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“Are you gonna behave?”
I should have been insulted, but I knew what he was doing. It was deliberate. He was letting me let go—making me let go. “Yes,” I said.
Then he was gone, and I took a breath and straightened. In a second he was back with my bathrobe, which he must have found on the hook inside my closet door. I hadn’t even heard him look.
He put the bathrobe over my shoulders and helped me into the sleeves. When I had tied the belt, he said, “Talk.”
I sat on the bed—gently, on my sore butt—and looked down at my lap. The words came in a rush, the same way the emotions had.
“When I was eighteen, I got pregnant,” I told him. “It wasn’t on purpose, but once I knew what was happening… I wanted it. I wanted to keep it. I thought I loved my boyfriend. I thought he would agree.”
The bed sagged as Max sat down next to me, listening.
I shook my head, remembering. “I was stupid. I was eighteen, and I had no idea what love was, but I thought I did. I thought my boyfriend would be as happy as I was, that we’d make a life. It was a silly fantasy. He was horrified when he found out. We fought. He wanted me to get rid of the baby. When I wouldn’t, he said he needed space, time to figure things out. Basically, he dumped me.” I risked a glance at Max. He was watching me, his dark eyes steady on me, listening. I looked down in my lap again. “He was eighteen, too, and we’d been careful, so he was terrified. I see that now, though I didn’t see it then. It didn’t matter, anyway. Three weeks later I miscarried. I was just under three months along.” I took a breath, letting it go deep into my lungs. “That was eight years ago, and I’ve never been able to talk about it until right now.”
He made no comment. “Does your mother know?”
“Yes,” I said. Normally I felt unbearable pain even thinking about this, but now I just felt light, like I could float away. “Olivia, too. She’s a year older than me, and there was no hiding what was going on. Both of them know what happened. But I played it down, and I’ve never talked about it again to either of them. They both think that I just dealt with it and moved on. They both think I’m so strong, that nothing gets me down, that I just picked myself up and kept going. My mother worries about Olivia, about whether she’s happy, but she never worries about me. She always says it’s because she doesn’t have to.”
“They’re wrong,” Max said simply.
The words felt like they invaded my chest and squeezed it. I glanced at him again. He was watching me, that familiar frown between his eyebrows. “I put up a pretty good show,” I said. “But my life ever since then…” I looked around my apartment, ran a hand through my hair. “I’ve never admitted it to myself, but I do what I do because it makes me feel like I’ll never hurt like that again. Like nothing could possibly tear me apart and break me down. Not a man, not a job, not anything.”
“I get that,” Max said, and he stood up and crossed my tiny apartment to my fridge, where he found a half-drunk bottle of white wine. “Now tell me about this problem you have with your job,” he said, his voice growling as he found two glasses and pulled the cork off the bottle.
Considering I had just told him the worst thing that had ever happened to me, the thing that had ruined my life, it wasn’t an emotional scene. But I realized that was what I wanted. I didn’t even feel like crying; I felt calm, able to handle it for the first time, as if after all these years I could finally deal. It seemed that even when he was spanking my ass, Max was slaying my demons. He handed me a glass of wine, and I told him about Trent, and how he was keeping money from my paycheck, threatening me. How he wanted me to work his exclusive party, supposedly to get my money back. A party he himself would attend.
And Max listened to that too, standing a few feet away from me, until all of the words had spilled out. Then he downed his glass of wine in one shot and put the glass down on my small table. The frown between his brows had turned into a full-on grizzly bear scowl.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m going to handle this. You get some rest.”
My jaw dropped open. “What do you mean, you’re going to handle it?”
“Exactly what I say. Drink your wine. Go to sleep. Do whatever you like. Just don’t worry about this anymore. Oh, and don’t take any more gigs.”
“But tomorrow’s Saturday,” I protested. “Saturday nights are my best moneymaking nights.”
“Gwen,” he said, exasperated, “forget about the fucking money. That’s an order.”
I stood up, because he was turning and striding for the door. “Where are you going?”
“To handle some shit,” he replied. “I’ll talk to you later.”
“Wait!” He stopped, and turned to look at me. His expression was just barely composed, but I could see it—he was furious, though not at me.
I didn’t want him to leave. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to thank him. I wanted to have sex with him. I wanted to sleep. I wanted all of those things at the same time, so all I managed to say was, “Are you going to beat him up?”
For a second Max’s eyes blazed, and I realized what a very, very bad idea it was to cross a man who had already seen more, and done more, than most people did in a lifetime. “That would be very fucking fun,” he said, his voice chilled, “I admit it. But no.” His eyes blazed again. “He isn’t going to heal from what I have in mind.”
He turned, and then he was gone, letting the door fall shut softly behind him.
I was a different woman than I’d been an hour ago. Other than that, it was as if he’d never been.
Chapter 16
Max
“I really don’t miss Shady Oaks,” Devon said.
