I slowly sank to the bed beside her. Protected could mean a lot of things. Mafia, either ours or the Russians or maybe the Chinese? Or just friends in very high places? Either way, if that was true then we couldn’t trust anyone. I sighed. “Then you need to disappear,” I said. “If you stay quiet, they’ve got no reason to come after you, as long as they don’t think you’re going to the cops. You can go somewhere new, start a new life….”#p#分页标题#e#
She blinked at me. “We just let them get away with it?”
My heart sank. There’s nothing like seeing wide-eyed innocence to make you realize how jaded you’ve gotten. She actually believed that bad guys went to jail. “Yeah,” I said sadly. “We let them get away with it.” Seeing the dismay break across her face, I wanted so bad for the world to be like she’d imagined it, for every last bad guy to be behind bars. Even though I’d be one of them.
I saw her shoulders rise, just once, like the tremor before an earthquake. Tears were close...and that made something stir inside me, something I hadn’t been counting on. I wanted to rip what remained of her clothes off, sure, but this was deeper. I really couldn’t bear to see her cry.
“Sorry,” she said, starting to blink. “Just...I keep thinking about my step-dad. I lived under his roof for years, and all that time...that’s all I ever was to him. He never loved me. I was just a thing to him, to be sold. That’s all I was!”
The anger boiled up inside me: rage at her step-dad that felt all too familiar. I knew what it was like to be betrayed. Before I knew what I was doing, I had my finger under her chin and I was tilting her face up to look at me. “Hey!” I snapped. When she was looking right into my eyes, I said, “Listen to me. You’re not someone’s fucking property. You’re worth more than your step-dad or the bikers or that Volos fucker, or anyone else. You’re fucking priceless. And don’t let anyone tell you different.”
I was at least as surprised as she was by the steel in my voice, like I was telling some fucker to put his gun down. The thought of her crying had just brought it out of me.
But it worked. She blinked back the tears, nodded and gave a hesitant, embarrassed little smile. It hit me like a sucker punch in the chest: a smile that would make a man’s whole day. Damnit! Why did she have to have one of those smiles? I could feel myself teetering on the very brink of self control. All I had to do was lean forward and my lips would be right on hers.
I stood up and turned my back on her. “Get some sleep,” I grunted.
10
Annabelle
I nodded quickly, climbed into bed and pulled the covers over me. Then I lay there on my side facing the window, trying to get myself under control. I was a mess: part of me still wanted to cry; part of me was scared; part of me just wanted him. Despite everything that was going on, I was into him. Really into him. In fact, he might be the first guy I really was into. All through school, the other girls had chattered about clean-cut boy bands and then quarterbacks and then movie stars. And sure, some of them had been good looking but I’d always thought there was something wrong with me because they’d always left me cold.
Carrick? He set me on freakin’ fire.
It occurred to me that maybe there hadn’t been something wrong with me at all. Maybe I’d just been around boys—some of them grown-up boys, but still boys. Maybe I’d just needed to meet a man.
It wasn’t just the muscles or the tattoos or even that gorgeous face. There was a confidence about him. Like he’d seen every horrible thing life could possibly come up with and nothing could phase him, anymore. Except….
Except when he looked at me.
When he looked at me, that coldness in his eyes disappeared for a second and he looked like the guy I’d first met. Did that mean I could help him regain what he’d lost?
I lifted my head just a little. He was over by the window, with his back to me. As I watched, he turned off the light and then lifted one corner of the drapes to look outside. The overhead bulb lit up the Hell’s Princes insignia that covered his shoulders and the whole muscled hardness of his upper back. I could just make out another tattoo, as well, lower down, so small it was easy to miss: a shamrock. I found myself tracing the lines of his back.#p#分页标题#e#
When I closed my eyes again, my mind was filled by an image of his chest, the pecs broad and huge. When he’d strode out of the shower surrounded by steam, as if walking right out of hell itself, I hadn’t been able to take my eyes off of it. Those smooth slabs of muscle looked so solid, so hard….