Release!:A Walker Brothers Novel (The Walker Brothers Book 1)(19)

Please don’t ask me anymore. I’d told him everything I wanted to reveal.

“Changed how?”

I shrugged. “My mother left, and I had bills to pay.”

“Her bills?”

“The rent was overdue, and I was going to be evicted. At the time, I had no idea where she’d gone. I had to give up every penny I’d saved to keep a roof over my head.”

He frowned. “Why didn’t she tell you, take you with her? My dad was strict, but he would have welcomed you. He wouldn’t have wanted you to be left alone at seventeen. Christ! She just deserted you.”

She’d done much more than that, but I wasn’t going to tell him just how coldhearted my mother had been. What good would it do? “She hated my father, and she despised me. I reminded her of every failure she’d ever had in her life. Her marriage to my dad was one of her big ones, or so she said. I think she had to marry my father because he got her pregnant. My grandparents wouldn’t accept him…or me.” Lord knew I’d heard about how I ruined my mother’s life often enough—her mixed-race child that her parents would never take in.

“Why?”

“He was a laborer, and we were always barely scraping by. But he kept us fed and put a roof over our head.”

Trace looked at me sharply. “You cared about him. You miss him.”

I nodded. “Every single day since he died. I loved him, and he loved me.” I hadn’t known the warmth of parental affection since the day my father had left this earth, and I think I’d always miss it.

“I never really knew Karen,” Trace mused angrily. “None of us knew about you, Eva, or we would have come for you. Honestly, I only met your mother once, and that was at the wedding. All of us were surprised when we found out Dad was getting married. Sebastian and I were in college, and Dane was getting ready to leave, too. I guess Dad was lonely.”

“Why would you feel obligated to help me? You aren’t really family.” The Walkers had no reason to rescue me. Granted, I’d harbored resentment toward anyone with the name Walker, but they’d been just as faultless as I was.

“Because none of us are like your late mother,” he growled, sitting his drink on the table and standing up.

He grasped my hand and pulled me over on the couch with him. The wine still balanced in my hand, I sat reluctantly, letting him pull me closer to his body. I wanted to be there, but I didn’t. His scent filled my senses; his nearness made me want things I could never have.

I sighed as he took my wine glass and set it on the table next to his empty tumbler. For a moment, I let my body sink into his larger form, letting myself believe that he would have helped me, protected me, after my mother had left.

His arms tightened around me, and I laid my head on his shoulder. Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes because he felt so damn good. It had been so long since anyone had actually cared about me.

“Thank you. It’s not your fault that you didn’t know.”

“I didn’t ask, and I hate myself for that.”

Tilting my head, I looked at the stormy expression in his eyes. “Don’t,” I said firmly, putting a hand on his face, reveling in the feel of his whiskered jaw under my fingers. “It’s not your fault, and I’m safe now. I have a job, and a future because of you.”

“Don’t be grateful to me,” he rasped, using his body weight to pin me down on the couch.

My head hit one of the throw pillows, and I stared up at his furious expression, just inches from mine. “I am grateful. How could I not be?” I would very likely be at a homeless shelter somewhere if I hadn’t gone to his office begging for a job.

“I don’t deserve it. I don’t pity you, Eva. I want to fuck you.”

I knew that wrapping my arms around his neck was trouble, but I did it anyway. Fire was licking through my body, incinerating its way straight to my core. “Then do it, because the last thing I want is for you to feel sorry for me,” I whispered, tired of fighting the rampant attraction between the two of us.

The future didn’t matter right now. All I wanted was Trace. I knew I was only here to do a job, but I’d never felt this way about any man before. Carpe diem! Never had that expression meant more to me than right now. I wanted to seize the opportunity I had at the moment and not think about tomorrow.

I saw a flash of something resembling satisfaction as he lowered his mouth to mine. Then, I was lost in a world of crazy desire as our tongues and mouths fused in swirling desperation and insane need.

He kissed like a man possessed by a wild fury he couldn’t control. He held most of his weight off me, but I would have welcomed it. I wanted to climb inside him, feel our bodies meld and merge in the most elemental way.