Page 57 of Bad Men

It came off with five hard scrubs. I knew he’d tried to be gentle, but the thing had only faded, becoming a faint outline before it was gone entirely.

“Why are you here?” I asked once he was satisfied he’d erased the whole thing. “I thought you had a meeting.”

The ruined rag was tossed into the sink with a squelching plop. He dried his hands on the towel hanging on the rack, sat himself down on the covered toilet seat and sighed.

“We needed to make sure you got home,” he murmured. “We had to make sure you were safe.”

I studied his beautiful face. “You told him I was a prostitute.”

His eyebrows immediately furrowed. “We told him what he needed to hear.” He must have seen the annoyed disbelief on my face because he exhaled and slid his body forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “You can’t care about people in our line of work, Mia. You can’t…” he broke off to examine the hands clasped between his knees. “Those people become collateral damage. They become a weakness, a mark for people to use against you.”

“But you have Davien,” I pointed out. “You’ve been best friends forever.”

“And there isn’t a day I don’t live in fear of something happening to him, or worse, Eduardo deciding to put a hit on him. He’s more than my best friend. He’s my brother. I would die for him.

I thought of Laine. We may have grown up in different cities, but I loved her with the ferocity of a sister, a twin. She was my best friend. I would kill for her without question. Yet his reasoning only left more questions.

“But I don’t mean anything to you. I’m nobody.” I murmured, not to fish for compliments but to state a fact. “Why come after me?”

He took several minutes to answer, busying his attention on sweeping a damp curl off my cheek. His fingers lingered, tracing the flushed line of my cheekbone to my jaw. He used the finger to tip my face up to his.

“You mean more than you know, more than is safe” He let his hand drop away, taking his warmth with him. “And you’ve never been a nobody, not to me. Not to Davien. You haven’t been for a very long time.”

The implication of his words filled my belly with a warm, honey feeling. It momentarily thawed the chill Alejandro had sewn into my bones. My clenched knees unfolded in the sudsy water and I shifted deeper under the bubbles, letting my back brush the cold ceramic.

“Then why?” I asked. “I’ve only been with you for three days.”

Penetrating eyes dropped to the worn linoleum squares between his boots. His knitted fingers tightened between his knees.

“Because I fucked up.”

“What did you do?” The words quivered on my lips, numbing them. But I knew already, didn’t I? Because hadn’t Alejandro basically spelled it out for me in those endless minutes in the car with him? “It’s because of the other night, isn’t it?”

Heavy lashes lifted and I was struck by the full weight of his guilt and regret. It sent a new wave of cold through me the scalding hot of the bath couldn’t chase.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he murmured, an edge of self-loathing cutting into the words. “I have never done anything that stupid before. I’m so sorry, Mia.”

I started to shake my head. “How could you know?” A secondary thought occurred then. “How did he find out?”

Irritation flickered across his gaze. “I don’t know, but I will be finding out.”

“No!” I grabbed for his hands, clasping his warm, dry ones with my cold, wet ones. “Don’t. Just stay away from him. He’s dangerous.”

He didn’t pull away. “So am I.” He freed a hand and turned the palm over to slip his fingers through mine. “I never should have let you leave with him.”

I shook my head. “He said he would have killed you and Davien if you hadn’t.”

His mouth pursed, but whatever he was about to say was chewed up and swallowed back down. “Fact is, none of this should have happened. You should never have…” he broke off with a low growl. “It’s my fault. If anything had happened to you…”

“Hey,” I tugged at our joined hands. “I knew what I was signing up for when I agreed to be with you and Davien. I knew it would be a risk.”

Haunted, light brown eyes lifted too fix on my face. “You didn’t sign up for this.”

“But I did.” I offered him a humorless smile. “Maybe not this exactly, but I know the rules are different in our world. We don’t get the luxury of normal.”

My arm was lifted. The hand threaded with his was warmed by the light brush of his lips over my knuckles.

“I want to give you normal.”

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