Page 82 of Fire for Effect

I didn’t need his social security number. I would find him. Or, more accurately, Agent Sierra would help me find him. Hell, she’d join in.

“It’s creepy when you say things like that,” she said, her body relaxing.

I tugged at her arms, pulling them around my side until she was back in my embrace.

So much for a little cat and mouse in the woods.

I had always, in my head, thought of taking her roughly against the bark of the tree, growling and screaming like a feral animal. Two intense athletes, rough, and predatory, vying for dominance. It was a lust I had built up over the years and suppressed when I was married. Then later, suppressed because she wasn’t interested… or so I thought. Resentment built, when she was within reach, but untouchable. I harbored fantasies of forcing her to enjoy my cock and screwing her to within an inch of her life, weeping my name.

It had been a taste I’d developed with one night stands across the globe.

But I didn’t need it now. All I needed was her.

I wanted to erase the scars on her naked torso, and never, ever see them again.

With her face against my chest, and my arms around her, she felt perfect, and I would create a world around her. I would fix the world to make her life better.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I needed an answer to this.

I needed to know why, in our years of friendship and trust, she kept this from me.

I should have taken a note out of Sierra’s playbook and violated the fuck out of her privacy. What else didn’t I know? Why did it take so long for her to give me this bit of herself.

“I could have helped. I could have listened, at least.” I twisted my fingers into her hair, pulling back on it until her face tilted up towards me. In a small way, I wanted to cause her a little pain. Just a bit, so she understood the devastation that not knowing this detail about her caused inside me. “We were friends, Taz. Close friends. You were my best friend. You are my best friend. That’s something you should have told your friend.”

She pulled away, tilting her head down, but keeping her cheek against my shirt. I unbound my fingers from her hair, and let my hand trace up and down her back.

“Because I didn’t want you to think of me that way.”

“What way?”

She shifted uncomfortably in my arms and was about to pull away again. I could feel it. But I held her tighter, making sure she had no means of escape. Not from this. Not from this conversation, and not from me.

She let out a sigh.

“Like the kind of woman who would let a man hit her.” She slumped, her shoulders sagging, as she went limp. Like that confession had drained it all from her. “You wouldn’t tolerate that kind of weakness. I didn’t want you to treat me like… like that kind of girl.”

“What kind of girl is that?” I had no fucking clue why she’d ever think I’d judge her for this.

“The weak kind,” She whispered. “You hate weakness.”

“I do,” I said, tracing my fingers around what was apparently a stab wound from her ex-husband. I noted its location, vowing to place a wound there on him… but with a serrated knife. “I don’t think you’re weak.”

“I let a man beat me. I never stood up to him. I didn’t…”

“Being hurt by the person you love is not your fault. Being harmed by someone who was meant to take care of you isn’t your fault.”

I had a million things to say. But for another time.

“Being hurt doesn’t make you weak,” I said, tightening my arms because I needed it. I needed to feel her. “Not killing him… well, that’s just a level of character I don’t think I have.”

She laughed. It was small, and sad, but genuine. Just like the rest of her.

I wasn’t joking though. Heath Carlin was a dead man. If he was already dead, then I’d destroy his legacy, and then piss on his grave.

I had to stop my mental check list of all the ways I was going to destroy a man I hadn’t known about until today.

Her head tilted up, and she planted her mouth on mine. Her kiss was deep, aggressive, and oh-so-Taz. Her hands fisted into the collar of my shirt, as she scrambled to pull it up and over my head.

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