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“Three months after we moved in,” he answered. “When I was eighteen and you were sixteen.”
Three months. Only three months. He’d…he’d agreed to be blackmailed, to essentially become a slave to a corrupt cop after only knowing me for three months?
“And you’ve been his C.I. ever since? To protect me?”
“Ronnie,” he said, his voice as unreadable as his expression, “if I told you half the stuff I’ve done to protect you, you would never look at me again.”
I had no clue what to say to that. None at all.
“Tell me about the woman in hospital,” I said instead.
He took a sip of his coffee, closed his eyes and sat motionless for a moment.
When he opened his eyes, I wanted to weep at the torment in them.
“She was fellow Trinity member. A woman a few years older than me. She was at an MMA fight, in charge of the bets being taken on my next fight. As I was waiting, she slid her hand down my shorts and grabbed my cock. Told me she was going to suck it if I won. As an added incentive.”
Hot and sour jealousy crashed through me at his statement. It blindsided me. I wanted t
o be disgusted with myself. He wasn’t mine; I had no claim on him. Why was I overwhelmed with a dark desire to smack this woman I’d never met in my life?
“I withdrew her hand from my shorts,” Lucas went on, staring into his coffee mug, his expression distant, as if he was living the moment again, “and told her I’d rather a goat suck my dick than her.”
A wry chuckle fell from him.
“She punched me. Right here.” His fingers found the faint red mark where I’d smashed my knuckles into his jaw earlier. “And told me she was going to do whatever she wanted to my cock because she could and I would love every minute of it.”
He raised his focus from his coffee and gave me a smile. It was empty and menacing at once. “I told her to go to hell, so she hit me again. Unfortunately, Dewey saw her do it. After the fight—which I won, by the way—he apprehended her on some bogus claim, drove her to the abandoned warehouse precinct by the river and beat her until she could no longer stand. He then drove her to the hospital and delivered her to the ER, citing a rival gang as the reason for her state.”
He studied me with a guarded hesitancy. Did he know how I was feeling, or was he worried about my feelings? Either way, I wanted to ball my fists and scream.
“How do you know all this?” I asked.
“He told me. Before he told me he would do the same to anyone else who touched me. Doubly if it was you.”
I shoved myself from the table and ran for the powder room. It was that, or throw up there on the dining table.
I heard Lucas follow me.
I felt his hand on my shoulder as I dropped to my knees and shoved my face into the toilet bowl.
What little food and liquid was in my stomach lurched and gurgled and broiled about but didn’t defy gravity and come up.
I gripped the rim however, eyes closed.
Oh God. Oh God, what…
Lucas smoothed his hand up and down my back. There was no way I could deny what he was doing. There was nothing sexual or arrogant about his touch. He was calming me. Being there for me. Caring for me.
When it was obvious my stomach wasn’t going to launch everything in it out of it, I lifted my head, scraped my hair back from my face with a shaky hand and offered him a wobbly smile. “You certainly know how to show a girl a good time,” I mumbled.
He moved his hand from my back and brushed his thumb over my bottom lip. I could see the torment in his eyes as they followed his thumb’s movement. “Ronnie, I never ever wanted you to get caught up in the shit that is my life. I’m sorry.”
I shook my head. “It’s okay, Lucas. I’m okay. Really. And as masochistic as it sounds, I’m glad I’m caught up in it.”
He raised his gaze to my eyes. I saw hope and something far more profound in their dark depths.
My chest tightened. I tried to convince myself I didn’t want to see it, but I failed. The thought of Lucas fucking Pratt being in love with me…it did things to me, to my heart, to my soul that I had no defense against.
