“I did forget. I asked you to go to New York with me, for God’s sakes. Why on Earth would I take you there and not to Vegas, Baby? You’re freaking out for no reason.” He lets me go but pulls me into a hug and holds me tight. “What’s really wrong, Baby?”
“I don’t know,” I confess. “This can’t last. It’s all too good to be true. And I know that no matter how hard you try, your family is going to fight this.”
He lets me go and takes a step back. “Angel, I’ll fight them over you.”
“You shouldn’t have to,” I say and the tears start falling. “You should just do what’s expected of you. Be with a woman in your league. You’re so far out of mine, it’s not funny.”
“Don’t talk like that. You’re a brilliant woman and you’re on the cusp of your own greatness. Have a little faith in yourself and know you will become someone who’s amazing.” He looks over my shoulder and I hear footsteps moving over the gravel in quick steps. “Who’s this mother fucker and why does he look like that?”
I turn around and nearly fall down. “Gage!”
To be continued…
Hot Nights in Sturgis Book 3
The Billionaire Takes Charge of His Angel
A Billionaire, Bad Boy, Motorcycle, BDSM, Romance
By
Michelle Love
Heat. Submission. Passion.
Angel’s past shows up, as the man who broke her, Gage, finds her and wants her back.
Blaze finds himself furious as Angel seems to be welcoming Gage back with open arms.
Gage has a very good reason he didn’t attempt to contact Angel after he left. A reason that has Angel second guessing everything.
When Blaze’s family shows up unannounced, it has him even more hopeful Angel will decide what they have is better than what she had with Gage.
Angel finds out some things Gage had been hiding before he left. But will it prove to hurt his chances with her or help them?
Can these two catch a break? Or will people keep getting in the way of them having a happy life together? With the return of the man she thought had left her and his unique set of circumstances, will Angel feel she owes him another shot, leaving Blaze in the dust?
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 1
BLAZE
“Gage?” I ask as I watch a strange man scoop my Angel up in his arms.
And she’s letting him!
“Angel, I’ve missed you. I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” he says as he holds her tight. Then he lets her go and walks up to me with a few quick steps.
I’m shocked as he knocks me in the chest, shoving me back and I hit the wall behind me. “Hey, mother fucker,” I shout at him and draw my fist back.
Angel is suddenly between us. Her back is to me and her hand is on the other guy’s chest. “Gage, what are you doing?”
“I saw how he handled you.” He looks at me. “What makes you think you can be so rough with her?”
I’m at a complete loss for words right now. This can’t be real. This asshole ran off on her and she’s not calling him out on it.
“He wasn’t being rough with me,” she says as I watch her hand run over his chest. “He and I were having a little argument. He wasn’t hurting me.”
His demeanor changes rapidly and he takes her hand, the one she’s been running over his chest for reasons I can’t explain. “Angel, we need to talk.”
“The fucking hell you do,” I let him know. “You left her. Without another word from you in the last couple of years. You broke her, you asshole. You don’t get to talk to her now.” I run my hands over her shoulders. “Tell him, Baby.”
She looks back at me over her shoulder. “Benny, I’d like to talk to him. To get some closure after all this time. Please let me.”
“Let you?” the guy asks. “Angel, he doesn’t have to let you talk to me. I’m the man you love. How could you have forgotten that?”
Her voice is weak as she says, “Gage, I haven’t forgotten anything. But you have to understand that I’ve moved on. Benny and I live together. We love each other. So I won’t be talking to you unless he approves of that. I care too much about him not to have his approval.”
He pulls the hand he’s been holding to his lips and kisses her palm and I about come unglued. “No you don’t! You, son of a bitch!” I try to reach around Angel to yank her hand away from him.
She presses her back against me and pulls her hand away on her own. “Gage, you don’t get to do that. You can’t show up here and think you and I still have anything. You left. You never called. I moved on because you left me alone.”
“That’s what I want to talk about, Angel. I have my reasons why I haven’t tried to contact you. Just come and talk to me about it all. Once you know everything, I think you’ll feel differently about us.” He looks at her with sad, puppy dog eyes and I want to kick his ass.
The way she’s looking at me with slightly drooping eyes makes my heart ache. “Benny, I’d like to talk to him.”
I don’t want to let her do this.
“Angel, I…”
“Please, Benny. There’s so much I want to know.” She looks so hard at me it’s as if she’s looking into my brain for some compassion.
“I don’t want you to be alone with him. You have to understand,” I say as I run my hands up and down her arms.
“I do,” she says. “But I really need this.”
It takes me forever to decide what to do. I look at the prick who’s decided to show up at the most inconvenient time. “Where do you plan on talking to her at?”
With a nod, he gestures to a tall red truck that’s parked behind him. “In my truck. We won’t leave the parking lot. Unless she decides to come with me.”
Angel’s eyes go wide. “You want me to go with you, Gage? You want me back?”
He nods. “Baby, I’ve been driving for hours to get to you. It’s all I could think about since… Well, I’ll tell you all about it. But I do want you back.”
“No, I can’t let you talk to her.” I shake my head. “I can’t. I won’t! You just stood here and said you want to take my girl. I can’t allow that.” I stop talking as Angel puts her hand on my chest. Tears stream down her pink cheeks.
It breaks my heart and I run my thumbs over them to wipe the tears away. “I won’t leave with him. I love you, Benny. I just want to know why he did that to me. That’s all. I promise you that. I love you. My heart is yours.”
“Angel, he doesn’t deserve your time. He left, and it took away a big part of you. A part you’re just now beginning to get back. If you fall for his shit, it will end us and you’ll go back to being that broken girl. Don’t do that to us.” I stroke her cheek as I nearly beg her not to do it. “Don’t do that to yourself.”
She looks so torn and I hate that. I want her to stand up to him. Be defiant, and not even want to hear whatever it is he has to say to her.
She and I look at each other for the longest time, our minds connecting in a way mine can do with no others. I feel confident she’s going to do the right thing for us.
Then his voice breaks our connection as he says, “The reason I left was to see the world. Angel had college to worry about. She had a brilliant career ahead of her. I didn’t want my yearning to see the world put her career on hold.”
Without looking at him as I try to keep her eyes trained on mine, I say, “How generous of you.”
“Look, I know it’s hard to understand,” he continues. “I lived in a tiny town my whole life. When I got out of high school, I bought a motorcycle and made my way to Sturgis to spread my wings like I’d wanted to do since I was a little kid. I met Angel, and it stopped my growing process.”
“I met Angel, and it began mine,” I say as I run my hand down her lo
ng braid.
He shifts his weight to his other foot and groans. “Look, this is fucking hard for me to take, watching your hands move over my true love like that.”
Angel’s eyes narrow and she spins around and snaps at him, “Your true love? Gage, how can those words even come out of your mouth?”
Get him, girl!
Finally, the anger that should’ve come from her from the start.
“Look, Gage, I’m not going to let you get by with talking in a way that’s not true. I’m not your true love,” she says.
He interrupts her. “Yes, you are.”
She shakes her head. “Stop that! No one leaves their true love and never even calls to see if they’re alive.”
“Funny you should say that.” He frowns at her. “Why is it you never attempted to call me? Not once, from my understanding.”
“You left me. Why would I call? To beg you to stop following your odd dream of seeing the world? I’m not selfish like that.” I can feel her beginning to tremble.
I wrap my arms around her from behind and kiss her cheek. “It’s okay, Baby.”
Her hand moves over my cheek and her body stops shaking. The man who left her looks at me with an expression that begs me to let her go. But I won’t.
He gestures to us. “This is hard to watch. Please let her go. Stop holding her, at the very least. It’s hard not to come at you and rip your fucking head off with you all over her like that.”
She looks at me. “I can see what he’s saying. Let me go, Benny.”
“No.” I’m not letting her go just because this ass-wipe wants me to. I look him in his dark eyes. “Be uncomfortable, be very uncomfortable.”
He looks right back at me and I have to give it to the man, he is persistent over a woman he left alone for two years. “Fine, hold her, but you need to know she and I had a special bond. I thought it was strong enough to allow me to pursue my lifelong dream and be able to come back and pick up where we left off. We hadn’t broken up. I was merely going on a trip.”
“Gage, you took everything you owned with you,” she says with a despondent tone in her voice.
“One bag, Angel. Everything I owned filled up one bag. You know I hadn’t accumulated much of anything while we were together. You and I moved into that little house and the things we got, the furniture, the bed, the dog, those stayed there with you and our home. I only took my clothes and toiletries.” He looks at her with hurt in his eyes. “So how can you say I took everything when I left you with what we had gotten together?”
“Every last item of clothing, Gage? You needed the damn bar of soap that you used? Every bottle of your cologne, you needed? There wasn’t a thing left of you. Do you know how long I went without washing your pillow? Nearly a year because it still had a trace of you on it.” Her body begins to shake again and I hold her tighter.
With all she’s saying I know she did love this man. Maybe not with the same kind of thing we have, but she did love him. And by her actions, she still might have some of that love stored deep inside her.
“I’m really sorry you thought I was leaving forever. I wasn’t. How could you think I was walking out that door without a tear in my eye if I was leaving you?” He shakes his head and looks confused. “Angel, I loved you. With everything in me, I loved you. I left that day to go on a trip and then come back home. I thought you understood that. I’m very sorry you didn’t. And now it makes sense why you never came looking for me. Not even a phone call to see if I was alive.”
“I don’t understand, Gage. Not at all. That day you left, you had just told me about your plan of traveling the world. I had just found out how you’d been keeping money squirreled away for three years. You’d been doing that without telling me a thing all that time. Never did you mention your dream of traveling or the fact you were putting money away to do that.” She looks at him and waits for his reason.
He looks back at her and smiles. “How many times did you tell me I was a bad communicator, Baby?”
I’m stunned that he can stand there and smile about a thing that caused her so much pain. “Dude, that’s no excuse for what you did to her,” I tell him. “You turned her into a shell of what she was. I’ve only seen a few of the tears she cried over your no good ass. I can’t imagine the number she shed before I came along. Whatever you were thinking was going to happen by you coming back here and picking up where you left off, is not going to happen.”
He levels his eyes on me and his lips form a thin line as I’m sure he’s biting back a string of curse words he’d love to hurl at me.
“Gage, he’s right,” she says. “Lack of communication may be to blame here. But that’s a thin excuse for two years of no communication.”
“Are you willing to accept your part in this, Angel? You also stopped communicating,” he says.
She nods. “I can accept that. I should’ve called, I suppose. I was hurt, though. I can look back now and see I should’ve called if only to get the closure I desperately needed. So, yes, I am partly responsible but a very small part.”
“And can you admit that your school and work took you away from time you could’ve spent with me?” he asks as he looks at her in the same way a parent asks a child if they understand what they did wrong.
“Dude, we’re talking work and school. You can’t expect her to feel bad about taking time away from your precious ass to further herself. What a fucking prick you are, man.” I let Angel go because now I’m shaking with anger. “If you think I’m going to stand here and let you talk shit to my woman, you’re sadly mistaken. I see right through your very selfish ass.”
“I’m not selfish. Tell him, Angel,” he says as he glares at me.
She doesn’t say a word as she takes me by the arm and looks at me. “It’s okay. No need to get mad about anything. His words can’t hurt me anymore.”
He cocks his head. “What does that mean?”
She locks her eyes on him. “It means you can’t hurt me anymore, Gage. You used to try to make me feel bad because I had to study instead of play video games with you. You told me I was more in love with my books than you. It made me feel bad. But not so damn bad that I’d stop learning and play games with you.”
“A person needs attention, Baby. I tried to explain that to you on many occasions.”
“Interesting that you could take the time to let me know how I wasn’t paying enough attention to you, but never the time to tell me you had a dream of traveling the world and was hiding money to make that happen for you.” She crosses her arms in front of her. “And part of the reason I had to work so much on top of going to school was because I had to pay for the majority of things because you never seemed to have any money. Only you did have money. Lots of it, if you managed to put away enough to travel the fucking world!”
Her ire is up and now I think this asshole is about to get ripped a new one!
I watch from just behind her as he narrows his eyes at her and says, “You worked because you wanted to be there to watch the work the mechanics did on the bikes. And you know that’s why you were there so much. Since you were bringing in so much money why not let you pay the bills so I could put my hard earned money up so I could one day have my dream?”
She throws her hands into the air. “And we’re back to your dream. The one you never talked about. This is getting to be a circle and I’m kind of sick of this circle shit. You know what, Gage, this is over. I don’t want to talk to you about anything. This is more than enough closure for me.”
She turns back to me and takes my hand and we start to walk back inside.
His voice is low as he says, “I was in a wreck the day I left. I’d been on the road for three hours when something happened. I can’t remember what because I was injured so badly that I was in a coma in a hospital in Sioux Falls where I was Halo-flighted to, apparently. I can’t recall any of that. I just know I woke up three months ago and had to be retaught how to walk and talk and the only thing I could remember was you.�
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This is not good news for me…
Chapter 2
ANGEL
My head is spinning with what Gage has just told me. Letting go of Benny’s hand, I run back to Gage. I look into his dark eyes and see the pain behind them.
“Gage, I’m so…”
His mouth on mine stops my words as he grabs me up and kisses me hard. Without thinking, my arms go around his neck and I hold him and kiss him back.
My heart is pounding and my head is spinning. The kiss ends and still he holds me tight in his arms. They used to be so strong and now I can feel some weakness in them.
“You don’t have to say it, Love. We can move on and put that behind us,” he says with a husky whisper.
I run my hands through his shoulder length, dark waves I used to love to mess with so much. Suddenly I remember Benny and pull myself out of Gage’s arms. “I, uh, shit! I shouldn’t have done that.” I turn back to see so much hurt on Benny’s face. I take a few steps back toward him.
I stop as he holds up his hand. “Don’t.”
With no idea of what to do, I stand still. “Benny…”
He shakes his head and I see his eyes glistening with unshed tears. “Angel, I just saw the worst thing. Worse than I ever imagined. You still love him.”
I shake my head. “No. No, it’s just that I had no idea he’d been hurt. It hit me like a brick. My mind went blank.”
I try to explain something I don’t understand myself then I feel Gage’s arm run over my shoulders. “You do love me, Angel.”
“Don’t, Gage!” I shout and move his arm off me. “Don’t make me be mean to you. I’m with Benny now. End of story. I’m sorry you were hurt. I really am. But the fact is I love Benny more than I ever loved you in the three years we were together. I love him more than I ever loved you from the first night he and I spent together.”
“But the kiss,” Gage says as he looks at me with tear-filled eyes. “Angel, you felt something. I know you did.”
Hot Nights in Sturgis The Complete Series: A Billionaire, Bad Boy, Motorcycle, BDSM, Romance (Billionaire Romance Novels) Page 13