Kate
“Areyou going to tell me where we’re going?” I asked as Macy drove out of town.
She glanced over at me. “No,” she replied happily.
I pursed my lips. We were taking the desert road, out toward where Freya lived. Her house was at the very end of a quiet road with her closest neighbors miles away. The lifestyle I’d been coveting.
“Swiss wasn’t with you,” she remarked, her eyes on the road.
“He wasn’t,” I agreed. Just the mention of him had my chest burning, panic building low in my stomach.
I’d given him an ultimatum. One I’d meant. One I intended to follow through on. But what if he didn’t care? What if he killed Preston anyway?
“He’s pretty much been surgically attached to your hip since…” Macy trailed off.
“Since my husband beat me half to death?” I offered.
She sucked in a breath. “Yeah,” she nodded, her voice not as carefree as it had been moments ago. “And men, especially badass alpha male bikers, tend to keep up with that surgically attached at the hip thing long after the healing is done.” She looked at me over the top of her sunglasses. “And your healing is nowhere near done. So where the fuck is he?”
Her gentle, high voice had a hardness to it now. An anger. On my behalf.
It was still odd, even after how much she’d proved herself to be kind, loving and genuine, to feel comfortable around Macy. To feel comfortable in this friendship without waiting for the other shoe to drop. I wondered if I would always feel like this in my relationships, never able to fully settle, to relax, always holding just a little back.
“We had a… disagreement.” My eyes shifted to the desert that was passing us by. There was still a large amount of houses down this stretch of road, but the farther we got out, the larger the space in between them was.
“A disagreement?” Macy repeated. “And what did you disagree about that caused an alpha male to abandon all of his senses—however misguided—which are to forgo all earthly delights such as food and sleep in order to be ready to protect you lest a piano fall from the sky?”
Despite the entire situation, I smiled at her question. Although each of the Sons of Templar men were remarkably different in almost every way, they did share a lot of important qualities. One being the over-the-top protectiveness that Macy was obviously an expert in.
“We disagreed about whether or not he should kill my husband,” I told Macy.
I supposed I could’ve hedged a little. But I knew when to pick my battles. Well, technically I didn’t—I didn’t fight back for a decade and a half—but Macy was not someone to let something like this go.
And I was dying to talk to someone about it.
I braced myself on the dashboard, wincing from the pain when Macy slammed on the brakes of the car.
“Jeepers,” I muttered, gaping at her. “Did that warrant stopping in the middle of the street?”
She raised a brow. “Yes, I think that did. Plus…” she jerked her head to the right. “We’re here.”
I looked to my right where, off the road a bit, was a small but adorable Spanish style ranch. The front garden was an explosion of colors, and there was no uniformity or symmetry to it. I absolutely loved it.
Behind the house there was nothing but sprawling desert, save for a collection of houses which were nothing but specs in the distance.
I was unsure about what this house had to do with anything. Maybe some friend of Macy’s lived here.
“You don’t want Preston dead?” Macy asked with interest but without judgment.
I turned to look at her. She’d pushed her oversized aviators to the top of her head.
It was somewhat surreal, talking about whether my boyfriend? Old Man? Was going to kill my husband with a beautiful, free spirited, fashionable woman who had become one of my best friends. One of the only true friends I’d ever had in my life.
I sighed. “I would like him dead… I think.” I screwed up my nose. “Don’t get me wrong, I’ve fantasized about him dying more than once over the years, but I’ve never really been in a situation where it was plausible that he’d actually die. I don’t know if I’m that bloodthirsty.”
I took a pause to rest. This much conversation was hard on my throat which was still burning. My head throbbed, and it hurt to breathe. I gazed out into the desert, remembering hands around my throat. The million times I’d been told I was stupid, fat, ugly, worthless. Those times, rare but not infrequent, when I’d laid awake in bed, Preston sleeping beside me, and I’d imagined going into the bathroom and taking a whole bottle of painkillers.
“Yes, I am that bloodthirsty,” I nodded.