Page 63 of Perdition
…just a fucking tree….
Those words still poured agony over her when she heard them in her mind, echoing like the dying screams of an animal caught in a trap.
It had taken her longer than she’d like to get dressed because even dragging she soft cotton fabric up over her hips and down over her chest made the painful awareness turn into burning arousal. Needless to say, just sitting in the same room as her husband after so long without touching him, feeling his touch, or evening smelling his scent was going to be difficult as hell.
Which was why she took a moment, sat on the edge of their king-sized bed, and dragged up every painful, rage-filled, humiliating thing her husband had said and done in the last year.
The list was long, and her patience used to be just as long-suffering, but she was done with that now. The missed calls, the read but unanswered texts, the lonely nights after broken promises of dinner at home, the excuses for why he didn’t call or text or come home, the neglect, forgetting about important events with her and the kids.
The crap he pulled with Locust and Nadia; forcing someone he cared about to go against their own nature—the desire to protect—in order to target an innocent woman. Where had he even gotten the idea to do that? That decision, that action—that was all Frost, the Unchained MC president. That hadn’t been Mads behind the wheel. She knew that down to her bones.
And then there was Sarah.
Her breaking point.
Before that morning, just a few days ago, she’d been shambling along, a zombie—love starved and dying for a scrap of attention from her husband—but she’d been more alive than emotionally dead. She’d endured, hopeful yet fading fast, determined to give him just one more chance to turn things around, to choose her and their family, their marriage….
That was one of the unspoken, previously unacknowledged reasons she was bringing him those jeans that morning. She wanted to “chance” upon him in his office, maybe slip inside and catch him in an unbusy moment, to nonchalantly ask him to come home for dinner, or—hell—ask him something as benign as “Did you sleep last night?” She been willing to lower her walls first, even just that inch, to see if he would be willing to climb over and just see her.
Remember her and what she meant to him.
To admit he was putting the club business before what should really matter to him.
And for him to stand up from behind his desk, wrap her in his arms, kiss her, and tell her he loved her.
Was that too much to ask?
Instead, she’d been faced with the total and utter destruction of her heart and pride.
And it was still a ravaged wound, pulsing, bloody, necrotizing, despite all she was doing and had already done to cleanse it. Stitch it closed. Cut away the dead parts.
…just a fucking tree….
Anger built inside her, but so did the hurt, and they battled for supremacy, easily dominating and killing off the arousal.
“You can do this, Emily Daisy Flowers,” she quietly declared. “You can’t keep letting this hurt you, letting him hurt you. Demand the truth. Listen. And then you can tear him a new asshole.”
Usually not one to use profane language, since Frost used up their marital quota, she was surprised at how good it felt to let that word slip.
Asshole.
A grim smile curled her lips as she rose to her feet and began her too short journey to the living room.
Mads was sitting on the couch facing the big TV he never used, so she sat on the loveseat, the cushion giving beneath the weight of her body and her heartbreak.
He was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, hands hanging limp between his legs, facing her, his intensely blue eyes—like killing frost—were pinned to her, watching her.
Devouring her.
Hell, she couldfeelthat gaze of his—banked hunger of a captive predator—which was the same one he’d been wearing in the bedroom.
She knew that look like she’d known her own face and body were giving off “do me” signals like muscle memory. They were attuned—body and soul—to one another, without need for words to express their need for one another.
Just a look, a darkening of his eyes, the tightening of the skin around his mouth…the way his chest rose and fell, the way his arms flexed, and his hands clenched and unclenched, the way he spread his legs wide to make room for the thickening and lengthening of his glorious dick.
Yes, she knew her man, she knew he was just as ravenous for a good fuck as she was, but that wasn’t why she told him to come.
Not that you’d really mind getting poleaxed by a few good orgasms.
