Page 100 of The Bad Wedding Date

“And if you don’t want to answer it?”

“I won’t.”

I reached up to run my free hand over the shaved sides of his hair, letting it drift down behind his neck. “What you and the other men do… how did you get into it?”

Even though he still wore his smile, Fraser’s nostrils expanded, and he inhaled slowly before he let it all drift back out in a cautious exhale.

“You don’t have to tell me,” I whispered, running my fingers up and down his neck.

“You had one question, and you chose that. It’s obviously important to you.”

You’re important to me,I thought, somehow holding that back even though it was on the tip of my tongue. Fraser had a way of making me want to spill all my secrets, even the ones that were destined to scare him off. How I was an emotional car crash. How even the thought of love and the power it held frightened me. How I didn’t really know what happiness was and would no doubt push it away if ever it came too close.

“I just want to get to know you,” I said quietly instead because I did want to know him better. I needed to at this point. In the week he’d been a part of my life, I’d experienced more joy and pleasure from this one man than I had in the two years I’d spent with Penn, and in the twenty-four years I’d spent living. “You’re this brute of a man on the outside, but I can see it in your eyes… you’ve got a whole lot more going on back there.”

Fraser held my gaze, something flashing over his eyes before his shoulders relaxed.

“I was twenty at the time, walking through Greenwich when I heard a commotion. I’d been working in a shitty bar, trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life, and I was walking home. It was late. Too late. A few of the guys I worked with had convinced me to stay behind and have a few beers with them, so I did, knowing I could walk home in the dead of the London night, and no one would bother me.” He shrugged. “It’s a privilege I have, unlike you, I know.” His voice trailed off, no smugness in his statement, just fact.

“About twenty minutes into my journey, I heard a girl cry out when I passed this alleyway. I stopped in my tracks and walked back a few steps to look at what was going on. I saw shadows moving around—like a scuffle of sorts—and then something slammed up against those big, metal industrial bins, making this horrendous sound. Something clicked inside me, and I didn’t even think about what I did next. I knew someone was in trouble. I just ran down that alleyway, dropping my bag and everything in it. When I rounded the corner at the end, there were these three guys holding a young girl down. To cut an epically long story short, I got her out of there.”

“They were going to—”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice full of quiet anger.

Nausea rolled in my stomach at the thought of it. The danger the girl had been in. The danger Fraser had put himself in. The possibility of things having gone wrong.

“Please tell me you killed those guys.”

He huffed out a laugh that held no humour. “Close, but no. I didn’t know what I was doing back then. Luckily for me, I’m a big guy, and those men were inexperienced fighters. It didn’t take me long to put them down on the ground, but when I tried to call the police, the girl…” He paused, frowning. “She begged me not to. Her father was well known around London. She didn’t want his or her name to be dragged through the mud.”

“That’s ridiculous. She was the victim.”

“It doesn’t always work like that, Charlotte.”

“So, you just… left them there? Those guys got away?”

Fraser’s eyes searched mine as though he was trying to decide how much to tell me. “I took the girl to her father. He offered me money as a thank you for saving her, and he offered me even more money to find the scumbags and make them pay—in a way the law would never approve of.”

“How did he know you could do that?”Or would do that, I thought.

“He could see it. When you’re poor, you carry a desperate plea in your eyes every day, even when you think you’re hiding it. You’re not this blank canvas people look through. They see what you need by the state of your overgrown hair, the dirt in your fingernails, the tears in your jeans, and that look in your eyes. He knew the kind of money he was offering would change my life forever, and I wasn’t able to turn it down. Not when I wanted to track those guys down myself and kill them anyway.

“After that, I had a list of people—men—put in my hand, and the father told me he’d mentioned my name to every single one of them. They were all rich and had daughters that needed protecting. He suggested I get myself a team I could trust to help me build something they’d all benefit from.”

“That’s when the others got involved?”

“It took time, but I guess so.”

“And you were good at it, what they were asking of you.”

“The best,” he said without a shadow of a doubt. “The father turned out to be quite demanding, though. He asked me to be nearby all the time. To watch over his girls if he needed me to. Don’t ask me why, but he said he trusted me, and as a young kid, I liked the way that made me feel. Like being a good guy wasn’t something to shy away from, even when I had to do bad stuff. Maybe I could make a real difference somehow. I could be more than just a barman or a waiter.”

“You could get revenge for your mother, too.”

Fraser’s smile was sad when he stared up at me. “We’re all out here trying to live and fight our demons at the same time, aren’t we?”

It was obvious he was talking about my need to rebel against my family and how it had taken me down paths I never truly thought I’d go down, including what I did for a living.

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