My brows rose.
“How’d you know that cheap beer was my favorite?” I challenged.
I knew how she knew. It was the same reason I knew she liked tacos better than fajitas. I also knew her favorite soft drink was Mountain Dew. Her favorite alcoholic drink was a glass of wine that was so sweet that it didn’t even taste like it was alcoholic.
She gave me a look.
“Your sister told me,” she said distractedly. “Although it’s not hard to figure out after watching you drink it every time you came over to your sister’s house, or when you went out to dinner with us.”
“Why’d you leave?” I asked her, placing the case into the fridge and grabbing a can before turning back to her to gauge her reaction to my question.
She grimaced and looked away.
“Why?” I asked again when she still didn’t explain.
“Everything good or healthy has a way of turning unhealthy around me,” she replied. “It was better to leave before it turned bad.”
I cracked the top on the can of beer and took a healthy swallow before placing it on the counter and walking to her.
She had her back to me, doing some weird shit with the chicken breasts in between a plastic bag with a rolling pin.
Placing one hand on each side of her hips, I waited until she finally sighed.
“It’s better this way, I swear,” she promised.
I waited until she growled in frustration.
“You, okay?” I said.
“It was because of you.”
My heart squeezed. “Why me?” I asked, lifting my hand to sweep some of the stray hairs that’d fallen from her ponytail off her neck.
I dropped my lips so they rested on the muscle of her shoulder, and she shivered.
Lips skimming her shoulder blade, I smiled when she finally replied.
“You make me do this.” She lifted her shoulders in a shrug.
“You’re not making sense,” I whispered against her skin.
She shivered.
“You. I left because of you. You have a son. You have a woman. You have a family. I didn’t like being there.” She cleared her throat and dropped the knife she was using to cut up the chicken. “You make me wish for things that’ll never be. It hurts to be around you.”
I inhaled deeply, then stepped back until our bodies were no longer touching.
I pulled the beer up to my lips, then drained it.
“You shouldn’t have left,” I whispered to her gratingly.
“Why?” she asked, perplexed.
“Because I didn’t want you to. I’ve been thinking about you since you were rescued.”
I hadn’t intended for those thoughts to ever leave the confines of my lips.
In fact, the last fucking thing in the world Raven needed right then was my fucked-up self in her life.
I’d always been trailer trash. A useless sack of bones—or so every single one of my high school teachers had informed me throughout my high school career.
The only thing that’d saved my life was enlisting in the Marines at the age of eighteen.
I’d met my wife the moment I got out of the Marines, ten years later, and had fallen in love with her—or the idea of her.
I should’ve never pursued her. Look where that got her. Six feet under, decomposing and feeding the worms due to my career choice.
I’d always been a selfish bastard, though.
Which was why I was about to do something the both of us might regret come morning.
My hand holding the beer can let it go, and it fell to the ground at our feet, clacking against the tiled floor like a shot resounding off the empty walls of a firing range.
Raven would’ve jumped and turned…if I’d let her.
Which I didn’t.
I held her still, immobile against the counter with not just my hands at her hips, but my pelvis against her backside.
“Wolf,” she whispered, panic starting to rise in her voice.
I placed my lips against the top of her head and inhaled deeply, taking in the hint of cucumbers and something else that I couldn’t quite place.
“Raven,” I whispered.
Backing up until a good four feet separated us, I waited for her to turn.
The moment she did, my breath caught in my throat.
My eyes ran up and down her body, taking everything in with one glance.
“Those shorts you were wearing earlier were fucking sexy as hell, but those jeans you somehow painted on are making it hard to breathe,” I told her, my eyes taking everything in at once.
She smiled timidly.
“These aren’t usually what I wear out,” she whispered. “Wolf…what are you doing? What are we doing here?”
I grinned at her.
“What do you want to do?” I asked.
She smiled softly, her face blushing a deep red before she shook her head and refused to answer.
“You don’t want to know what I want to do,” she challenged me, her eyes locking with mine. “You’d probably not appreciate it.”
“Try me,” I challenged her.
She licked her lips.
“I remember.”
My eyes slammed shut, and I shuttered at the remembrance of just what exactly she could ‘remember.’
“What do you ‘remember’?” I whispered gruffly.
Her eyes lifted from the contemplation of my chest, and she gasped for air.
“What you did for me. The night you found me. What you did. I remember. Everything,” she choked out.
My eyes closed, remembering the horror of seeing Raven that way, but also remembering how she felt in my arms as I carried her out of that nightmare.
Her eyes filled with tears as she relived the memories of that time.
“He tortured me. It wasn’t the same way as he tortured July, but he did it all the same,” she confirmed my worst fears.
“I sure as hell won’t ever forget that night,” I said gruffly.
She shook her head, refusing to give me any more information than what she already had.
I moved forward until there was only a breath separating her from me.
She leaned forward and rested her head against my chest, my heart thumping with the emotion of that night and this one.
Chapter 7
Why are there so many warning labels on things? What happened to survival of the fittest?
-Wolf’s secret thoughts
Raven
1 year ago
I peeled open my eyes.
In a different place, again.
Wonderful.
“Let me out, your stupid asshole!” I screamed, my voice raw and unsteady.
That was usual for me.
It wasn’t very often that I knew where I was anymore.
Jensen liked to drug me and move me where he wanted me.
He also liked to incapacitate me and do things to my body when he couldn’t get it from anyone else.
I, of course, deserved it.
I’d given him access to my body before, so why wouldn’t he be able to keep accessing it, right?
Then I viciously shut that thought down.
Jesus Christ! This was not okay. Him touching me while I was drugged out of my mind was not okay!
I didn’t want this!
I was on my knees, naked, my hands tied above my head, holding my body up even though everything inside of me wanted to collapse in exhaustion on the floor. And he had a vibrator strapped to me.
My stomach churned at what was happening to me.
“Fuck!” I heard Jensen cry from the side of the room. “We gotta go. We’re fucking surrounded by cops.”
“Those aren’t cops,” Barrett, the other captor in this whole fucked up mess, explained. “Are you done with your play toy? Can we go?”
“Yeah, we can go,” Jensen said. Then he dropped down to his haunches across from me, his ey
es level with mine. “You saw what happened to July.”
It wasn’t a question, but a statement. A threat.
I nodded in confirmation.
It was likely something I’d never forget.
I’d seen the whole thing, and it tore at my heart, even all this time later.
But, time was relative when you were kidnapped.
When you had nothing else to do but sit there and think, the passage of time became so inconsequential that it was nearly humorous.
Nearly.
Jensen got up and started across the room and tears started to leak out of my eyes.
The tears weren’t for Jensen.
They were for me.
For the fact that, yet again, he was going to leave me hanging.
Only this time he was leaving me hanging with an end in sight. That end being the possibility of discovery, of rescue. The possibility of others seeing me in this position, seeing what Jensen was doing to me, seeing my shame.
A possibility that became a reality not five minutes later when the darkest, most beautiful man I had ever seen entered.
His eyes zeroed in on me.
In an instant, he had me catalogued.
Hands above my head. Naked as the day I was born. Vibrator shoved up my vagina being held in place with a black belt.
My eyes closed in mortification as the man came straight to me while ordering everyone else out of the room.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I nodded my head, my heart practically galloping in my chest.
Could he hear the vibrator?
I knew he could.
It was near impossible for him not to hear it.
He dropped to his knees so his eyes were level with mine.
“Can I remove it?” the man with the black eyes and the intimidating set of shoulders asked me.
My eyes lifted to his, and the blush of my humiliation burned on my cheeks.
I nodded my head.
“Please,” I croaked, my voice cracking.
He next went to work removing the belt and pulling out the vibrator. Then went on to the bindings on my hands and quickly untied me. He pulled off the shirt he was wearing and wrapped it around my naked body, lifting me into his arms and swiftly carrying me out of hell.
And then he held me while I cried.
The tap tap tap of someone knocking had me jolting in bed, and I looked around in confusion at my surroundings.
That’s when I realized that I wasn’t by myself in my bed. I was on top of someone.
A very muscular someone.
“You’re going to be late if you don’t get up now!” Travis called through my door.
“I’ll be late. I’ll drive myself,” I yelled at Travis, hoping he didn’t use his key like he normally did when he thought I was sleeping in.
I had a problem waking up in the morning.
He knew it. I knew it.
However, he must’ve interpreted the wakefulness in my voice because he didn’t try to come inside like he would’ve done had I not sounded awake.
“Oh, God,” I breathed, pushing back until I could see the chest that’d been my human pillow for who knew how long.
Wolf’s eyes were awake and aware, focused solidly on me.
“What are you doing?” I asked frantically, my eyes going down the length of our bodies.
Luckily, we both were still fully clothed, meaning we’d not done anything he could regret later.
That thought flew out the window moments later when he suddenly reversed our positions and I was underneath of him.
“What are you doing?” I asked him, watching him with wide eyes.
“Leaving,” he murmured.
A smile broke out on my face.
“It sure does look like you’re leaving,” I murmured sarcastically, eyeing his face from only a few inches away from my own.
“Gotta work myself up to it.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because it’s eight forty-two and I can hear men talking downstairs, which likely means Travis and Dante are here already. Therefore, I’ll have to walk through all of them to get to my truck, a truck they helped me restore so there is no doubt they know exactly who owns it,” he informed me.
My mouth dropped open.
“Are you embarrassed to be seen with me?” I asked him in outrage.
He shook his head.
“No,” he murmured. “What I’m embarrassed about is conking out after only two beers.”
“So that means…what?” I asked. “That you would’ve gotten out of here earlier, but you were too drunk to do so?”
He grinned.
“You’re taking everything I say out of context.”
I bared my teeth at him, causing a grin to spread over his face.
“I’m going to go to work. What I don’t want to do is go out there and see Dante and Travis look at me like they looked at me yesterday morning when they realized I knew you better than they knew you.”
My held breath left me in a whoosh when I realized that he wasn’t actually embarrassed to be seen with me.
“Gotta go, babe. Make sure you stay with Travis or Dante. Don’t leave to get them lunch. Don’t run to the grocery store for a cookie. Don’t …” I held my hand up to stop him.
“We went over this last night,” I reminded him.
Wolf grinned and pushed off of the bed, and I lost his warmth.
The feeling it left me with wasn’t one I particularly liked, and to cover it up, I got up as well and quickly changed out of the shirt I’d worn all day yesterday.
The pants would stay. Those weren’t anything but nice and stretched out now, so there was no reason to change them. It was rare that these pants ever felt anything but tight.
I heard the bathroom sink switch on and I yanked the first t-shirt down from the hanger, not even noticing which one it was until it was too late to change.
The bathroom door opened just as the shirt passed over my ribs, and I didn’t pretend for a second to miss the sharp inhalation of breath that passed over Wolf’s lips at seeing my bare back.
“When did you get that tattoo?” he asked hoarsely.
His voice sounded rough, and I couldn’t quite tell why he sounded like that.
“The week before I left Kilgore,” I whispered, turning to face him.
The moment I turned, though, he turned me back around and lifted my shirt.
“Exact fucking replication in reverse,” he murmured, running his rough hands over the tattoo that stretched the length of one half of my back.
“What is?” I questioned him, turning even though his hand was still busy running along my back.
Without answering me, he lifted his shirt, and I gasped.
“That’s so cool!” I whispered.
He grinned at me over his shoulder.
“You don’t see the significance here?” he asked me, dropping his shirt back into place and leaving me feeling bereft at not getting to see that beautiful back of his anymore.
Then what he said struck home, and my mouth opened and closed like a guppy.
“You have a raven on your back! And I have a wolf!” I crowed. “Why do you have a raven?” I looked at him in confusion.
“The week before you left, I got this. Because of your strength,” he said. “You reminded me of things I couldn’t change. Things I needed to move on from.”
He must’ve seen my face at the mention of him moving on from me, because he was quick to explain.
“Not moving on from you, but everything in general. My wife mostly, but even more my way of life. I wasn’t living. In fact, I was so far from living that it was almost comical. It took seeing you, so vulnerable and broken that tipped those scales for me, and made me realize that I needed to get my life together. That’s what this symbolizes.” He patted his shoulder where the tattoo rested.
It was big, not just a small tattoo
of a raven on his body.
No, this one looked so real, so lifelike and big, that if you were standing far away, it could literally pass as a real-life raven.
The beak and neck of the raven stretched from Wolf’s muscled shoulder all the way down to right above his collarbone. One side of the wings of the raven went down underneath the raven’s head, cutting across his chest and coming to a stop right between his nipples, while the other wing flared down the length of his back. The raven’s tail and feet ran down the length of his arm and stopped right around where his bicep started.
It was very intricate and well done, and oh so beautiful.
Hauntingly so.
“Let me see yours again,” Wolf said. “All of it.”
I presented him my back and lifted my shirt up to rest at the top of my neck, pulling one arm out of the sleeve to give him full access.
The next thing to go was the bra, which Wolf oh so helpfully unlatched for me.
I barely caught the cups from dislodging my breasts in time.
The mirror on my closet door showed his mirth at the near slip, and I narrowed my eyes at him.
“Rude.”
He grinned and I lost his eyes as they took in every last inch of my tattoo.
I knew what he was looking at.
I was surprised myself at how beautiful it was.
And big.
It was most definitely big. Realllly big.
The thing about the tattoo that I loved the most, though, were the eyes.
They were Wolf’s eyes.
I wasn’t sure if he noticed that, but it was the one thing that I adored most about the entire piece.
I hadn’t got it because of Wolf specifically. It was more as a dedication to him, though. A dedication to myself and a release from the shitty life I’d lived.
Wolf was my starting over point. From the moment he set me free, I started a new life. One where I intended to live it, not caring what or who I pissed off to make sure I lived it the way I wanted to live it.
I was a lone wolf. I only had me to count on.
Or, at the time I got the tattoo, that’d been my reasoning behind getting it.
My ‘official’ reason, anyway.
I’d be lying to myself if I said Wolf didn’t play a bigger part in the decision to get this particular tattoo, though.
“It has my eyes.”
My lids dropped and I breathed out before inhaling deeply.
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