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Yeah, she was, and it was too late to get palpitations about it. Eight was Ajax’s father, and she believed what she’d told him: regardless of who he was, what he’d done, what he still did, he was the only father her son had. Once Ajax wanted Eight in his life, that decision had been clear. Not that she didn’t second-guess it a million times a day.
In that case, then, it really wasn’t a huge leap to trying a relationship with the man herself, right? Eight was already here, in their lives. And he was right: if they could make it work together, if they could build a family from the blood they shared with their kid, then that was the best case.
So the only reasonable angst left was whether they would work together. Marcella had no idea, but right now, lying sweaty and spent after hours of brilliant sex, nestled against him, feeling his brawny body all around her, she liked him a lot. The way to her heart was through her pussy, apparently, and nobody treated her pussy as well as this guy right here.
But she knew so little about him. What she did know was mostly … not great.
As she’d been thinking, her hand had been playing over his chest, through the hair, over the ridges of muscle, across the scars. When her fingertips brushed the burn scar at his side, he caught her hand and flattened it on his belly.
That was the prompt she’d needed. Fully aware that his reaction might well kill this moment and could even undo the decision they’d so recently made, Marcella said, “Tell me more about your childhood.”
The steady rise and fall of his chest and belly stopped at once. The muscles in the arm around her froze solid.
“No,” he said, gruff and quiet. “You know enough.”
“Eight. For this to work, we need to know each other. Good stuff and bad. All we know is we’re good in bed and we made a kid.”
“We know more than that. You know I’m a Bull. You know I’m an ex-con. You know my childhood fucking sucked and I was raised by bad people. I know you’re close with your family. You’ve got a younger sister, and your parents are divorced but they did it right, and you have good relationships with them both. I know you’ve been singing your whole life, and with the Lowdowners for twenty years. I know you’re a good mom.”
Touched by his answer, she squeezed her arm around his waist. The she found a question that had nothing to do with his childhood. “Tell me about how your leg got hurt.”
“I told you that. Wiped out at speed on a highway in Texas. Skidded about twenty-five, thirty yards, and by the time I stopped, most of my leg was on the asphalt.”
“But how’d you wipe out? Why were you in Texas? Details!”
When he stayed quiet, she lifted her head and looked him in the eye again. “We won’t work if we don’t talk, Eight. Am I asking about some kind of deep, dark secret? How many of those do you have?”
His expression was serious, but he didn’t look away. “I got a fair number, Marce. There’s shit I can’t, or won’t, talk about. Period.”
She suspected as much—and, frankly, with the outlaw shit, she probably didn’t want to know the stuff he couldn’t tell her.
However, she was not someone who believed ignorance was bliss. That was a good way to get blindsided every which way. “I get that you need secrets. But I need to know as much as you can tell me. Is the accident that hurt your leg a big club secret?”
“No.”
“Then is there some other reason you can’t tell me?”
He studied her eyes before finally saying, “I don’t know how.”
“What do you mean?”
Moving his gaze from her to some neutral point on the wall, he stared there for a long while. Just as Marcella was preparing to push him again, he said, “It’s stupid, but you know, I’ve never really talked about myself.”
That was astonishing. “Ever? To anybody? What about your friend—Becker?”
“Beck was … I don’t know. I guess … we lived the same life, you know? I could talk to him without telling him shit.” He met her eyes again. “Do you understand what I mean?”
He really was trying, she thought yet again. His obvious effort moved her, made concrete the idea that he was a good man at his core—or capable of becoming a good man, at least.
“I think so,” she answered. “Because he knew so much already. You had a shorthand.”
“Yeah, that. So I’m laying here seeing that I’ve never told anybody shit about me. Not even when I was heading to a stint in McAllister. Not even when they made me see the prison shrink. I don’t think I know how to do it.”
“Do you not remember details about the accident?”
“It was a long time ago, but I remember it all. I think I’d have to go senile to forget.”
“So, just tell me what you remember, the way you remember it.”
