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“Do you see the way my brain is leaking out my ears right now?” His voice was barely above a growl. “A name.”
“Why? So you can go over there and kick his ass?”
“Exactly!”
“What do I get out of that?”
He paused. “The satisfaction of seeing him dead?”
“The only satisfaction I want is the one that will come when I kill them myself.”
“Them?” The word was a feral snarl on his lips.
Ah, fuck. His fingers clenched into fists, and he paced the length of the small room like a caged animal. One with big teeth and claws and the capability of busting out at any minute and going on a death rampage.
I couldn’t let him do that.
I needed to be the one who did it. I would never sleep well until I proved to myself once more that I was the woman I thought I was. That I could protect myself.
If Fang knew, he wouldn’t be able to stop himself. So I had to defuse the situation, because when a man like him said he would kill every man who’d ever spoken to you, he meant it. He’d been a member of this MC the entire time I’d known him. I knew they did things that weren’t always on the right side of the law. He had the means and motive to rip Caleb and his friends apart.
I lifted the covers on his neatly made bed and got beneath them. His sheets were soft, his mattress the perfect firmness. I tugged the quilt up to my chin and then silently raised the corner, offering him a space beside me.
He stopped pacing to stare at me. “That won’t work.”
I said nothing.
He sighed. Then he put his hand to the back of his shirt and pulled it over his head.
I counted the ridges on his abs while he undid his fly and took off his jeans, leaving him only in black boxer briefs.
Like I knew he would, he got beneath the blankets with me.
I flipped over, giving him my back and wriggling onto the other side of the bed. His thick arm banded around my middle, dragging me to him again, his chest against my spine.
“You played me,” he murmured into the back of my head.
I’d given him a thing I never had before. Normally after we had sex, I was straight out of bed and blowing him a kiss as I walked out the door.
I never snuggled with him.
I couldn’t, because I knew how much he liked it. Every time I got out of his bed, his face would fall, and I’d pretend not to notice.
“I know,” I whispered back, letting him hold me in a way he never had before.
In a way I’d never wanted, because being this close to another person was terrifying and stifling.
Except his warmth felt nice. His arms around me made me feel small and protected. I fell asleep, knowing while I was in Fang’s bed, nothing bad was going to happen.
7
VAUGHN
I stood outside the courthouse with my busted, bleeding lip. Police tape had been put up to create a barrier between the swarm of police officers, medical personnel, and the rapidly growing crowd. Rumors spread and rippled around me, and minute by minute, more onlookers and press arrived.
“I heard it was a murder-suicide,” a woman beside me said in hushed whispers. “Imagine that? He kills her then takes his own life because he can’t bear to be without her. Like some sort of Romeo and Juliet.”
Rage filled me, hot and fast at the gall these women had, to stand right there in the middle of the street and make assumptions like they had any idea who my father was. “Who told you that?” I snapped. “My father wouldn’t hurt a fly, so shut your gossiping mouths.”