Devil You Know(Lost Boys Book 1)(86)

“How the hell are you so quiet being as big as you are?”

“I can’t protect you if you walk off.”

“You can’t protect me if you are too busy flirting with the locals either.” Did I just say that out loud? I was grateful for his muteness so I wouldn’t have to hear his thoughts on that.

“Jealous?”

“Now you decide to speak. Is it going to be like this from now on with you? Having to drag the answers out of you? It is really rather exhausting.”

His demeanor changed in an instant, but it was the devastation buried in those eyes that had the air stilling in my lungs. “You could have died.”

“But I didn’t.”

“I lost focus and you were the one who paid.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“It’s a fact.”

“So the plan now is to ignore me?”

He moved so close I inhaled the air he exhaled. “I’ve tasted you. I’ve been buried inside you. I know the sounds you make when my cock is driving into you and the look on your face when you come. Staying away had been hard when it was the memory of us I was battling, but your taste is still on my tongue. I’m ignoring you because otherwise I’ll give in.”

“What’s wrong with giving in?”

“I know how it feels to lose someone, I’m not losing you too.”

Rocked to my core by that statement I had no words.

“Ready?” he asked.

He didn’t wait for an answer and led me back to the car. It was me who stayed silent. He had lost someone, someone important. Not his mother or father, surely he wouldn’t shed a tear for them. So if not them, who? The fallen soldier he had mentioned? Based on the pain I heard in his voice, I didn’t think so. It was love and lost I heard and I knew how that sounded because I had been there. So it was likely a woman. He had never discussed the years we were apart, not personal things anyway. Was it possible he too had found someone, but unlike me she had meant something to him? I wanted to ask whom he had lost, but if he wanted me to know he would have shared. His unwillingness to share something that would bring me pain further suggested to me it was a woman. I went right to my room when we got home and spent the night coming to terms with the idea that Damian had loved another. I knew how he felt about me, but for a time he had loved another. It hurt, it fucking killed, knowing that he had loved someone else and it gutted knowing he had lost her. But under the pain there was contentment because he hadn’t been alone, he had been happy, at least for a little while. It was more than I could say for myself.



“You were the one who said we needed to have a presence in town. Dinner with the Sharptons gives us a presence.” I was in danger of actually morphing into Scarlet O’Hara with the number of times I had adopted her tomorrow is another day philosophy in the past week, but I couldn’t think about Damian and the woman he had lost. It was in the past but the pain was very real for me in the present. I pushed it as far back in my mind as possible and fell back on the humor I had once sought comfort in after Dad had died. To laugh instead of cry and with how I was feeling I should have my own stand-up show.

Damian grumbled at me and it was like I asked the man to walk over hot coals while watching Pride and Prejudice with my mom. It was dinner, one we didn’t have to cook.

“We won’t stay super long.”

No answer.

“I understand why you’ve resorted back to conserving your words like someone squirreling rations away for the zombie apocalypse, but if you spoke to me I wouldn’t have been so eager to accept their invitation. You have only yourself to blame.”

He was annoyed, but he said nothing—big surprise—and reached for the keys before holding the door for me. It was while we were in the car that I asked, “What is the significance of your tattoo?”

His head jerked to me in surprise. “Why do you think there’s a significance?”

“A man like you doesn’t mark himself, especially not that severely, without a reason.”

The lines around his eyes and mouth softened a bit. I was guessing because I was right and he liked that I knew him so well. “I heard it enough growing up. I embraced it.”

Now I was the one who was pissed. I turned more toward him as I worked to control the anger his matter-of-fact statement caused. “Your mother.”

“Yes.”

I knew his mother was vile, but to call him the devil? “Why did she call you the devil?”

“She hated my father and since I was his son.”

I curled my hands into fists, my nails digging into my palms. “How old were you when she started calling you the devil?”