Page 52 of Vengeance

“Yeah, I’m fine. I have to go. I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” Dallas says, his voice breaking a bit but not making eye contact with anyone. She can’t decide whether it’s a good or bad sign for her.

“Is everything good?” Psycho asks. “Do you need help with something?”

She shakes her head and lets him pull her outside. “Thanks for not humiliating me in front of everyone,” she mutters once the door shuts.

Stopping dead in his tracks, he turns to face her. “What does that mean?”

“I just mean that you had a perfect opportunity to tell everyone not only what we did, especially with the evidence in your pocket, but also what I said.”

“You really think I’d do that?”

The old you? No. The version of you I left? Yes. “Maybe.”

“Then why the fuck would you ask me to marry you?”

Her eyes search his, and it’s not anger she sees. No, she sees pain. “Let’s go to your apartment to talk.”

Without a word, he walks to her car and holds the door open like he used to. He hops on his bike and leads her to his apartment like she doesn’t remember where he lives. Where, as far as he knows, she’s only been there the one time she helped bring the things he bought and couldn’t fit in his bike. The truth is, she drives by his apartment at least once a day, praying she sees no sign of a woman with him.

She parks outside and gets lost in thought until he opens the door. Shaking her head, she gives him a small smile. “Thanks.”

Dallas still doesn’t say a word as he leads her into the building and up to the third-floor apartment. The silence makes her nervous, and she wants to rewind time to take the comment back. Maybe he only sees her as someone he wants to screw but not commit to again. Maybe there’s just too much pain to get past.

Unlocking the door, he walks into the kitchen and grabs a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. He pours them each a glass and hands one to her.

“Okay, I need an explanation.”

“About why I suggested we get married again?” Kimberly asks, taking the glass from him.

“Yes, but also why you thought I’d do something to humiliate you. To hurt you in the clubhouse. Why the hell would you want to marry someone you think would do that?”

Sighing, she looks at the glass in her hands. “Because the man you became, the man I left, would have. You would have embarrassed me to put me in my place. To remind me that it was my decision to walk away in the first place, and it was my fault. But the man I married decades ago never would have. And the man in front of me reminds me more of the man I fell in love with and less like the man I walked away from.”

“You didn’t stick by me, Kimmy. It got tough, and you took off. Losing you was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

“Leaving wasn’t easy for me, but you weren’t you, Dallas. You became this new person who didn’t care what anyone thought or felt. Especially me. And you pushed me so far away that I barely recognized the man who rarely slept in the bed next to me.”

He sips the amber liquid and shakes his head. “That’s really how you felt?”

“I lost you long before I left you. I tried. Talking, begging, and even manipulation. I tried to trick you into becoming the man I needed, and you just... you dismissed me. What I felt and needed didn’t matter. All that matter was the damn club, and you refused to see reason. The only option I had left to have any remotely decent existence was leaving. As much as I hated it, it hurt more to stay.”

“Kimmy... I don’t know what to say.”

Tears fall from her eyelashes. “I lost you long before I left you, and being without you has been the hardest time in my entire life. I love you with every ounce of my being, but if I’d stayed, we would’ve exploded. We would have done irreparable damage to each other. I couldn’t keep fighting when you weren’t willing to fight with me. The man I love would have done everything to keep me, and you just let me go. You never fought, Dallas.”

Resting his hands on the counter, he shifts and leans forward, taking a step backward to look at the floor of the kitchen. “For so many years, I blamed you. That you’d given up on me, but with a lot of shit lately, I see the truth. I didn’t realize I’d given up on us first. For some fucked up reason, so many of us do that, and then we get angry because the women we love can’t hold down a marriage by themselves.”

“What are you talking about?”

“TK and Karmen got back together, but it took him as long as it did me to see he was the problem, not her.”

Her eyebrows raise. Karmen cheated with another founding member of the club, and TK blames himself? That’s an unexpected turn of events. “I don’t think we’re talking apples to apples here.”

“She did it for his attention. He stopped seeing her, and after that, he stopped hearing her, too. I don’t know if I could get over the cheating like he did, but he knows it was a desperate attempt.”

“Huh. She must’ve been more desperate than I was.”

“Lex left Colt, too.”

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