Page 71 of Good Guy Gabe

I peel myself away from the window, fix my coffee, and tell myself to go to another room where I can properly hate Gabe, but damn my eyes for drifting right back to him swinging that axe.

Holy hell, it’s soft-core porn.

He’s shiny with sweat, every inch of him flushed, and with each swing of the axe, he grunts loudly enough I can hear it. Memories flood my mind — and elsewhere — at the sound. It’s the sound of getting absolutely wrecked on that mattress on my bedroom floor, of Gabe working out the week’s frustration in the most brutal, carnal way, of the knowledge there’s not a chance in hell I’ll be walking right the next day.

His scent, his sounds, his breath. The way he’d look up at me from between my legs or the sudden jerk when he was behind me but needing me closer, so he’d grab me by the ponytail and haul me up to him. How his cock felt pulsing inside me.

This is bad.

There’s only one thing I can do now. My rose and my rabbit have been working double-time lately, but at least they’re on the charger.

I give myself a pep talk to back away. My pussy clenches and tells me if I stay here long enough, she’ll figure the rest out, like I’m gonna grind one out on my kitchen counter.

The idea has some merit.

And then, horror of horrors, he looks up at me.

And drops his axe.

And grins wickedly at me.

Well, crud.

It’s wild how quickly we’re fighting. I tell him he’s not welcome inside, he grumbles about my lack of security and how the whole world can get in here, I tell him it’s none of his business, and then we’re screaming at each other.

“Everything you do is my business!” he roars like some monster rising from the deep.

But I’m at the top of the stairs and he’s several steps down, still a head below me. It’s loud, but I stand my ground. “You don’t own me, asshole!”

“No, but that baby is mine.”

“Through no choice of mine!Youruined everything, not me.”

“Yeah, I did, and that doesn’t change the fact that I’m the only one trying to keep you and the baby safe!”

He’s still below, staring up at me with pure, undiluted anger in his eyes. He looks like he could murder me right now. It doesn’t make any sense that he would do that, he literally just said that he’s trying to keep the baby and me safe, but this irrational fear takes hold of me.

Brian never hurt me, but he hurt so many other people. Other women. Teenage girls who were already helplessly underpowered against him before being sedated.

Gabe hurts people every day. He gets hurt, too — that hit he took in the final play of their loss against the Chargers was terrible, all the sports reporters said that — but he gets up and keeps going.

He could hurt me in a blink of an eye, and there’s no way I could stop him.

God help me, I shove him back.

And thank god because he doesn’t fall. IknowI’m being crazy right now, but he would seriously hurt himself if he fell down those stairs.

He surges forward, lifting me by the waist and carrying me back, back, back, until I’m pushed up against one of the mirrorsset up around Cora’s hemming platform. I cry out at the cold, afraid it’s going to shatter, but he lets me go, gripping the frame of the mirror in his hands to box me in.

I lean against the glass, but there’s no escape. He looms over me, his nostrils flared and his breath hot against my face as his chest heaves.

“You’re going to be the fucking death of me,” he groans.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, choking on the adrenaline surging through me. “I shouldn’t have pushed you.”

“You can’t move me.” His voice is a growl, so much anger in it. “Don’t you fucking get that? You . . . can’t . . . move . . . me. So when it takes four numbers to get into your apartment, and those four digits are literally your birth year and day, you should be terrified that if someone even close to my size breaks in,you can’t move them.”

“Why are you being so mean to me?” I cry out, closing my eyes and recoiling as best as I can, but there’s nowhere to go.

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