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“You’re not drunk,” I continued, doing my best to ignore my body’s traitorous reactions. “Or high,” I shot it at him because I wanted to hurt him. Shame him. It was cruel.
And it worked.
“No, I’m painfully fuckin’ sober.” Something moved in his eyes, something from last night, that vulnerability that broke me.
I sucked in a ragged breath. “You’re not drunk, therefore you arguably have all of your facilities available to you, which means you should’ve known that dragging a woman bodily is not fucking okay,” I continued my voice almost a shrill scream.
Liam advanced with wild eyes.
I scuttled back, even the fearlessness offered by tequila was trumped with a man that was sobriety, a hangover, sex, heartbreak, and death all in one.
“What’s not fucking okay is my woman leaning across a bar, breathing the same air as a man without a soul or morals to trouble him,” he hissed, his breath hot and minty on my face.
“This whole fucking club has neither a soul nor morals,” I threw the words at him even though I didn’t believe them. “And distinguishing the damned members from the redeemed isn’t something that I’m spending my time doing.”
“We’re all damned,” he replied immediately.
“You ensured that,” I spat.
He flinched, but I didn’t notice. I was ready to unleash everything that I’d been holding onto. All my anger. I wanted to make it physical and fucking beat him with it.
“You were a coward,” I hissed. “Not coming home to us because you were scared. You’re a fucking coward now too.”
“I know,” he agreed.
I blinked, losing a little bit of my fuel.
He continued to advance. “I’m a coward. Not because I was afraid of coming home. But afraid of not having a home after what I’d become. You are my home, Peaches.” He stopped just shy of my body, not touching me.
“You were my North Star, my fucking guiding light, every day, every hour, every fucking moment. From the day I left you, ‘til that night in the alley.”
The words were as effective as a punch to the chest at winding me.
All of those words I’d wanted to fling fell flat.
I stared at him.
I devoured him with my eyes, need pulsating through my core. I itched to rip his clothes off, to fuck all of my pain into him.
“If I were an honorable man, I’d walk out that door,” he rasped, hands clenched beside him, staring beyond me to the door.
Silenced pulsated between us, as though it were a living thing. It scratched at my skin, tore at the flesh. My thighs clenched at my carnal response to the pain.
To Liam.
“I’m no longer an honorable man,” he finished.
“Thank god,” I breathed.
I don’t know who moved first. But I know I ran to him, jumped on him.
I know he caught me.
Then he kissed me.
Then he unraveled me.
It was late.
I was sober.
Kind of.
Because if I was completely sober, I wouldn’t have spoken into the darkness, with Liam’s arms around me, his breathing and tight body telling me he wasn’t sleeping either.
“I was afraid that I would miss you my entire life,” I whispered against his chest. “That I’d always be broken.” I traced the lines of ink and scars.
“You won’t have to miss me again,” he promised. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I didn’t look at him. “Yes, I’ll always miss you, whatever happens here.”
“Jesus,” he croaked out. “Can you stop talking like that?”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like I’m…”
“Dead?” I finished for him.
He flinched.
“It’s a hard habit to break,” I whispered. I stared into the night. “I want to know it all,” I continued. “I need to know it all.”
His entire body tightened.
“But I can’t,” I finished. “Not now. For whatever reason. Because I’m weak. Because I’m selfish. Because I need to pretend that I have Liam with me in the place I’m being held prisoner.”
His hands went to my hair, ran through the curls that were coming back after getting it chemically straightened. He didn’t speak for a long time. “I’m selfish too,” he said, voice a rasp. “Because I don’t want you to be let go. I fuckin’ want to be your jailer. Want to make sure you can’t leave this. Me. I want it and I convince myself it’s for the club.”
I froze.“You want me to be a prisoner with you?”
He moved me so I was on top of him, straddling him. I let out a gasp as his cock rubbed against my naked skin. “I want you any way I can have you.”
And he did have me.
Every way he could.
Chapter Fifteen
I thought I’d escaped successfully. Well, with a reasonably deep gash in my arm from scaling the wall and making an ungraceful plummet to the earth, but in the grand scheme of things, scraping your arm while escaping from an outlaw MC’s compound is the absolute best-case scenario.
I should’ve known better than to hope, in my world at least, there is no such thing as a best-case scenario.
