Page 44 of Red Flag Bull

I turn back to the room I walked through. The huge bedroom with the massive bathroom and a large, room-sized closet attached. There’s very little color, and the few framed artworks are so familiar to me, they make the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

Jason’s remodeled master suite must take up the whole top floor. I can’t even picture where my room used to be, but when I turn back to the vast lake, all I can think about is how awful it was to feel so alone in such a beautiful place. And how Jason changed all of that.

The guy who watched everything, learning every detail so he could use it to his advantage. The guy known about town for taking what he wanted… took me.

He thought I was to his advantage.

The girl everyone else cast aside.

He wanted me.

I walk back inside and stand before the largest framed picture. I trail my fingers over the bright, textured painting as I study how such a heavy piece has been hung.

It’s an entire wall from inside my old closet. Cut from the house and lovingly displayed as a masterpiece in the bedroom of the man I love. The wall I painted in secret, with stolen supplies from the worksite down the street, because I was forbidden to make that kind of worthless mess in the house.

The children look so happy playing their games on his wall, and my heart is going to fucking burst with the amount of emotion crashing through me. He bought my house and kept my painting. He may have wanted to torture me all these years, but he hasn’t stopped loving me.

Because he doesn’t know the worst of it all.

Jason walks up behind me and drapes a soft blanket around my shoulders. “You’re shivering.” He picks me up and carries me downstairs to a big, warm kitchen-dining-living space with a fire roaring in the hearth. He tucks me into the corner of the couch in front of the fireplace and covers me with another blanket, before walking away to remove a whistling kettle from the stove.

The blankets fall to my feet when I stand to face him. “I didn’t have a choice.”

He looks me over. “If you’d rather stay cold, you’re going the right way about it. Seems like a choice to me.”

I sigh and pull one of the blankets back around me before joining him in the kitchen. “I wasn’t talking about you, trying to warm me up.”

“I know.” He pulls out a stool for me, and I sit on it.

He pours two cups of an herbal concoction that smells incredible, and slides one in front of me before he sits too. “You’re very naked,” he says, letting his eyes take their fill, before he blows across the top of his tea.

“You’re pleasantly naked-ish as well,” I point out, not caring to hide my fascination with the marks on his chest. He looks good without a shirt. Jeans and muscle and skin that tells the story of his life without the need for a single word.

My name is branded on his body in permanent ink.

The tally of years I’ve caused him pain are right there too.

How many more will I make him add before the end?

“I should tell you why I couldn’t stay,” I say.

“I know why you left.” He doesn’t meet my gaze.

The air leaves my lungs in a rush. “You do?”

“Sure,” he says, without looking up from his tea. “What we had was too good to be true. The fantasy had to end sometime. Summer was over before I was ready, but I knew there’d be a time when your snooty family would take you back to your rich, luxurious life, and I’d become the story you’d giggle about to your friends, at your fancy art school. I’d be that guy you went slumming with so you could learn how nasty men from the mountains liked to fuck. I knew you were out of my league when I held you to the dirt and fucked your pretty cunt, Princess. I was your shameful, dirty hobby for the summer, but there was no place for me in your life away from here. I understood.”

I shake my head. “No. You didn’t,” I say with sincerity. “You don’t.”

“Yes, I do, Amanda. What else was a poor little rich girl to do when summer came to an end?” He smiles sadly. “She couldn’t very well marry the lowly thief who couldn’t give her the life she deserved, no matter what promises they made under the full moon. We were young, and I was stupid to believe anything different.”

“You weren’t stupid.”

“Oh, I was,” he says with a cold laugh. “The amount of effort it took to reach the front steps of your gated fucking castle, only to have your mom sit me down on her plush sofa and give me pitiful looks, while she explained that you already left for Europe, for some prestigious art program after you’d manipulated your dad to cough up tuition fees?—”

“She told you that?”

Jason slams his cup down, spilling pink tea. “Yeah, she fucking told me. And hurt as I was that you left without saying goodbye, I was happy for you. Happy you’d realized your worth. That even if he needed his hand to be forced, your dad was supporting your passions. Knowing you were happy lessened the sting of your absence, because I knew it was best for you. I told myself that loving you was letting you go. That, if it was meant to be, maybe you’d come find me again — if you wanted. But you never did. Until now.”

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