by Chloe Cox
Simone perched on one of the stools that had come with the fancy kitchen island and watched him get out the milk and some leftover pizza, which he bit into cold. She shook her head and sighed.
“Men,” she said. “How can you be so dumb about some things? Yeah, people like us, Luke. People with abusive families.”
Slowly, he closed the refrigerator door.
“So?” he finally said.
Simone took another deep breath. “Look, I’m not saying it’s the same,” she said. “I don’t know your details, obviously. But I know the signs, Luke, come on.”
“Stipulated,” Luke said. “My father was a bastard. How is this relevant?”
“It’s relevant because I’ve wanted to kick Jimmy Walters’s ass for ten years now,” Simone said. “And if I had been there last night, I would have wanted to so badly I probably would have tried. And I know you wanted to. I know it. But you didn’t.”
“Get to the point, Simone.”
“The thing about having a shitty father,” Simone said, ignoring him, “is that you can never really get rid of him, right? I’m not saying our fathers are the same, but I know what it’s like to wonder, am I going to be like him? And the worst part is that it’s impossible not to be a little bit like him, because he’s your freaking father. But you never know how deep it goes. Is it just that you like your eggs the same way, and you have the same nose, and you both hate cilantro, or is it that there’s some horrible bomb locked away inside you that will go off one day, destroying everything you love?”
Luke stared at her.
“Holy shit,” he said.
Simone shrugged.
“I had a lot of time to think in rehab,” she said. “Anyway, I’d know a man like you a mile away, like I said. And I know you carry it all on your shoulders, trying to undo the past with every action you take in the present, even though that’s literally impossible, etcetera, etcetera.”
Luke stared at her.
“Don’t try to Dom me, it won’t work,” Simone said, although she looked nervous. “There’s only one Dom who can do that, and you’re not him.”
“The way you describe my entire life, it almost sounds stupid,” he said.
“That’s because it is stupid,” Simone snapped. “You wanted to beat the crap out of him, and yet you didn’t, right? Why?”
“Because it would have hurt Charlene,” Luke shot back. “And because I don’t want to be like him.”
They both knew who he was talking about.
“Well, congratulations,” Simone said, smiling for the first time. “You’re not like him. Not at all. Exhibit A would be the fact that Jimmy Walters still walks the Earth.”
Luke put his hands on the kitchen island, looking at the bandages.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “I wanted to kill him.”
“Of course you did,” she said. “You’re human. But if you’re honestly afraid that you’ll become like your father, and that’s the reason you can’t be with the woman you so obviously love, then I think you are full of crap, frankly. And a coward. And I’m only brave enough to say that because I love her like a sister, so I’m pretty mad at you, to be honest. Because your stupidity is breaking her heart.”
Luke was still looking at his hands. Charlene had bandaged them the previous night, and he’d had to tell her to leave, and with every moment they were apart he was feeling sicker and sicker.
And the thought of Charlene feeling this way made him want to rage against anything that would hurt her, even his own stupidity.
He looked up, and Simone pushed his still-full coffee in his direction.
“Let me ask you one more question,” Simone said. “You literally walked into a burning building for her. Is there honestly anything else you can’t do for her?”
Luke stared. Simone knew how to phrase a question.
And he knew the answer.
Charlene dreamed about Luke, which was completely, utterly, cruelly unfair. Because when she woke up, there was a moment when she felt like she was floating, buoyed up like some impossibly light balloon by the effervescent joy that filled her heart.
And then that balloon popped as the memory of the previous night came rushing back into her mind, and underneath it was just this absolute pit of heartbreak and despair that made her feel tired all over again. The weight of that memory descended on her, squeezing on her chest, making her gasp for breath.
It was a terrible way to start the day. And she’d slept in, which she never did and which made her feel like a lazybones.
Charlene forced herself up, blinked into the full morning light, and tried to assess. She was at the club again. Probably for the near future, because her house was at least partially burned up.
Which, probably she should be more concerned about that? Maybe she was in shock, but in the end it was just things. Losing a bunch of things didn’t really bother her, in the grand scheme of her life. What she kept thinking about was a person—the person that she’d lost.
Every time Charlene thought about Luke, that weight got heavier. And she couldn’t not think about him. She knew he was trapped in his own prison, the way she’d been trapped when he’d decided to free her. She only wished she could have helped him the way he’d helped her. That she couldn’t wasn’t just salt in the wound, it was like…
There was nothing to compare it to. Nothing to describe the pain she felt when she realized that maybe she couldn’t reach him because he didn’t love her the way she loved him. That maybe he would meet someone else who could reach him. Some other sub.
That was like a stab to the heart, but she knew, deep down, that if she could see Luke happy, she would be happy. Because she would give anything to see him happy. Because he was her Dom.
And that made her want to throw up.
“Screw this,” she said out loud, and kicked her legs over the side of the bed. If she kept on thinking like this she would just dissolve into a puddle of tears, and that was no use to anyone.
Charlene knew how to deal with pain. She would keep running, and keep working, until she’d burned off enough of it that she could manage. That’s what she’d always done, and that’s what she’d do now.
Which was good, because she had her work cut out for her. Not only had she lost her freaking house, she’d lost her only wedding location. After de-wrinkling of a supposedly wrinkle-proof sundress, making a brief pass at making herself up, and a doing a quick rummage to find her notebook, she already had a sort of plan to save Gavin and Olivia’s wedding.
She opened the door to the private room she’d been given at the club, and steeled herself to face the world.
Only nobody was there.
Like, literally nobody. Club Volare was always fully booked all weekend, with all the private rooms and playrooms in full use, and people downstairs in the shared areas at pretty much all hours. It was a bustling place, normally.
Charlene looked down the empty hallway and half expected a tumbleweed to blow by.
“Ok,” she whispered. “This is weird.”
Warily, she made her way downstairs, still weirded out by how empty the place felt. They’d had to turn people away, and were already thinking about a second location; it was unthinkable to see no one else in the club.
Until she saw a single trainee outside doing yard work, Charlene almost thought she was still dreaming.
“Hey, you’re up,” Olivia’s voice called from the big, industrial kitchen in the back of the house. The doors had been left open, and there was a plate of biscuits that Olivia had been working on while she…waited for Charlene?
“Just the person I was looking for,” Charlene said. She really wanted to get to work—she could feel all of her heartbreak skirting around the edges, trying to find a way in already—but this was just too weird. “What is going on?”
“Here?” Olivia said innocently. “Nothing.”
“Uh-huh,” Charlene said, giving her friend the side-eye. “Well, I had some thoughts about the wedding loc
ation, if—”
“Oh, that won’t be a problem,” Olivia said, waving her hand. “Help me up out of this chair?”
Charlene gave her visibly pregnant friend a hand out of her seat, and an alarm went off somewhere in the back of her mind.
“What do you mean it won’t be problem?” she said. “And where is everyone?”
Normally Gavin made sure there were like eleventy billion people attending to his pregnant soon-to-be wife when he wasn’t there to do it himself, and he was always there to do it himself.
Except today.
“Seriously, where is everyone?” Charlene asked.
“That’s where we’re going,” Olivia grinned, dangling her car keys in front of Charlene. “I saved you a breakfast biscuit, but c’mon, let’s go.”
“Go where?”
But Olivia just smiled at her. And what was Charlene supposed to do, not follow her friend? That would have meant dealing with her own disaster of a life, so no. She followed Olivia.
She even let Olivia drive her about ninety percent of the way before she said anything at all.
“Olivia, this is the way to my house,” she said quietly.
“I know, honey. That’s where we’re going.”
Charlene saw her friend sneak a look at her and frown, and she realized she must be visibly freaking out. The closer they got to her house, along that familiar stretch of road, the closer Charlene got to the reality of her life now, and the closer she got to that pit of dread and heartbreak and loss that she was so determined to avoid. Her throat felt like it was tightening up, and her fingernails dug into the seat of the car, and her heart began to pound in her chest.
“Liv, I don’t know if I can handle this,” she said.
Olivia reached across the front seat to grab her friend’s hand, and squeezed.
“Please trust me?” she said.
Charlene closed her eyes, and she had to smile. Because, incredibly, that was something she could do now.
“Ok,” she said. “Show me.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Charlene had no idea what to expect.
She didn’t know why all these cars would be parked on her lawn.
She didn’t know who half these people milling around were, and they were all carrying equipment and wood and Lord knew what else.
And she didn’t know what she would find as she opened the car door and stepped back onto her property for the first time since Luke had risked his life for hers. But she knew what she hoped for. She damn well knew what she hoped for, with all of her broken, growing heart.
And what she found exceeded all of her wildest dreams.
Everyone she knew from the club was there. Everyone. And they were all working. Gavin and Holt were tearing down the burned up wood from the side of her house, while Blue’s new man, Aaron Black, helping to clear the damage from the inside. Others were gathering materials to rebuild the exterior, building frames and measuring joists and whatever else was involved. It was just a sea of shirtless Doms glistening in the sun as far as the eye could see, and that took quite a bit of the sting out of seeing her house with a big, gaping, burned-out hole in it.
And overseeing all of it, a pencil stuck behind his ear and bandages still covering his rough hands, was her own shirtless Dom, shining in the sun.
Luke.
He looked up, like he knew she was there, and his gaze held her, like it always did. And then he smiled, and her heart fluttered open.
Then he beckoned her towards him, and other parts of her came alive, too.
She walked toward him like she was in slow motion, everything else around her falling away. Just the knowledge that all of these people were here to help her, and that he had done it. Somehow, he had done it.
“How did you do this?” she asked him.
He was so close she could touch him. But she wouldn’t let herself hope for that. Not yet.
Luke just grinned down at her.
“Made some calls before the sun came up. But I didn’t have to do much,” he said. “Turns out people were practically climbing over each other to help you out.”
Then Luke was the one to step closer, his eyes growing soft as he reached for her with one of those bandaged hands.
“This is the family you earned, Charlie,” he said. “You’re stuck with us.”
Charlene’s breath caught in her throat as her heart strained against the cage of her chest, begging to be let out.
“Us?” she said.
Luke took one of her hands in his, then the other. And when he looked at her, it was with all the raw, naked passion she remembered from the St Andrew’s Cross.
“I want to take you home with me,” he said. “If you’ll let me.”
“To Texas?” she whispered.
Luke nodded, and reached up to brush away a tear that had spilled onto her cheek.
“There’s things I want to show you,” he said. Then he grinned. “Plus, I need a wedding date.”
Charlene opened the car window, leaned back against the headrest, and let the breeze and the Texas sun kiss her face. She was so freaking happy.
Going to Texas with Luke was just this side of Heaven. Any doubts she might have had about letting herself hope—which had become an endangered species after finding him rebuilding her freaking house—had withered into tiny, shriveled nothingness by the time they reached the border, after hours in the car together.
Even if it didn’t work out, hope was worth it. And Luke Logan was definitely worth it.
If nothing else, this was the first road trip she’d actually enjoyed. She’d been on only a few with her ex, way back when, and there had only been a few of them because she would have lost her mind otherwise. Somehow road trips always seemed to bring out the cracks in any relationship—some couples would take out the stress of the road on each other. Others could laugh it off.
Charlene and Luke had been laughing a lot.
Only, they weren’t an actual couple yet. They weren’t even Dom and sub, not formally. Luke had been very, very careful about that.
“I want more than that from you,” he’d said, those eyes burning into her. “And I’m going to prove I can give you what you deserve first.”
He’d been so damn stubborn, and, well, Dommy about the whole thing.
And of course, none of that stopped him from actually being a Dom all the damn time. There was still the confidence and the raw alpha-male-ness and the utter control.
But Luke really hadn’t made a move on her on the road. Not once. Not when she had been bending over to pick up trash beside the gas station’s pump, even though she’d straightened to find his gaze hot upon her backside. Not when she’d been licking the foam off of her cheap fast-food latte, which, if Charlene was going to be honest with herself, had been an overt attempt at provoking him. And not even when she’d leaned across his chest to roll down his window, which had earned her a look that promised punishment—maybe.
Or would have, if they were actually together. Charlene knew that Luke was right, and she was wary about rushing in too soon. They had to feel each other out. It made sense.
It also made her absolutely crazy.
She stole a glance at him, his seat way back so he had room for his long legs, his thick, muscled arm extended straight out with his palm resting lightly on the steering wheel, his eyes squinting at the road. And she sighed.
She hadn’t even thought it was possible to be wet for this long without exploding. That was the cost of physical proximity to Luke in closed spaces. Being constantly suspended at the edge of the precipice left her knees shaking and her unfulfilled body feverish.
But Luke was being careful, and Charlene was trying to be smart, even though every fiber of her body wanted to throw caution out the window at sixty-five miles per hour.
Not that they were going that fast anymore. They slowed to a more reasonable forty-five as something resembling a town appeared around the bend of the road. It was a cute, cozy cluster of houses
leading to a high school at the end. The sort where kids would come in to school from miles off and everyone would go to the football game on Friday night and maybe some high-school sweethearts actually made it. Cozy and warm.
Luke didn’t look as though he felt cozy.
How could he? He wouldn’t see all the little houses and recall the amber-tinted nostalgia that Charlene’s mind concocted. He’d think of the reality he actually remembered.
He’d think of his father. And his mother. And his broken family.
Charlene drained the remaining dregs of her latte, long since gone cold.
“Sooooo, what are you thinking about?” she dared to ask.
It took Luke a jaw-flexing, knuckle-cracking, achingly long moment to answer.
“Flamingos,” he deadpanned.
Charlene burst out laughing, and swatted at his arm, secretly hoping he’d hold that swat against her sometime in the near-ish future. Luke looked down at where she’d touched him, then looked at her—and grinned.
Yup. He’d remember.
“It’s good to see you smile,” she said.
He looked back at the road ahead, but his eyes softened.
“I know I’ve got work to do,” he said finally. Quietly. “More than just rebuilding your house, anyway. I’ve got to rebuild trust too. And showing you all this is the best way to do it. So that’s what we’re gonna do.”
He didn’t say the rest, but he didn’t have to.
Because he didn’t want to be there. It screamed from every taut line of his body. He was worried about what would happen with his mother, about whether he’d just hurt her by opening up old wounds. And he was worried for Charlene, too. Probably the last person he was worried for was himself, even though this was hard of him.
And he was doing all this for her.
She felt so warm. It was wrong, feeling warm from something that made him so uncomfortable, and yet…knowing that he cared enough to drag his butt out of his comfort zone and make a visit to the demons in his closet for her was undeniably kind.
But more importantly, maybe it would help him heal. And if this was her chance to help him, the way he helped her, she was going to do her best.