Page 69 of Demons

Shock was not the word I needed here. There was so much more happening right now inside me that I had no way to define it.

“You GAVE me a house?”

He chuckled then, and the sound was both unnerving and darkly addictive. “Well, maybe not gave. Maeme wouldn’t have been on board with that. I presented you with a house you could afford.”

Maeme. How did he know the lady I rented from?

“I don’t understand. I need more.”

He took a step in my direction. “Maeme owns the house—or rather, the Salazar family controls the homes on that side of town. She made that one available for rent—for you only.”

My eyes widened. Maeme was a Salazar. She’d never given me a last name. I paid my rent to G & M Properties via an electric withdrawal every month.

“Maeme is related to King?”

He nodded once. “His grandmother. Her husband bought up most of that section of town years ago. She leases properties under the corporation he set up to handle it—G & M,” he said with a touch of amusement. He knew I’d recognize where I sent my monthly rent money. “Gabriel and Maeme,” he added. “Her late husband’s name and hers.”

Did King know this? Was he letting me be … stalked? Was that what this would be considered? I shook my head. I couldn’t make sense of this. Why would Thatcher do all this? If he was going to stalk someone, then wouldn’t he have chosen some female that was … well, not me? I wasn’t his type.

“Can we eat now?” he asked.

Eat? How was I supposed to eat? I’d been living in a house for seven years that he had access too. How many times had he been inside?

I took the chair he’d pulled out and sat down. The burger smelled good, but the emotional chaos going on in my head was controlling my appetite. I wasn’t hungry. I was … leaning more on the side of terrified.

“Thatcher?”

“Yes?”

“Do you stalk me?”

He sat down across from me, grinning as if I’d just told him a joke. The question did seem absurd, considering who he was and who I was, but still. It was a valid one.

“I protect you.”

He seemed to be big on that description. Protecting me was something he truly thought he had been doing.

“Why?” I asked. “Why protect me?”

He picked up his glass and met my gaze. “You’re the only one who eases me. I need you safe.”

Eases him? Was I ever going to get a direct answer that I understood from this man?

“How do I ease you?”

He took a drink from his glass, then set it down. “My entire life, I’ve had little emotion. I see others have it, but that never came for me. My own mother rarely comes around me. When I did feel, it was always heavy, uncomfortable, often brutal. But you … you settle the stirrings in my chest that I don’t want. When you’re near, I get peace.”

My hands clenched and unclenched in my lap. I took a deep breath and held his gaze.

For a moment, he’d looked like a lost boy. When he’d spoken of his mother, there had been a pain that flickered in his eyes even though I knew he wouldn’t want me to notice it. The man sitting across from me looked nothing like a boy, and thinking of the fact that he had once been a kid, a child, I saw him differently.

He had been struggling with things all his life, but no one seemed to care or take notice that he might need help. They knew. King knew. His own brother knew. They’d all warned me. But why did they not help him? Why was it they acted fearful of him if they cared for him? The women he brought in and fucked, then tossed out, did they not see this? Question why he was this way?

“I heard you—or rather her,” I told him. “It’s why I left. I had come to look for you and talk about the night before. In my room. But you were with someone else. Already. The very next day. I can’t do that. You were right. I am boring and unexperienced. I can’t do things with you like we did, then watch you turn around and screw some other woman. Bringing me here won’t change that. Eventually, we will have to go back, or they will find us.”

He leaned back in his chair as he listened to me. Like most times, it was hard to read what he was thinking. He had the ability to close off his expressions so well that you thought he felt nothing. But he did. I knew he did.

“You shouldn’t have left me.”

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