Page 45 of Darling Psycho

“Oh, my god.” She bellowed. “You touched my stuff. All my stuff, you maniac.”

Grinning to himself. Lawless knew what she was talking about.

All the bedrooms were a carbon copy of each other with the same furniture, so all he’d had to do was dump her stuff and carry it upstairs to put away.

He’d seen her battery-operated friend on the nightstand.

There was no point in telling her he’d watched her using it.

Not yet.

He was a monster, not dumb.

Just as he kicked out his legs in front of him, relaxed and loose in his limbs, Lawless noticed the screen. She’d left her messages up.

Josh:I’m in town this weekend. Want to get together?

Joshua Muller.

Angela’s high school boyfriend.

Boy wonder and know-it-all with his pigeon chest puffed out.

Ang:Absolutely! Can’t wait to see you, Joshy. Call when you’re here.

Sitting back against the couch, Lawless pulled his eyes from the computer and hummed low from his throat.

He’d once wanted to pull the spine out of Joshua Muller for being a dirty punk teen.

It would be a shame if the guy never made it to Colorado. Wouldn’t it? He put the boy on the back burner because he listened to Angela stomping around upstairs. She took so long to come back, he went on his nightly walk around the cabin grounds.

By the time he got back, he kicked off his boots, hung up the jacket, and found her fast asleep on the couch with the lazy cat plopped on her chest.

Dropping Oscar onto the cushion, ignoring the meow of protest, he leaned down and lifted Angela into his arms. She instantly came alert. “What are you doing?”

“Carrying you to bed.”

She must have been the right amount of sleepy not to protest, because he was halfway up the stairs when she put her head on his shoulder and sighed. Only when he placed her on the bed and draped the sheets over her, assuming she’d fallen back to sleep, did she break her silence.

“You broke my heart, grumpy.”

Closing his eyes, Lawless froze like a taser zap.

He’d already known her truth, but he felt like a piece of shit hearing it from her lips.

It was why he’d never been able to read any of her letters. He hadn’t wanted to see her pain on the page without a way to fix it.

She’d already closed her eyes when he pressed a palm to the side of her head. “I know I did.”

Now there was time to put it right.

Leaving her in bed, Lawless trekked silently down the stairs into his room, heading for the closet, he brought out a shoebox, carrying it out onto the deck, sitting with a bottle of beer and his feet on the deck ledge.

He took out the first letter.

An hour later, he’d finished the final of Angela’s letters.

If a psycho like him could bleed on the inside, his fucking guts were shredded from ingesting her agony over missing him.