Page 13 of Monster Bully

He smiled at her, but it was one of those smiles where he seemed to know what he was doing, and he liked it. “And what is it I’m doing?” he asked.

“You know how I feel about you. You know I love you more than anything on this earth, and I can’t just switch off those emotions. You know this and yet…”

“Yet what?”

“You ask what you did at dinner?”

“Eve, you keep asking me for a divorce but it seems to me you don’t know exactly what you want. Divorce is final. It will stop you from being mine but it also stops me from being yours. Do you really want that?”

“See, you’re doing it again.” She pointed her spoon at him. “You know I don’t like this. I don’t like any of this. You made me … have feelings for you, and now…” She couldn’t finish.

“And now?” Grim asked.

She shook her head and shoved her spoon back into her mint-chocolate-chip ice cream.

“Eve?”

“And now I don’t know how to leave. Don’t you see what’s happening? You lied to me. You manipulated me and now … now, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to think. Is any of this real, or did you manipulate all of it to suit your own desires?”

“You know that is not true.”

“How is it not true? I don’t know who you are.” She shrugged. “I know what I think and I know what I saw.”

“And they cannot be one and the same?” he asked.

She didn’t know how to answer that.

“Is it wrong for me to be good to you because you deserve it? No one out there does. I don’t trust anyone but you. I know what it’s like out there and you don’t trust anyone.”

“Why can’t you?” Eve asked.

“Don’t be foolish. It does not become you.”

She glared at him, and suddenly her appetite for the ice cream was banished. She put the lid on top of the ice cream, shoved the spoon in her mouth, and placed the tub back into the freezer. “Well, I certainly wouldn’t want you to be in the company of a foolish person.”

“Eve, that’s not what I meant.”

“No, but then you do think I’m an idiot, which is why you’ve kept your true self hidden from me the past year.”

She put the spoon and her cup into the kitchen sink, and was able to avoid him all the way up to her bedroom.

Grim didn’t follow her, and she didn’t know if she was happy or sad about that.

Chapter Five

Grim was not in the best of moods as he stared at the sniveling peace of crap that begged for forgiveness. He had absolutely no feeling toward this man who curled up in a ball and begged and pleaded with him to show mercy.

First, he was tired. He didn’t like fighting with Eve, and he certainly didn’t like having cross words with her, and knowing he did irritated him.

Since she had become his wife, he had not slept anywhere else other than by her side. Eve fit perfectly in his arms, and in the past few days he’d not gotten much sleep. That tiredness was making him even less tolerant than usual.

This man before him wasn’t some loser who had lost a lot of money, or even a drug user. No, this man had been caught attempting to abduct a child in broad daylight. His men had been running an errand when they saw this man snatch the child out of her wheelchair, and tried to run away with her. Grim didn’t even want to think of what would have happened to the child if his men hadn’t been in the area.

He didn’t like that a child-snatcher was running his streets. Already, he had reached out to discover there had been a couple of child kidnappings within the past few weeks. Not too many to raise suspicion but enough for Grim to know someone was attempting to run a child-trafficking business.

“Who do you work for?” Grim asked.

He couldn’t be thinking about his wife when he had to deal with this filth.

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