Page 32 of Savage Guardian

Like Aoibheal’s career. So why had Carrie brought her sister along if she could ruin Carrie’s opportunity for fame and fortune?

Why did you trust your brother to take care of Shannon in L.A. while you were helping Da in New York?

But…that didn’t sound like Fae, not the same Fae who stammered when she first met him. Not the Fae who looked so lost and lonely reading her MC smut in the diner. Not the Fae who spoke fluent Gaelic and constantly surprised him with her intelligence and humor.

Then again, his own brother had been someone he thought he knew. Someone he could trust. Someone he would have died or killed for. In the end, though, jealousy had rotted the fruit of their family tree, and his brother turned on him, betraying him. For a woman.

He remembered that look Fae threw Carrie on that first day, a look that spoke of anger and jealousy. A look Hawk had immediately recognized and questioned. But rather than approach Fae with wariness, he’d easily pushed that first inkling of unease aside…and forgotten about it. Until now.

Was his first impression of Fae the right one? Had he been taken in by her stutter, her guileless eyes, and coy expressions, and fallen into the same trap Carrie was talking about?

He liked to believe he was better than that, that he’d learned his lesson from the pain and humiliation of his own past. But had he?

Unable to speak for the boulder lodged in his throat, Hawk could only listen as Carrie carried on.

“Fae has always been a little…jealous of me, ya know? When her mom died, she finally got all of daddy’s attention, and she just soaked it all up. He spoiled her, gave her everything she wanted, even emptying his savings account to pay for her to go to some fancy school in New York. The really sad thing is, she didn’t even use the money for school. She used it on some dumb business idea that flopped, which is why she’s still living at home. When her dad married my mom, and she had to share her daddy with us, she hated it. Took every opportunity to turn her dad against us. It doesn’t work, though, because he can see right through her.”

“What business?” he asked, storing the rest of her words away to digest later.

Carrie shrugged. “Some weird greeting card thing—but let’s not talk about her anymore. I want to talk about you,” she purred, curling up in his lap to press her cheek against his chest. His dick, which normally would have been hard and ready to go, was limp. There was a gorgeous, willing woman in his lap, but he didn’t want her.

And he certainly didn’t want to talk about himself, not when his thoughts were already rife with the tainted seeds of old memories.

Lifting her gently, he set her down beside him on the couch and leaned away from her, putting distance between them.

Why distance? What happened to being obsessed with meeting her and wooing her, and making her your old lady?Good question.

Something happened between the time he’d knocked on her hotel suite door that first time and when he actually met her. She’d gone from the voice he’d fallen for to an actual person he could meet, touch, and seduce. But from that first moment he’d set eyes on her, things warped. And he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what. He just knew that the urgency, the yearning, the desire for there to be more between him and his Aoibheal was gone.

No…it hadshifted.

To Fae.

The same woman he’d just hurt on purpose.

“Why don’t you go get dressed?” Hawk suggested, hoping to take his mind off things he shouldn’t be thinking.

Carrie’s pout turned to a smirk. “You taking me somewhere, sexy?”

He wanted to roll his eyes, but he refrained. “You feel like going someplace for breakfast?” Not that he was actually hungry. One look at the hurt in Fae’s eyes and his stomach had turned to lead.

Carrie’s pout returned. “Don’t you have a strip club—and a bar, and-and…what about the whorehouse? Couldn’t we go to one of those?”

She wanted to go to Sex & Candy?

“You want to go to the bordello?” he asked, his brow pinching. “What would we do there?”

Her smile turned wicked, her eyes going hooded. “I can think of a few things I’d like to try. I heard they have a BDSM room….”

For fuck’s sakes! He did not want to take her to the Black Room—or the bordello at all. And what interest could a woman who wrote and sang a song called “Gentle Heart Lover” have in a strip club and rowdy biker bar?

Just admit it, the reality of her is not as good as the fantasy.He could fucking say that again.

What a fucking day.

Slamming his front door shut behind him, Hawk stomped through his house to his kitchen, where he emptied his pants’ pockets, and strode to the fridge to grab a beer. Popping the lid, he turned to look out the windows over this sink, not really seeing anything through the haze of things in his head. It was the haze that had kept him from heading to his room at the clubhouse, where he would have to deal with the raucousness of his brothers and their bullshit. He needed the quiet of his own digs, so he’d headed to the small three-bedroom cottage he’d bought and fixed up five years ago. It was an investment, as he’d planned to rent it out. Once he was done gutting it and updating it, he figured that having a place of his own outside the compound might be a good idea.

And he was right. He had the cottage in Vegas, the cabin on Lake Mead, and a manor house in Keswick he’d inherited from his paternal grandfather, the previous Earl of Kentweith. Yeah, he was born nobility, but he didn’t give a shit about all that. Much to his father’s displeasure.

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