Besides, what am I supposed to say to him? What could I possibly say that would make things right or take back everything I’ve done?
Nothing.
Nothing that makes sense anyway.
“You should have seen the way he was hitting on your sister. He completely ignored the ring on her finger and flat out used the lamest pick-up line known to mankind to seduce her. I swear, dude, one more minute of eye-fucking her and he’d be getting a face reconstruction by his own staff on his own operating table.”
I knock on the bedframe twice and force myself to look up, really take him in. When Noble said Vince’s chances of walking again would be less than ten percent, I didn’t believe him. Couldn’t. The guy is a fighter, no chance in hell would he let anything stop him.
I should have known better…
One full body scan and a clear look at his open wounds with my own eyes and it’s more than obvious that I was wrong for not trusting his diagnosis. Vincent’s legs are slaughtered. It’s almost as if a dog has managed to chew through them and the doctors didn’t have enough skin to stitch him back up.
“I am so fucking furious with you, you know that, right?” My grip on the railing is so tight, I can barely feel my fingers. “You just had to follow me in. Had to stay even though I begged you to go back outside. Had to get yourself hurt—” I choke on the bile burning up my throat and hit the metal frame again, making the entire bed rattle. “Goddammit, Vince.”
I force my eyes close and focus all my energy on the sound of his heartbeat monitor.
My breathing follows his.
Steady. Comforting. Reassuring.
Until it isn’t anymore.
Her face, her soft blonde locks, her beautiful crystal-clear blue eyes… a flash and she’s gone again.
“Lillie.” The memory of her name heaves out of me like an imploring demand. I shake my head and lift it up to the ceiling. “Vince, I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. I didn’t know, didn’t think—please.”
My hands go to my hair, my fingers wrap around the strands, and I pull. I need to cry. I want to feel the goddamn tears, but they won’t come. I grip and tug harshly, hoping that the physical pain will cause some sort of instinctive physiological reaction, something that would allow me to free the incessant ache buried in the depth of my cold heart.
Nothing.
Every sob, every cry begging to be released, wedge themselves in the back of my throat.
It burns.
It hurts.
Yet, I can’t let go.
“I just—I saw her. She was right there,” I whisper, knowing very well he can’t respond. Even if he did, he’d have no idea what I’m talking about. “I—I made a mistake, Vince, I get it. But right now, I really need you to wake up.”
I slump my shoulders, letting my head fall. I should have left when I had the chance. Being here is just making everything worse.
“Excuse me, miss, but you can’t be in here.”
Miss?
I turn to the side and see Aubrey standing less than ten feet away from me.
Are you shitting me right now?
Brows pulled together, her beautiful tearful face is brimmed with a blend of confusion and mistrust.
A thick filled silence surrounds us as we stare at each other. I knew she’d eventually find me. She’s in my head, she knows how I cope, she knows how I think… but spying on me? That’s stooping to a whole different level.
I inhale, lock my jaw tight to prevent myself from lashing out at her and start counting down from a hundred. Slowly and steadily until the rage dies down.
It’s what I did while my dad beat me.
It’s what I did when my mom left.
It’s how I learned how to survive.
I remember staring up at my bedroom ceiling and praying for it to be over: the physical pain, the ache in my heart, the filth crawling on my skin, the guilt coursing through my veins…
Life wasn’t generous enough to grant me the privilege of an easy way out, so I did what I did best: I rebelled against it and made it worse.
I drank. I got high. I vandalized. I fucked. I got beat up.
Anything to numb.
Anything to pretend that the bleeding, the bruises, the soreness, the grief wasn’t real.
Anything… until her.
“Miss—”
“Give us a fucking minute,” Aubrey whispers through clenched teeth.
As if she’s just realizing that my fiancée isn’t the only trespasser, the nurse takes a step to the side and locks her scolding brown eyes to mine. “Hey, you—”
“Can’t be here?” I snicker. “Yeah, I got that. Except I wouldn’t be here if you incompetent assholes actually did your job. Now like she said, give us a fucking minute and we’ll be out of your hair.”
The nurse wriggles her mousy nose and purses her lips into an insulted pout. “I’m going to call security.”
I smirk. Like I actually give a flying fuck.
Just like me, Aubrey chooses to ignore the threat and rests her shoulder comfortably against the doorframe.
“You should leave,” I mutter when the nurse flies out the door. As intrigued as I am with her sudden defiant side, the last thing I want is for her to get into trouble for trespassing.
“I should, but I won’t.” In a matter of seconds, her tears have been wiped away and all the light that used to shine in her beautiful teal eyes has vanished.
“We’re not doing this, Aubrey. Not now and definitely not here.”
Her focus flickers between Vince and me. The rhythm of his monitor spikes for a few seconds before stalling, and like mine, her jaw goes rigid.
“Well, that’s too bad because I’m not going anywhere until you start talking.” She lets her head fall to the side and arches a brow, challenging me. “What happened to my brother, Micah?”
“You know what happened.”
“Explain it to me,” she replies, ignoring the warning in my tone. “Tell me how my brother ended up on an operating table with less than a ten percent chance of being able to walk again. Explain to me how you and Vince ended up being inside a burning house where I know you both aren’t supposed to be. Explain to me why you look so damn—”
“YOU weren’t supposed to be there.” Rage bleeds out of me. I’m done hiding behind my self-control. She wants to call me out on my mistakes, to blame me for what happened? Fine. But she sure as hell needs to start owning up to the consequences of her damn choices. “When we started dating, I asked you one thing, Aubrey. One. Fucking. Thing.”
A soft snicker escapes the back of her throat and I swear the grind of my teeth makes her smirk even more. Shaking her head, she removes my hoodie from off her back, and with a challenge lingering in her silence, she ambles toward me. Each step she takes in my direction follows her brother’s slow-paced heartbeat as if it’s giving her the strength she needs to confront me. Her prowl is laced with emotions I can’t depict. The only thing I do know, is that she’s watching me like there’s no one else but the two of us in the room, and right now, I’m not sure if this is a good or a bad thing.
My eyes trail down her tempting curves, pausing at the top undone button of her dress. The sight of her black laced bra stirs a completely different emotion inside me, and suddenly the storm brewing in her darkened blueish-green orbs is compelling in too many ways.
Aubrey stops less than three feet away from me and the blend of my cologne and her perfume hit my nostrils. I run my thumb over my lower lip and grip the railing to tame my unexpected urges. “Anything I can help you with, Bankes?”
She extends my hoodie, and when I refuse to take it back, she drops it at her brother’s feet. “You’re good at pretending, Micah.” The sweetness of her voice is laced with malice. “You almost make the enmity believable.”
Almost?
“But I do think you need to remember one thing.”
“Really, and what could that thing possibly be?”
A slow smirk tug
s at the corner of Aubrey’s mouth when she catches sight of my bemusement. She stands on the tip of her toes, brushing her breasts against my flexed arms so she’s able to close the remaining distance to whisper in my ear.
I can’t even stop the gurgled groan escaping the back of my throat.
“Well… as you can see: two can play this game, baby.”
Aubrey Bankes.
A friend. A daughter. A twin.
My fiancée.
She is no longer a firefly.
She is a reflection.
My reflection.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Micah
Present
“I told him to leave.”
An arched brow and a proud smirk. That’s all my speechless ass got before she walked out of her brother’s room. I should have run after her the second she left, but I couldn’t leave Vince without apologizing for breaking yet another one of my promises, so I stayed back. And now, I’ve been standing in the doorway of a small secluded conference room for over five minutes, watching her staring at her ring while sitting cross-legged on the edge of a desk. I can’t tell if she’s too lost in her own head to realize I’m there or completely ignoring me.
“If you’re going to spy on someone and demand answers, the least you can do is listen to the explanations when they are given to you.”
Aubrey suppresses a laugh and gives me another one of her annoying slight head shakes.
“Really? A fucking snicker? That’s all you got for me right now?”
Tight scornful orbs lock with mine. “Why? Were you expecting a thank you? Oh no, I know, maybe you thought I’d feel better knowing my fiancé didn’t want my brother around when he walked inside a burning house and that the damn thing blew up.”
“I told him to leave, Aubrey,” I bite back loudly.
“And you knew he wouldn’t listen. He’s your best friend… you should have walked out of there the second you saw he had followed you in.”
“And let a five-year-old kid die? You have no idea what it’s like to be in a situation like that, Aubrey. You can’t judge because you don’t fucking know. This is my job. I take risks to save lives.”
“You risked my brother’s life!”
“Don’t you think I know that this is my fault? Don’t you think that if I could have done things differently I would have?”
She rolls her eyes and goes back to staring at her hands. Her insolence is pissing me off. I have a burden of mistakes resting on my shoulders, years of rage yearning to be set free, and right now I can’t tell if she’s building a wall of indifference to protect herself or if she’s looking for a fight.
I step inside the room, slam the door and lock it behind me. “What is it that you want from me, Aubrey?”
“That’s an easy one: how about you leave me the fuck alone.”
“I would but you seem to have a whole lot of shit on your mind right now, so you’re going to spit it out and tell me whatever the hell you need to tell me so we can be done with it.”
“You want to talk?” She hops off the table she was sitting on and crosses her arms over her chest. “Fine, we’ll talk. How about we start by you explaining to me how the hell is it that you’re allowed to be angry with me right now?”
“You broke your promise, Aubrey.”
“I broke my promise?”
“Yes.”
“And what about your promise?”
My brows furl.
“You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
I think the answer to that is more than obvious, but whatever…
I shake my head.
“Un-fucking-believable,” she snickers. “Of course you don’t. Here, let me explain it to you. When we started dating, I asked you to be honest with me, Micah. Always. I told you I couldn’t be in a relationship based on lies and filled with deceit, yet here we are.”
I know that look. She thinks she has me cornered somehow, that she’s hit a nerve. She’s watching me, awaiting the moment I’m going to either push back or admit to something. Which is kind of hard to do because I have no fucking clue what she’s talking about.
Her jaw clenches. “Are you shitting me? Still nothing?”
“Get to the damn point, Aubrey.”
“The point,” she repeats, blowing out the long strand of hair hiding her eyes. She twists it in-between her fingers and tucks it behind her ear before locking us in another staring competition. “I’m only going to ask you this once, Micah. Who is she?”
“Who’s who?” I frown, irritated, but mostly confused. But then I catch sight of her accusing scowl, and a dreading feeling starts to churn in the pit of my stomach. She heard me say her name.
“Lillie.”
My jaw goes rigid. “No.”
“No?” Suppressing a cackle, she pops a brow. “You’re acting like this conversation is a choice.”
“It is a choice. We’re not talking about her.”
“Why not? Is she an ex?” Each step she takes toward me is slow and premeditated. “A casual fuck you keep on the sidelines in case you fuck up?”
Every muscle in my body tenses. The truth is, I’ve been living with this secret for so long, I almost started to believe my own lie.
Our entire relationship is built on a damn lie.
Aubrey’s head falls to the side and she meets my glare, challenging me like she’s grown to know how to do. “What’s the matter, Micah, you got caught, and now your bad decisions are finally coming back to bite you in the ass? Or is it the guilt of all your lies that are finally catching up with you and driving you past your breaking point?”
My jaw clenches. Her determination, as enticing as it is, is treacherous. She has no idea what she’s talking about. She also has no clue as to how thin the rope she’s walking on really is. “Don’t fucking push me, Bankes.”
She leans forward and angles her slow malevolent smile to my ear. “Or what?”
The challenge in her two last whispered words causes the carnal darkness buried inside me to unleash. I grip her arm and throw her against the opposing wall.
A rush of air leaves her lungs and I expect her to flinch or shove me away, but she doesn’t. “If my brother can’t walk—” Venom. Pure fucking venom. “—it’s on you.”
I place my left hand to her throat, adding just enough pressure to hold her still and watch her. Study her. Brave little lightning bug, I do need to give her the credit she deserves, she has a lot more tenacity in her than I thought she did. Unfortunately for her, she has no fucking clue what kind of storm she’s just brewed.
“You won’t hurt me, Lambert.”
Wrong.
I lick my lips and smirk.
I have every intention of hurting you, Firefly. I’m going to indulge in you. Possess you. Lose the rest of my sanity inside you, and then I’m going to make you regret.
Regret your words. Regret your broken promise
Regret ever falling in love with me.
Without loosening my hold on her, I let my right index finger glide down the flesh of her collarbone. Stopping at the mound of her breast, I pop the first button of her sundress and smile.
Aubrey’s stammering pulse betrays her. She should know better. She should stop me right here…or at least try to. But it seems like my girl is fighting a battle of her own. Hooded behind her quest for answers, her hostility, her search for reassurance, and her dire need to make the world better is a desire Aubrey can’t tame and a lust she needs to soothe. “Tell me who she is, Micah.”
I should take her mouth, swallow each whimper, every single moan, until she recognizes her mistake and believes me when I tell her there is no one else but her. But her flare of jealousy brings a different kind of fight to the play, and the dark path she’s heading is bewitching in an entirely different way. “And why would I do that, Aubrey? What would me telling you that you’re wrong about your accusations change since you seemed to have made up your mind about it anyway?”
I p
op another button.
Her dazed glower follows my fingers as they unfasten her snap-down dress to unveil the tempting black lace underwear she’s wearing. While I know very well that her heart is in pursuit of comfort, I’m also very aware of the relief her body is craving. Aubrey is confused. I can see it in her eyes. And what kind of man wouldn’t use every bit of his prey’s confusion to his advantage?
My thumb grazes the smooth skin under the seam of her bikini-line, and her back arches.
Already begging for more…
I smirk. “Fair play isn’t my thing, baby.”
The straps of her dress slip off her shoulder, and she gives me a smoldering look before letting the fabric fall at my feet. “Good. Because it isn’t mine either.”
I grin, giving her body a slow, delineate once over. It seems that behind all her sweetness, my fiancée is a rather convincing siren.
Pure. Fucking. Perfection.
Aubrey Bankes is a dick’s fantasy. Porcelain smooth skin, long silky hair that falls over her slender shoulders, a perfectly toned body, tits that fit in the palm of a hand, erect pink nipples that perk the second the cool air hits her body, hips made for gripping, thighs built for clasping, and an ass that every man pictures in his wet-dreams.
I press myself against her barely covered body and nip at her earlobe. “What would you say your pussy tastes like right now, Aubrey?”
I glide two fingers along her wet slit and smile at the sound of her gasp. “Do you think it tastes sugary sweet or salty like your irritating mood?”
If a glare could kill, I’d die bleeding out from my dick.
“I’d say it taste more like victory.”
“Victory?”
“Victory,” she repeats smugly. “Because we both know the second my pussy wraps around your dick, I’ll have you at my mercy.”
I thrust my two fingers inside her and roll my thumb over her clit. When her knees start to buckle, I pull out and sweep her lips with her arousal. The challenge in her stare is hitting every damn nerve in my body.
Broken Promises (Burning Mistakes Book 1) Page 12