Page 17 of LA Reign

Bobby studies my face for another moment before smiling. “Then I’m happy for you.” His hand settles briefly on my shoulder, and he gives me a squeeze. A friendly squeeze.

Until suddenly his hand is gone and there’s a familiar solid chest at my back. “Touch my wife again and I will break every bone in your arm.” Alejandro’s deep growl slices through the moment like a blade.

Bobby jumps to his feet. Fueled by alcohol and pride, he squares up immediately to my irate husband, trying to wrench his hand from Alejandro’s iron grip. “What the hell, man? Get your hands off me!”

My stomach plummets. This is about to go very badly for Bobby if he doesn’t back down, which it doesn’t seem like he’s going to. So I grab Alejandro’s arm and try to persuade him to drop this instead. “We were just catching up,” I say quickly. “But we’re done now. Let’s go upstairs.”

Alejandro turns his blazing eyes on me, studying my face for a long moment.

Then he releases Bobby and I’m filled with relief. “Stay the fuck away from her,” he snarls.

His hand closes around my elbow. “Let’s go, princesa.”

“Bye, Bobby,” I say with an apologetic smile as Alejandro marches me out of the bar.

I wait until we’re in the privacy of the elevator before I confront him. “What the hell is your problem?”

He doesn’t even look at me, staring at the doors with his hands stuffed into his pockets. “We’ll talk upstairs.”

The elevator ride is torture. He stands on one side. I stand on the other. The air between us crackles with anger so thick it’s suffocating. I steal glances at him, his jaw tight and his gaze fixed on the doors. And suddenly a nervous thought creeps in. I haven’t done anything wrong but he seems pissed at me. I know we were playing around earlier about a spanking, but that was the fun kind.

Dear God. Am I even going to be able to sit tomorrow?

When the elevator doors finally open, we cross the hall in silence and enter the suite.

Alejandro pours himself a Scotch without a word and stares out of the window while he sips.

I slip off my heels near the sofa. “Alejandro,” I say carefully. “What the hell has gotten into you?”

His glass slams onto the table, and he stalks toward me. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he explodes. “I walk into my bar and find you flirting with your ex-boyfriend while he has his hands all over you—and you want to know what’s gotten into me?”

“I was not flirting,” I snap, defensive and angry. “We were talking. And he touched my shoulder for like two seconds.”

His eyes blaze with fire and fury. “You were sitting in my bar with some asshole draped all over you. How do you think that makes me look, Alana?”

And suddenly I understand. My laugh slips out before I can stop it. “Oh my God. Is this about your ego?”

He snarls at me, teeth bared as though he’s about to reply, but I don’t let him. “Shall I tell you how it looked? It looked exactly like what it was. Two people talking. Just like you talk to your ex-girlfriends in that same bar at least once a week. It also looked like you are a man who trusts his wife, so much so he’s content to leave her in the company of another man while he deals with some business. That was how it looked—at least until you went all alpha-male and threatened to break Bobby’s arm, and then you just looked like a jealous, insecure asshole!”

His expression turns lethal, and that little voice in my head tells me to stop talking now, because he’s already beyond pissed, and I’m just going to make him madder. But I ignore that little voice—because I’m beyond pissed too, and I have done nothing wrong. “You’ve slept with half of LA,” I remind him. “I constantly run into women who look like they want to eat you alive. But the one time someone from my past shows up, you lose your mind.”

“That is completely different,” he growls.

“Oh, yeah! How?”

“Because none of those women meant anything to me, Alana. But him? He meant something to you.” His lip curls in a sneer. “The one that got away.”

I knew that would bite me in the ass. “I didn’t say that, he did.”

“Then tell me who he is to you.”

I back up instinctively as Alejandro advances, matching me step-for-step until my back presses against the floor-to-ceiling window and I have nowhere left to go. Forty floors above the city. “I told you, he was my high school boyfriend.”

“Yes, you did tell me that. But that’s not all, is it? I’m obviously missing something. Now who, or what else, is he to you?”

I swallow hard as I look up into his eyes, confused and uncertain. “I don’t know what you want from me, Alex. There’s nothing else to tell.”

His fists slam against the glass on either side of my head and it rattles, making my heart lurch into my throat. “Who is he to you?”