“Just you and me?”
“Yeah.” Tristan nodded slowly, his eyes drinking me in. “Just you and me.” There was that stupid trusting hand again. I took it. I gripped it.
I embraced it and closed my eyes, trusting him completely and hoping I wasn’t making a giant mistake by doing so.
“Alright.”
He wrapped his arm around me and kissed my head, whispering, “It’s going to be okay. I swear it.”
Maybe it made me naïve. But I believed him. In that moment. I believed him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
They said he was still alive, though his back had broken on impact, along with one of his legs. Freaked out, I watched the EMTs work on him. I heard someone shout that they were losing him, and I did something no human being should ever do. I turned and walked away. —Mel
Tristan
KEEPING MY HANDS from shaking was a lot harder than I thought it would be. Every time I saw the look of hurt cross Lisa’s face, I wanted to pull the steering wheel from the car and throw it, but who would I aim for? Taylor was dead, and, honestly, it felt like I was too.
My chest hurt with each breath.
For her to go through what she’d gone through.
To even, for one instant, think I could reveal who I was? What I was to her? No. That couldn’t happen. My father had had things right when he said it needed to stay a secret. It did. For her sanity, it truly did. I would take it to my grave and feel no guilt whatsoever about keeping the demon in his prison of hell. The only loose end was Gabe and Wes. But it wasn’t my own guilt that had me confessing; it was my need to protect Lisa at all costs, even if it meant they had to eventually protect me from her.
I was still worried about what had set him off the edge, worried because I’d been diagnosed with something similar. Then again, my own father functioned just fine, though he seemed to be just as heartless and callous as his sons.
“This isn’t a Ferrari,” Lisa whispered.
“No.” I barely got the words past my dry lips. Licking them wasn’t helping; I was a nervous wreck as we turned the corner to my house. “The Ferrari is parked, just waiting for you to take it for a ride.”
She didn’t smile.
And it killed me, literally made me want to pull over and do anything and everything in my power to get her to smile again. To get her to realize that it wasn’t her fault, regardless of her involvement in that stupid website; it wasn’t her fault that she’d been taken advantage of. Nobody deserved to be raped.
“Alright.” I put the car in park and hit the garage opener. “Now, you are going to have to pick a color…”
Lisa’s eyebrows furrowed. “Pick a color? What? Like you have a car lot—” Gasping, she covered her mouth with her hands as the lights clicked on, revealing not one Ferrari, but three — along with a few other cars and toys that I rarely used but had looked nice at the time. Now it all seemed pointless. The money, the lies — all of it.
“Well.” I cleared my throat. “What are you waiting for?”
“How?” she rasped. “How do you have three Ferraris? No, scratch that. Why? Why do you have three?”
“Too much money.” I sighed and tapped the steering wheel. “And too much freedom when I came into it.”
“Red.” A ghost of a smile appeared on her face. “I think I like the red.”
“You can’t just pick a Ferrari from thirty feet away, Lisa. You have to touch it, caress it…”
“Am I buying it dinner later?”
“Hell, no.” I opened the car door. “You don’t want to make me jealous, do you?”
Her smile fell. Just like that.
As if the idea of me being attracted to her wasn’t even a valid one anymore, but stupid, an impossibility.
One I was more than happy to tackle, even if it killed me.