Page 60 of Indecent Lies

Or how to carry herself at parties.

Who to date.

What to drink.

All three engagement parties were organized and Poppy didn’t have one say in any of them.

It made her a weak woman and she didn’t want to be her anymore.

She wanted to be the type of woman who pushed someone to talk when she saw they had a problem, to be the woman who would hug a gorgeous man around his waist and feel him trembling.

“Tait?”

“Friends I respected, worked alongside every single day turned their backs on me just like that, I get they’re angry…he treated me like dirt. Like we haven’t had each other’s backs for years, or that I wasn’t there for him all those times he was too drunk to drive home and I carried his ass over the door because he was grieving. Then I stayed to make sure he didn’t puke and choke to death.”

He was hurt and she felt it through his croaked voice so she hugged him tighter.

“You already said you deserved it.”

He grunted. “Yeah.” and walked around the kitchen, grabbing things out of the fridge, all with Poppy attached to his spine like a grasping sloth.

He didn’t say one word about letting him go.

“So you’re angrier at yourself then you are at them?”

He rumbled a noise she took for confirmation.

“What are you doing to fix it?”

That’s when she let him go and came around to face him standing at the island.

His head shot up and he pinned her with a stare sharp enough to strip paint. She didn’t wither. Sometimes the truth was hard to face.

She’d had to do her own facing recently and some things were not pretty to look at or admit. Especially if it meant admitting you were wrong.Admitting that she was weak and a pushover was not easy to have in her mind, but she’d said those words and vowed to change.

“You obviously miss your friends, so fix it.”

“It’s not as easy as that. I fucked up; I did something unforgivable.”

“Did you...murder someone?”

He snorted and started chopping lettuce like a professional sous chef.

She was mesmerized with his dexterous hands and the veins standing up out of his skin on the back of them. “Murder in my world is not unforgivable, little girl.”

It’s not? Wow. That would be for her to unpack in another conversation.

Bikers really were terrifying.

She hated to admit it, but she was kind of glad he wasn’t around them, thus putting her around them too. Just seeing them in the bar and the bakery caused her bones to quake with slight fear.

They were a different breed of men, that’s for sure.

Men who classed murder as no big deal.

“Then what did you do?”

“I broke trust. Loyalty.”