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Then he took my hand, bringing my fingers to his lips. “I’m not hurt, sweetbelle poupée.”
“Then what is on your face?” I knew the answer. It was dried blood. Calling me beautiful doll in French wasn’t going to cut it. He couldn’t ply me with compliments and expect I wouldn’t ask questions.
“Don’t ask about my world, Delaney. You won’t like the answers.”
“It would seem I’m a part of your world now.”
He rubbed my knuckles across his lips several times and I shuddered. “You are right, but only to a point. I did what I needed to do in order to find information.”
“Does that mean you learned something?”
“Enough to know I don’t like what’s happening. I also discovered what you went through in Los Angeles is likely because of my world.”
There was also blood on his clothes. I jerked my hand away, trying not to be horrified. He’d saved my life. I knew it. I felt it. Yet the horror of noticing he had blood splattered on his clothing meant he’d harmed another human being. Or worse.
“You killed someone,” I said more in passing than a normal human being would do. Maybe I was partially immune to the knowledge regarding his lifestyle. Violence. Savagery. Blood sport. Whatever he chose to call it, some of his punishments ended in murder.
He took his time placing his weapon on the coffee table next to my wine then removing his jacket, neatly folding it over the back of the couch. While he wasn’t wearing a tie, his crisp dark blue shirt was still far too formal for the tee shirt and shorts I’d worn all day. The dichotomy of who we were as human beings was ever present.
I had a love of life.
He couldn’t care less about death.
Blood and gore, his methods of play. Mine was makeup, leather, and lace.
There was too much of a difference in our worlds and our personalities.
But watching him slowly unfastening his sleeves, rolling them over his elbows was about as sexy of an action a man could take.
“I don’t take kindly to betrayal.”
“So you killed a man. You threatened Quince as well. Didn’t you?”
The smirk was almost coy. I wanted to be sick to my stomach, but a tiny part of me remained enthralled that he’d taken such a strong action. For me. The girl who wore braids down her back and had been forced to wear a misshapen, uglier-than-sin school uniform for half her life.
The girl who had braces until she was almost fourteen, the one who stared at him with huge puppy dog eyes.
Now the hunger in his heated gaze was almost all I could think about.
“I have my answer. Why? Oh, wait. Are you going to threaten every man who talks to me with breaking their legs if they do so again?”
“I do what’s necessary.”
“So I heard. By the way, Quince fired me as a client. I make him hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and the man fired me because of you. You must have a powerful threat. Now, you didn’t answer me. Did you kill someone?”
“Is that what you really want to know? The specifics? Do you really want me to tell you about the moment the life vanished from his eyes? Or about the loss of blood?”
“I… don’t know.” He was trying to terrify me on purpose, turning me away from him. It had worked well before, but I couldn’t just turn off my feelings any longer. “That doesn’t scare me any longer.”
Oh, God. I was one crazy bitch. A man like him could never love someone like me.
“It should terrify you. But good answer, my perfect doll. You don’t need to learn such things. Just know that you will be safe under my protection.”
“But that’s it. Right?” Why did the question slip from my mouth? Was I trying to embarrass myself? “Bodyguard and nothing more.”
“What happened between us should never have occurred.”
“What we shared was nothing more than a mirage, a fantasy gone wrong. A distant memory.”
