Page 42 of Heart of a Devil

“I had, I know. I’m not… Look, I’m not saying you did anything terrible, Seb. I’m just saying it hurt. That might not make sense, but none of this does, at least not to me. I’ve never felt like this before about anyone. I have threats from Diego Torres, a family that’s knee-deep in violence, and I’m about to take on a psycho Russian criminal so I can save his wife and child. None of that scares me anywhere near as much as how I feel about you.”

He takes my plate and moves it to one side, then pulls me into his arms. My head rests on his bare chest, and his huge hands run soothingly down my back. “I hear you. I feel the same, Lauren. I might have been engaged a few times?—”

“Five.”

“Okay, five,” he huffs, making me laugh before he continues in a serious tone. “But I don’t think I’ve known what loving a woman is until now. When I met Alice, Sam’s mum, I felt that same spark for her, but I was only sixteen, and I let her go.”

“You sound like you still feel bad about that.”

“I do, in a way. I let them go because I was a kid myself. What the fuck did I know about being a parent, with my background? I was still working out how to be a human being. Anyway. Water under the bridge. Since then, there have been women I thought were special at the time. I genuinely always wanted it to work, but then my cock would get bored and go rogue.”

I smile at the image but also feel unnerved by what he is saying. “Is your cock some kind of separate entity, then? Mind of its own?”

He shrugs. “It’s felt like that in the past, yeah. And I didn’t say any of that to freak you out. I said it to reassure you. My cock is very much at one with my mind where you’re concerned. And both of them are only into you, Lauren Hayes. I’m in, one thousand percent. No hesitation, no doubt, no part of me wondering if I’m wrong. I’m yours, Lauren. Completely and utterly yours. I might have the heart of a devil, but it belongs to you.”

I stroke the side of his face, and his beard softly bristles against my fingers. “The heart of a devil? Why would you say that?”

“My old man drummed it into me. From the time I was a baby. He’d say it, then hit me, then make me repeat it over andover again. Like I said earlier, it’s the scars you can’t see that do the damage.”

“Well, fuck your old man. Is he dead?”

Seb nods.

“Good. I don’t care what he told you. You don’t have the heart of a devil. You have the heart of an angel as far as I’m concerned—even if we both have some pretty devilish tastes. I love you too, Seb. So much. You’re the first man I’ve ever felt this way about. The first man I’ve ever trusted withmyheart. Just promise me you’ll take care of it.”

“Always,” he replies, kissing the top of my head. “I promise.”

Chapter

Twenty-Two

SEBASTIAN

Iknow myself well enough to understand that I can be a bit of a prick. All of the women I’ve been in serious relationships with have been great, and the fault for the breakups never lay with them. The only mistake they made was to trust a man like me. I promised Lauren I would take good care of her heart, and I fully intend to do that. She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and I’m not going to fuck it up. I spent a lot of time in my last relationships thinking about other women, and now—well, Lauren occupies almost every waking thought. This is entirely different from anything I’ve felt before. After more than thirty-five years of chasing women, I’ve finally found the one.

Of course, it helps that the two of us are fucking each other’s brains out every chance we get. My house, her apartment—carefully, because I don’t want the lads getting an eyeful—the car, both offices, out in the sand dunes on the coast. I’m thinking it’s about time to take her to my special place, a bit of secluded land I bought a few years back in case I needed a safe space. I think she’d love it there, and it’s the perfect place to hunt. She’ll definitely be up for that. The woman is insatiable, into trying every twisted little game I suggest.

She’s in court all day today, and I’ve sent Scott to keep an eye on her. She won’t like it, but it’s a public building, so she can’t stop him. We’ll both get an earful, but I’m all out of fucks on that front. Jax and Alejandro have so far failed to lay eyes on this Diego Torres cunt who’s been bothering her, and since she told me more about her uncle and how they were connected, I’ve been even more worried. The little things like the dead flowers could easily be a prelude to something bigger, and it’s my job to worry about that. If some psycho has been obsessing over my woman since he was a kid himself, then I’m going to take care of her any way I can.

I’ve got my own work to do, but first, I’m going through a report that Phil Campbell emailed over. The file is accompanied by a note:Sorry this has taken a while, Seb. I kept digging but couldn’t find much. Wondering if maybe your instincts are wrong on this one?

“I don’t bloody think so,” I mutter to myself, staring at the pages on my screen. Try as I might, though, I can’t see anything that Phil couldn’t see. Taylor Grant was born in Manchester in 2002, which is the kind of birth date that still freaks me out—how can grown-ass humans have reached adulthood when they were only born yesterday? His mum was a school dinner lady and died of breast cancer exactly when Taylor said she did. No dad on the scene at any point, and no stepdads either. Looked like she was a good mum, worked hard and kept him safe, which is more than a lot of kids get.

He got into a bit of trouble in his teens, mainly for fighting. Kicked out of school for breaking the PE teacher’s jaw, which seems fair enough as most of them are sadistic bastards. Nothing serious, just the usual anger management issues I see in a lot of my men. He moved here exactly when he said he did, all his references checked out, and he doesn’t have so much as a blemish on his credit history or his criminal record as anadult. All the scraps he got into when he was younger were with other men, no sign of him being an asshole to women, kids, or puppies, and basically fuck all to go on. But still, those instincts are screaming at me. There’s something not right, and I plan on finding out what.

While I’ve been reading, another message has landed from a nonsense email address that’s all letters and numbers. Normally, I’d kill it off. Talking to Jax has made me realize we need to take our cybersecurity a lot more seriously at Archangel as well.

The only reason I don’t delete it right away is the subject line, which contains three eye-catching words:Lauren Getting Fucked. I suck in a breath and immediately assume it’s Torres—this kind of shit is right up his alley. I might regret it, but I open the email and skim it.£200k into this account by midnight, or this goes viralis above a string of numbers. Nothing more, nothing less. Based on everything I learned about Lauren’s situation, I never got the impression Diego was in this for the money.

There’s a video file attached, but I hesitate. I should probably forward the whole damn thing to the experts, but I can’t bear the thought of invading her privacy that way. If this really is an intimate video of Lauren, she wouldn’t want Jax and Alejandro seeing it. She ran from her family, and she never told them about all the shit that’s happened to her over the years. She has boundaries, and I need to respect them.

I press play, my nostrils flaring and my fists clenching on the desk as I watch. Bollocks. It really is a video of Lauren getting fucked—by me. I have her bent over the sink in the ladies’ room at McIverson’s, her dress is shoved up around her waist, and I’m railing into her. Any other time, I might find it a turn-on, but not when it comes with a threat attached. How dare this piece of shit threaten her like this?

I don’t give a damn if the internet is full of videos of me shagging—but Lauren? She has a career where that crap matters. She has clients who respect her. She has a lot to lose, and I won’t allow her to be humiliated. I stand up and throw my chair across the room, where it crashes against the wall and falls to the floor in pieces. Fuck!

Trying to calm myself, I rub the bridge of my nose between my fingers. I’m not going to help by wrecking the place, but I’m so angry I could kill. How did Torres get this? Will he actually go away if we pay? It’s a lot of money, but I can afford it, and I’d pay anything to protect her. Except I already know the answer to that—blackmailers never go away. They just slink off under a rock for a while, then as soon as the cash is gone, they crawl back out for another bite of the cherry.

The door to my office opens slightly, and Taylor pops his head in. Of course he does. “You okay, Boss?”

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