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I tear my mouth from his, searching his face. “What’s wrong?”
“We need to talk about this scar on my face.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Candace
We need to talk about the scar on his face.
I don’t know what this is about, or why it’s happening now, but my fingers immediately rest on that scar. “I don’t need you to do this.”
“You do. And so do I. But I’m not trying to scare you off. Fuck.” His fingers close around my hair, but it’s not aggressive. It’s more like he’s hanging on for dear life. “I’m terrified I’m about to scare you off.”
Terrified.
This man, terrified.
“Don’t be,” I say. “You won’t scare me off. You can’t. I told you—”
He kisses me again, this time hard and fast. “Tell me they have whiskey in this place.”
“There’s a bar off the kitchen. Yes, we have one of those, too.”
“Good. Thank Fuck.” He releases me, runs a hand over his head and then scans to find the hallway he rightly decides leads to the kitchen. He heads in that direction and I follow, cutting through it to the small pantry-sized bar area.
By the time I get there, Rick has four mini bottles of bourbon on the counter, but he hasn’t opened them. He presses his hands to the bar and lowers his chin to his chest, torment radiating from him. I close the space between us and slide under his arm, placing myself between him and the counter. And when he lifts those blazingly fierce blue eyes to mine and blasts me with his torment, my hands go to his face. “You can’t scare me away.”
“I don’t know if that’s true or not, Candace. But one thing this night taught me was that my past will catch up to us. You deserve to know what that means. And I’m not going to drink that whiskey. Because you deserve to have me fully present for this.”
“We can drink it together after you tell me.”
He closes his hand around mine and kisses my fingers. “You always say the right thing.”
“Because it’s you. Someone else might think it’s the wrong thing. That’s because we’re—”
“Connected,” I say. “Yes. We are. In ways, you may never escape.”
“I don’t want to escape.”
“Good. Because I’d have to become your secret protector or stalker if you did. And to maturely protect you while watching you with another man, would be about as successful as asking The Rock to play Cinderella.”
“The Rock is actually funny. He might be able to pull that off in a silly—”
He kisses me. “Don’t run away,” he whispers, the words rasping from his lips, on a breath that is both warm and somehow icy cold.
“I’m not going anywhere.” I push on his chest and force his gaze to mine. “Tell me. Get it over with right now. Just say it.”
“That easy? Just say it?”
“That’s right. You aren’t a man to mince words. Don’t start now. Who cut you and why?”
He draws in a deep breath, that perfect chest of his expanding and the set of that strong jaw tightening to a near burst. He gives me a sudden nod and then steps back from me, leaning on the wall opposite the counter, the space between us small. The space is small. This is good. We’re here, me and him, and no one else. And I want him to know that I’m his safe place. He needs one. Even the big bad killer that he is needs a safe place.
His foot goes to the wall behind him. His hand scrubs the full-day stubble on that tensed jaw. And then, only then, does he breathe out that breath he’s been holding. “It was a job taking out a Venezuelan official. A hit on a bad man. Of that I’m certain. But that bad man had a small child.”
“Oh my,” I whisper when I don’t mean to. It just comes out.
“Yes. Oh fucking my,” he murmurs. “I killed the man and I feel no guilt over that. It wasn’t until he was dead that me and my team—there were three of us—got the call to kill the child, his child. He was ten.”
“And?” I ask, my voice so small, it’s barely more than a pin drop in a silent night, that may or may not, be your imagination.
“I did what you would have wanted me to do, baby. I tried to save him. There were three of us there that day, all of us under Tag’s employ. All of us working a job that was off the books but directed by whoever was in charge in the US government. Me, Wes Casey, and his wife, Lily Casey. I raced to the boy’s room. I got there just after Lily.”
“And?”
“She was already in the room. She had him and was about to slice his throat. I grabbed her and she sliced my face. I held a blade to her throat. I could have killed her. She agreed to let the boy go.”
