Page 23 of Catch a King (Five Kings 1)

“She’s fine.”

Sawyer flashes her a look of warning and the waitress is no fool and retreats. Then Sawyer says firmly, “Tell me, because so help me God, if I hear his name spill from your lips like it did last night, I’ll lose my shit.”

To my surprise, he wipes my tears away with his hand and releases me, before heading around the table and sliding in next to me. He places his arm around my shoulder and pulls me tight against him and whispers, “It’s ok, No one’s gonna hurt you, I need to know, so I can help you.”

Just the kindness in his voice is my undoing as I sob in his arms as my life comes back to haunt me at a time I least expected it.

After a while, I test my heart and say in a small voice, “Mason was my first love.”

Sawyer strokes my arm and it feels nice, so I relax a little and tell him a story it’s taken me years to accept.

“We were together in high school. He was popular, and I couldn’t believe my luck when he chose me over all the girls there. I was so happy.”

Thinking back on when my life was normal and easy and filled with promise makes me smile, and I say with a fondness that was destroyed forever by what happened next. “He asked me to prom, and it was all good. My mom was happy for me and bought me an expensive dress and paid for stylists to come to our house. When Mason came for me, he looked so handsome in his tux and I felt like a princess. I suppose every girl dreams of a prom like mine, and I couldn’t believe how lucky I was. I was so in love with Mason. He was everything to me. We were happy, and I never wanted the night to end. When it was time to head home, we set off and I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I knew, there was a loud noise and then everything went blank.”

The tears fall again as I relive the horror of that night, and yet Sawyer’s strong arms keep the terror away as he continues to stroke my arm as I say in a dead voice. “I woke up to a nightmare. The car was wrecked, and it hurt so badly. There were no windows left and glass was everywhere. It took me a moment to realize we’d crashed and when I looked across, I saw…”

I break off and squeeze my eyes tightly shut as if to chase away the memory. “I saw Mason with some kind of pole through his chest. It turned out to be the fencing we had crashed through that had impaled him through the shattered windshield. He was still alive and groaning and I begged him to stay with me; told him I loved him and tried so hard to stem the blood that was flowing from his wound. It was difficult to breathe because I didn’t know at the time that I had punctured a lung but all I could think of was saving Mason. It felt like hours before help came running, although by all accounts it was minutes. I was trapped in the car and it took the emergency services two hours to cut us out of the wreck. I was first out and I remember screaming for Mason. I suppose I knew he was dead because he stopped making any sound halfway through and the rescuers kept on assuring me he was ok. I suppose they were worried about me and needed me to stay strong because I was losing a lot of blood.”

Sawyer drops a light kiss on the top of my head and squeezes me tightly against him and whispers, “It’s ok, darlin’, you don’t have to say anymore unless you want to.”

I nod because I’m an emotional wreck and say, “A coffee would be good right now.”

He calls the waitress over who looks at us with concern and I try to smile through my tears. “It’s fine, can I get a coffee please, a strong one?”

She nods and heads off and Sawyer says gruffly, “I thought she was gonna call the cops for a minute there. I think she thought I’d kidnapped you or something.”

Despite myself, I laugh through my tears and Sawyer once again kisses my head and whispers, “I’m sorry, Millie, I had to know. When I heard you moaning his name, I thought, well, I thought you loved him and I suppose I was jealous.”

I look up at him in surprise and watch his eyes darken with a mixture of lust and something else. He seems troubled and reaching up, I stroke his face and whisper, “That’s in the past and it’s taken me a long time to get over it. It was so long ago, maybe five years now, and even though the memory is still haunting my dreams, I have come to live with it.”

It feels good talking about Mason again, despite how devastating that was. When I speak of him, it brings him back and I never want to forget his place in my heart. It’s true, he was my first love and the last time I was at peace with life. My life changed forever that day and even I never saw what was coming because it’s what happened next that’s responsible for my life spiraling out of control and that’s something I’mnotprepared to share.

Chapter 19

Sawyer

The coffee arrives and we take a moment to collect our thoughts and as she falls silent, I know she’s not telling me everything. There’s a deep pain inside her that isn’t the result of this story. Just the love in her eyes and the smile on her face as she described Mason, tells me he wasn’t the one who destroyed her. Her acceptance of the crash and the result of it was there as a devastating memory, but nothing else. Something else broke Millie Raymond and I won’t stop until I find out what it was.

I’ve thought of nothing else but what Axel and Slade told me. They seem to have it all figured out, but there’s something not sitting right with me. The Twisted Reapers MC isn’t a club to mess with if you want to live and tell the tale, and as I sit beside one of them, I have so many questions burning for answers. Just thinking of Millie living there, sleeping there and… well, I can’t even think about that, makes me wanna shake it out of her. Did Ryder King order the hit on Billy; did he pull the trigger himself and why; what had Billy done to bring that club down on him?

Nothing adds up, so until I figure it out, I’m keeping Millie close by my side.

We eat and it feels good to sit beside a woman like Millie. Strong, beautiful and made up of many broken layers that have made a masterpiece. It’s been a slow burn, but the more time I spend with her, the more interested I become and seeing her eating her breakfast with obvious appreciation makes me smile. She’s like an innocent child wrapped up in sin, which makes it even more surprising that she fell into this life.

I decide to test her story and say lightly, “So, darlin’, tell me how you ended up at the Dragon’s Ruin?”

As I thought, she stiffens but tries to disguise it and just shrugs. “I needed a job and heard about this one, so I applied and Axel told me to show up.”

I smile to myself because most of that was probably true, minus the key factors.

“So, where were you before, do you have a family, a guy who broke your heart, what’s Millie’s story after the accident?”

I know I’ve gone too far when she shuts down before my eyes. The innocent look in her eye is replaced with a bitter one and I see years of pain mixed with anger flash in her beautiful green eyes as she says in a tight voice, “If it’s ok with you, I’d rather not talk about my family. I try very hard to forget them and we are trying to have a nice breakfast.”

I’m surprised because when she spoke of her mom just now, she spoke of a woman who was kind and loving. Any woman who pays for stylists and buys their daughter a pretty prom dress, can’t be all that bad, but I respect her boundaries and then it’s my turn to close up as she says right back at me, “What about you, Sawyer, what made you join the military over staying at the club?”

I’m tempted to use her own answer back at her but know if I’m to get her to trust me, to open up, I need to let slip a piece of my past.

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