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“What’s my name?” he asked, his voice dipping seductively low.
My breath lodged in my throat, a surge of heat winding through at what he could truly be asking me. The last time we’d been together—months before my father’s trial, when I’d thought we’d have a future together—he’d given me an order, but after all this time, I didn’t know if it was still in effect. “Do you want your name?” I asked. “Or do you want what I’m supposed to call you?”
The smile he gave me nearly stopped my heart in my chest. Devilishly handsome, my body nearly melted at the sight. “My name, Mare. I want my name … for now.”
“Your name is Ian Marshall.”
His hand came down, nearly engulfing the top of my head in his wide palm as he lightly stroked his fingers over the strands of my hair like one might a pet. “Good girl.”
A shiver stole through me at that phrase.Good girl. I want to be,I realized. Even after all these years apart, I still wanted to be his good girl. God, how I’d fucking missed him—missedthem.
Ian slid his jacket from his shoulders and flipped it, draping it around mine, covering most of my naked skin. “Let’s go,” he ordered. “We’re leaving.”
“Wait,” I called as he headed for the threshold. “I still haven’t gotten paid for the night.”
He stopped at the door, his hand on the knob before shooting me a look over his shoulder. The eyebrow and lip quirk told me what he didn’t say; I wasn’t staying to get paid. Grinding my teeth, I smothered the retort I wanted to fling at him, knowing now wasn’t the time. The door opened and another achingly familiar face leaned in.
“Get the car ready,” Ian said. “We’re getting our girl out of here.”
“You got it, Boss.” Archer’s eyes lifted and met mine. “Hi, Mare.”
“Hi, Archer.” His name was a whisper on my tongue as I clutched Ian’s jacket around my body.Shit. Memories swarmed my mind—soft hands on my skin. Smiles. Sweet kisses with limbs curled around mine.
“You look good,” he said with a soft grin.
I tried to smile back, my lip barely curving as a wave of heartache squeezed my chest in a vise-like grip. “Thanks.”Don’t you dare cry,I ordered myself, but I could already feel the tears welling up.
“Get going,” Ian snapped, shoving Archer back through the door. “Knock twice when you’re ready.” The door clicked shut, and silence settled amidst the tension. Ever so slowly, Ian turned back around. His hands slid into the pockets of his jeans, pulling the fabric tight over his cock. I openly stared, unable to help myself. Memories of how he felt buried inside me silenced the last bits of shock from the attack, and a sensation of safety blanketed me knowing that Ian wasn’t a threat.To me at least.
He ambled closer, walking leisurely—like someone might if they were strolling through a garden at midday. Not exactly like someone walking towards an amateur shot girl in an empty room of the Bottoms Up Gentlemen’s Club.
“I don’t know what you think you’re doing, Mare,” Ian said, voice low enough for just my ears to hear, “but you decided this.Youmade this choice—the boys and I wouldn’t have come back if you’d just kept your pretty little ass where it belonged.”
“Where it belonged?” I repeated, my eyes narrowing. The desire that had started to build halted, my anger replacing it as I continued. “And where exactly is that, Ian?”
“In your apartment,” he replied, as if it was a simple request. It would have been, if my circumstances hadn’t changed so quickly.
“I need to pay my rent, Ian,” I snapped. “Do you really think I want to be in here?” I gestured around. “Because I can assure you I don’t.”There, I thought.That was better.Attitude would make the wimpy bitch who’d missed these men back off. I shoved her towards the back of my mind.They don’t get to waltz in here and think they can go back to what we were at a snap of their fingers. Things had changed.Ihad changed, and I didn’t need them to tell me what to do or not to do.
“I don’t know what you want, Mare,” he said, circling me again—always circling, always toying, a cat versus a mouse. When he stopped just at my back, I refused to turn and look at him. He wasn’t a threat to me, and I refused to let him get to me. “I told you five years ago that I would take care of you—thatwewould—and still, you went to the police when you should’ve come to us.”
“They needed to know what happened,” I said, my voice steady despite the turning of my stomach. As much as I tried to forget, the pained cries of Marco Sanchez echoed in my mind. “They needed to know what I saw.”
“And telling them put you under a lot of heat, didn’t it?” he asked. I could feel his breath against the nape of my neck. His heat worked its way over my skin, like he was branding me with it. Another way of showing me how I was still under his control. “You couldn’t go outside; you couldn’t go home; you couldn’t even meet with old friends after that, could you?”
“Is that what we were?” I challenged. “Just old ‘friends.’” I made air quotes with one hand as I kept his jacket around me with the other.
“What would you call us, Mare?” he whispered, the low tone threaded with a hint of ice. He must have taken his hands out of his pockets because as he spoke, I felt fingers lifting the strands of my hair as his breath continued to move over my skin.
My own breath shuddered out of my chest, goosebumps pebbling over my neck. “I don’t know what I’d call us. I was eighteen! But if I had to throw a label on it, we were fucking naïve is what we were.”
“Right.” His chuckle was soft, no doubt finding my continued defiance arousing. This was our game, Ian and me. Push and pull, the balance of power shifting as I rebelled against him. “And eighteen is perfectly legal.”
“You were twenty-five,” I countered with an eyebrow raise. He couldn’t see me from where he was, but he acknowledged my attitude based on his single laugh. “A twenty-five-year-old with an eighteen-year-old. That would make you what now? Thirty? You’ve aged, Ian.”
His chuckle returned, the sound a rumble against my back as he pressed closer. “Keep talking, Mare,” he whispered. “I want to see just how much trouble you’ll get yourself into before you realize that there’s no getting away now.”
“I’m not trying to get away, now am I?” I sassed.
