Page 36 of Raiden

She stares at me incredulously. “Buying me for what?”

“I don’t know. You don’t even have to know. He already had plans, I can promise you that. Zale does nothing without thinking about it. For years, he made this place a great club. He took it over from his father and built something good. Transformed this warehouse into our clubhouse and did a lot of good for this community. But he’s always,alwaysbeen a planner and he’s always known what he wanted.”

“Yeah? What was that?”

“More. He never knew when to stop.”

For once, I take a hint. I’m sensitive to the tightening of Widow’s lips and the stubborn hardness in the tilt of her chin that tells me she doesn’t want to keep talking about this. I change the subject, bringing us back around to the bastard who wronged her. It might not be in my power to make this right, but I’d throw some serious weight behind it to fix this for her.

“I’ll get you reinstated. Make sure you’re allowed to finish.”

Her eyes flutter closed and open slowly. The weight of her desire is obvious, but she shakes her head. “I can finish anywhere I want to. I don’t… even know if I do want that anymore. Maybe I don’t want to be something I’m not. The academic world is so snobby, I just got tired of all of it. The politics, the games, the pretense, the falsity. I just want to learn because I love it. I lovedknowledge. I’ve read all the classics.Most of them I devoured before I even got to college. I’m book smart. It was always easy for me, that and languages. You can’t read the classics and fully appreciate them unless you’re reading them in their original language. I know Spanish, Italian, and French, but I also read Greek and Latin and some Old English.”

A new curiosity burns in my belly, mixing with the feral desire for vengeance, and the other, darker desires that consume me when it comes to this woman. “What. The. Fuck. Why didn’t you tell me?”

She shrugs again, so pretty, but also so intriguing and alluring because she’s different than any other woman I’ve ever met. The animal lust that she’d inspire in a man is obvious. She’s beyond gorgeous, the full physical package, curves for days, big breasts, a sexy ass, long legs. She’s walking sex.

She’s so much more. I can understand now why she’s so angry with me. When I accused her of using herself as a weapon against me, which I’ve done more than once, which my sister has flung right into her face, we’ve shoved her into that same box that all the ignorant assholes who used her did. She’s probably been fending predators off since she was thirteen or fourteen and old enough to look like a woman. She’s exhausted that she can’t be seen for more than what she looks like.

I also alienated her. Shoved her to the periphery. Made her feel like she had no safe place here. For years, that’s what those fuckers did to her. They wouldn’t allow someone like her into their snobby little gentleman’s club.

She reads all of that off my face and more, but she still snarls at me. “I would have, if we could have built five seconds of rapport without tearing it all to shit.”

“Five seconds of rapport.” I muse on that, turning it over in my mouth. She steps forward but stops and clasps her hands in front of her, waiting. “Come over to my dad’s. Come see where I grew up. See the yard, all the flowers the club planted for my mom. Come visit her grave with me.”

She brushes past me and sits down on the bed so hard the shitty frame underneath the even shittier mattress jumps and groans. “That’s not the kind of rapport I meant, but maybe it’s a start.”

“I’ll ask Lark to come too.”

Her head snaps up, her breaths quickening. “You can’t make her accept me.”

“You’re right. But I’d like my father to meet my wife.” I’ve never said the words. Not in the woods and not now, but I need to. She needs to hear them. I can’t say them standing over her. I walk to the bed and kneel down. She inhales sharply and doesn’t let it out. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh my god. Get up. Please. Don’t be sorry for what happened. I was mad at the time, but you don’t even know me. You had a right to—”

“I don’t have a right to make you pay for what someone else has done.”

“I’m a grown woman. I can handle myself.” She brushes her fingertips over my shoulder. “Please. Get up.”

She doesn’t invite me to sit down beside her. That’s an intimacy that I haven’t yet earned back. “Before I do anything like that with you, I need to talk to your sister. I’ll ask her if she wants to go somewhere for an hour. I’m not a spa girl, but maybe to the range.”

“Yes. She needs to learn how to shoot. I’d love it if you could give her some help. We were teaching her before. I’ll talk to her.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I do.”

“You have enough going on. I’ll do it. I just don’t know that I can tell her about what happened to me. It’s not going to make her trust me. She might even say I had it coming.”

I can’t imagine my sister being so cruel. “Why would she ever say that?”

“What? Because she’s a woman? They can be mean too. Sometimes, they’re the worst of all. You have no idea, Raiden.”

I want to take her face in my hands, to hold her, to let her search me out, discover me, to be the balm that stands between me and the shit in my head. I want her to come to me, to kiss me again. A woman hasn’t initiated that with me until her. I’ve always been the one to take the lead. It was nice, handing it over to her, even briefly.

“I don’t. I hope that we can…” I’ve never been so awkward. So at a loss before. I think I’m the one flushed now.I know how stupid this is going to sound. “Maybe we can help each other.”

“Swap ghosts? Exchange closets and dig out each other’s skeletons?” She stops her sarcastic tirade, cutting herself off when she sees how red I’m getting. Her hands flutter at her sides. I don’t know if she wants to get up and touch me. I want her to. She doesn’t. “I don’t know if it will help, but maybe we’ll get to the point where it wouldn’t hurt.”

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