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“For what?” she asked.
“Everything I do wrong,” I replied. “I’m a shitty boyfriend, you know that.”
She took a deep breath and blew the air across my shoulder as she laid her head against my chest. Her arms came up around my neck.
“You are my hero,” Raine said. “You’ve always been that to me. My savoir, and despite your flaws, I still love you. I just wish you’d tell me what was going on in your head in a way I could understand.”
“My head is fucked up,” I told her. “I don’t know how much of that is fixable, babe.”
I leaned back a little and looked down into her eyes.
“Seriously,” I said. More tension flowed through my body as I tried to choose the right words. “If…if your father was still alive, do you really think he’d approve of you being with me?”
I felt Raine tense in my arms. Bringing up her father might not have been the wisest thing to do, but it was the best way to get my point across. After all, I was right there when he was tortured and murdered, and I didn’t do a damn thing to stop it from happening.
I hadn’t known Raine then and had no idea who her father was other than being a small-town cop in the wrong part of the big city at the wrong time. Why he was there I didn’t know, only that once he was discovered, Landon’s crime boss, Joseph Franks, wasn’t about to let him live. Everyone in the area who was considered a threat to Franks and his organization was rounded up, brutally tortured, and eventually executed.
I had watched it all, unable to intervene.
I shifted my eyes back to Raine’s face and observed her far-away expression. Tightening my arms around her, I pressed my lips to her shoulder. I hadn’t meant to upset her by bringing up her deceased father, but I needed to make the point.
“He wouldn’t want you dating me,” I said.
Raine flicked the tip of her tongue over her lips.
“I don’t know,” she said softly. “He wouldn’t like what you used to do, obviously, but neither do I. I think if he got to know you—really know you—I think he might have been okay with it.”
I snorted through my nose at the ridiculousness of her statement.
“I mean it,” Raine said. “I don’t know if I can honestly say he would have liked you or wanted to hang out with you on the weekends, but I think if he saw how you are with me, I think he’d understand.”
“You’re crazy,” I muttered. “What exactly do you think he would see? Me snapping at you for no fucking reason? Running out on you when I get pissed off? What do you think he’d like more—the chain smoking or the bike?”
I laughed dryly.
Raine turned to look at me. She stared into my eyes, and I watched her expression go from annoyance at my harshness to something softer. She reached out and ran her finger from my elbow up to my shoulder.
“Sebastian,” Raine whispered, “when you look at me, I can feel how much you love me. Sometimes it’s a little overwhelming—like a tidal wave—and it can make me feel like I’ve been turned inside out. I can feel it in my skin and in the pit of my stomach. When you look at me like that, I can feel your love for me in my soul. When you wrap your arms around me at night, I can feel your desire for me, and I don’t think there is any woman alive who has ever felt more wanted than I do when you’re close to me.”
She touched the side if my face.
“Dad would have seen that in you, too.”
Her point was made. At least for now, I wouldn’t argue with her.
“Lilliana,” John Paul said as he slid into the booth seat across from me. He had to duck his head a bit to keep from hitting the low-hanging lamp poised above the middle of the table.
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“It’s her name,” he said.
“Whose name?”
“The chick I was banging last night.”
John Paul was my one and only true friend. We’d both fought for Landon in the tournaments, and when I had to go into hiding, John Paul came with me. Now that I was beached in the south of Florida, he’d taken up residence in North Miami Beach, which wasn’t too far from our condo, and we tried to meet up regularly.
I rolled my eyes and sucked the straw in my glass of iced tea while John Paul ordered a beer and a pile of nachos.
