an awesome start.”
Veda laughed softly, rolling her eyes.
“But I guess we all know who that dick already belongs to.”
“Please don’t start. It’s bad enough I have to hear it from Gage.”
“Sounds like he sees what everyone else sees. The nurses have already started pooling their money, building a bounty in exchange for your life.”
“Fantastic.”
“You really have been hogging all the tasties on this island for yourself.” He pushed her playfully.
She took the push, eyes lowering. “I can’t even enjoy my tasty right now. We haven’t had sex in three days. That’s the longest we’ve ever gone. All we do is fight.” She took a deep breath. “I can’t help but think that some part of me, deep down, must know that you were right the other day. That I’m in denial about the fact that Gage could be ten.”
“He might not be.”
She cut a look at him. “Just the other day you said I was letting love blind me. That denial can be a powerful thing. That I wouldn’t give any other billionaire on this island the benefit of the doubt.”
“Yeah….” Jake nodded slowly. “And now I’m saying that he might not be.”
“The devil’s advocate facet of your personality is really tiring sometimes. Choose an opinion and fucking stick with it, would you?”
“I wasn’t trying to poison your mind to Gage the other day. I was just trying to remind you how important it is to look at your incredibly unique situation from every possible angle.”
“Well, regardless of your intentions, you did poison my mind. You ten-cent pistoled my mind.” Her eyes fell to his smiling lips, unable to stop herself from smiling too. “And now I can’t even look at my boyfriend without thinking about the fact that he might be ten.”
“But he might not be.”
“I asked him when he lost his virginity, and he told me
he was sixteen. I’ll give you three guesses how old he was the night I was attacked.”
“Doesn’t prove anything.”
“He told me he lost his virginity to some random girl. That he did it because he wanted to fit in with Todd, Eugene, and a few of the other assholes who were on the balcony that night.”
Jake lifted the corner of his top lip, still frowning. “Still doesn’t prove it was him.”
Veda sighed, eyes lowering. “We’ve never gone this long without making love. He’s going to try again on our cruise, and I’m probably not going to be into it then either. I might be a newly single woman when that ship docks four days from now.”
“Okay, why don’t we all just take a deep breath?” Jake did just that, lifting his palms toward the ceiling, his chest swelling high as he drew in a heavy dollop of air. He held it. Then he pressed his palms back down toward the floor as he released the air through pursed lips.
Veda followed, breathing in and breathing out, over and over, until Jake finally saw something on her face that made him clap a hand on her shoulder.
“There you go,” he said, squeezing. “Linc said he’d look into the names, right? With his fine ass.”
Veda smirked at Jake’s total inability to say Linc’s name without a derogatory sentence following right on its heels, then nodded.
“So let’s just sit tight until we know for sure. If the full names come back and the name in front of Blackwater is Gage, then we’ll have something to worry about. If it’s not Gage, then we’ll know he’s still a good guy who just happens to be related to a bunch of really, really bad guys. Let’s do our best to make sure you still have a relationship to return to in the event of that happening, okay?”
“You’re right.” Veda nodded again, her eyes burning with emotion. “You’re a really good friend, Jake. I don’t know what I would do if you weren’t here.” She took another deep, heaving breath. “I love you so much.”
Her mouth fell open in shock the moment those words slipped from her lips.
It was the same shock she’d felt with Gage months before, when she’d told him she loved him for the first time. Three words that, before returning to Shadow Rock, she’d never said to anyone but her parents and her grandmother, but seemed to be spewing like wildfire now. She realized, horrifyingly, that it was only a matter of time before she made the colossal mistake of saying them to Coco, who would latch onto those words like a slug and never let her forget it.
“I love you too,” Jake whispered.
That time, when Veda took a deep breath, it came easy.
Easier than it had in a long time.
15
Hell.
Veda was in hell, and there was officially no way out. Being blackmailed had kept her heart racing at a nonstop level ten. With nothing to clear her mind, it had been impossible to sleep at night or focus on anything.
She couldn’t even go to her spit-shined boyfriend to help ease her troubles. It was still too difficult to look at him. She couldn’t throw him down on the bed and exploit his magical penis, which had once been as vital to her livelihood as food and water. She was a car running on empty with nary a gas station in sight. An emaciated vulture with clipped wings in a deserted tundra. A starving shark squirming on the sands of an empty beach. Just close enough to the crashing waves to get a few splashes of water on her nose, but nowhere near enough to survive.
Gage had scheduled their cruise at the perfect time. With a cloudy brain, a terrified heart, and a neglected pussy, Veda was in no condition to administer medical assistance to anyone. She hadn’t killed a patient yet, but if she was ever going to—in the state she was in—it would’ve probably happened today.
So yes, if nothing else, Gage had perfect timing.
For a moment, she’d really believed that.
Right up until they’d run into his idiot friends about five minutes after setting sail.
One second she and Gage had been cuddled up at the railing of the boat, with the comfort of his biceps brushing against her waist, drinking in the rapidly retreating black cliffs of Shadow Rock, and the next minute a loud, boisterous voice had chimed in from behind. Followed by another, equally annoying, immediately after.
Veda hadn’t even had to turn her head to know who one of those voices belonged to. She’d felt the muscle under her jaw clenching and rolling. The sick sensation in her stomach that was becoming all too familiar. The fury that had encased her heart for ten long years going into overdrive.
She’d gazed longingly at the horizon of Shadow Rock Island. The horizon that, just moments earlier, she’d been happy to see growing smaller in the distance. But as Gage greeted his idiot friends behind her, she’d found herself considering the fact that she was still close enough to swim to shore. If she got desperate enough to jump overboard.
Cruise officially ruined, she’d felt herself getting to that point.
Fast.
Sadly, Veda hadn’t thrown herself overboard.
And as she found herself on the opposite side of a dinner table from Todd Lockwood and Chad Kensington, a friend of Gage’s she’d only been introduced to that night, she wondered why.
Why the hell hadn’t she thrown herself overboard?
Even if she’d drowned during her swim back to shore, it would’ve been worth it. Anything to escape sitting at that table.
She stared out the window next to their four-seat table, at the never-ending, expansive ocean. She fantasized about plummeting into the calm waves on the surface. She’d sink and sink. The farther away she sank from the two men across the table from her, the better. Even if it meant sinking all the way to the black floor at the bottom. That moonless, starless world at the base of the sea. The world that even oceanographers hadn’t fully unearthed. Where undiscovered sea life lived and swam in peace, utterly invisible, utterly elusive, and completely undetected.
She’d give anything to be in that world.
Anything but that Asian-themed restaurant. Anything but those red-backed chairs. Anything but the circular paper lamps that dotted the ceiling all around.
Anything but Todd’s blue eyes, searing into hers from across the table. Anything but Chad, who hadn’t done anything to her but was still a rich boy and therefore someone she hated by default, smiling a little too eagerly.
She felt herself trying to smile back. The squeeze of Gage’s hand on her thigh from the chair next to her asked her to do just that. To just smile. But she couldn’t do it.
She knew how much this meant to Gage. It was hard enough for him that she’d broken his connection with his family thanks to her quick tongue and smart mouth. So that evening, she bit her quick tongue. She knew she would never like the men sitting across from her, but she also knew she didn’t want Gage to lose anyone else who was important to his life. So she kept quiet and prayed for it to be over quickly.
“I have to say….” Gage’s voice rang in over the chatter filling the restaurant. “I’m so stoked we ran into you guys. I’ve been wanting Veda to meet my friends for the longest time.”
Stoked?
Veda met Gage’s eyes. She’d never heard the word ‘stoked’ come out of his mouth. The slow curl of her top lip was almost impossible to fight.
Were ‘dude,’ ‘bro,’ and ‘awesome’ next in the queue? She dreaded the very thought.
Her teeth ground. Was she smiling? She felt like she was smiling. She hoped she was, but some part of her understood she might actually look more constipated than anything.
“Two of my closest friends and my girl together. Headed to beautiful, sunny Mexico. It’s awesome,” Gage said.
And there it was. Awesome. Another word he’d never said in her presence. Veda winced at him, wondering who the hell this man was.
Wondering if she knew him at all.
She tried to stop her brain immediately, knowing the path it was taking.
Gage is not your number te—
“Doesn’t seem like Veda’s having a good time,” T
odd Lockwood jumped in before Veda could finish her thought, managing to violate her body without having even touched it. His blond hair seemed even yellower under the hum of the paper lamps. “Gotta be honest, bro, she looked kind of miserable when we ran into you guys earlier,” he said, obviously doing his best to remain cordial while subliminally letting her know that he despised her as much as she did him. “But then again, she always looks kind of miserable. A chronic case of resting bitch face. Have they found a cure for that yet, Veda?”
“Unfortunately not,” she responded before Gage had a chance to do it for her. He gave her thigh a squeeze of apology under the table. The same squeeze he’d been bestowing upon her crossed leg through the appetizers and halfway into the main course. “And while I do indeed suffer from a chronic case of resting bitch face, I’m far from miserable.” She forced a smile. “As a matter of fact, Todd… I’m having a ball.”
The moment that word left her mouth, Todd’s lips went slack. His cheeks reddened.
Veda drank in his embarrassment, so clear on his face one would believe she’d yanked his pants down and showed the whole restaurant the scar on his ball sac. The scar enclosing the space where his real nuts used to be, and the silicone prosthesis he’d been forced to have implanted.
She drove it home, just because she was enjoying his pain so much. “Yep, having an absolute ball. If I could have two balls I’d be juggling them like crazy. But I guess we can’t all have two balls, huh? Don’t wanna get too greedy.”
Chad frowned softly, his eyes darting from one member of the table to the next, hoping someone would fill him in on what was clearly an inside joke.
Veda’s voice rose with glee. “Great balls of fire, am I having a ball!”
Gage squeezed her leg tighter, seeing what she was doing, begging her not to fuck this up like she had the dinner with his family. As CEO of the hospital, he was one of the few people on the island who knew all about Todd’s dirty little secret.
Todd’s blue eyes fell. He dragged his fingers through his blond hair. The redness on his face spread to his neck and moved into his chest, his plate of food forgotten.
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