Fluffy sighed.
“Right?”
“I think so.” Massive shoulders rose and fell. “I hope so.”
I didn’t like the uncertainty in Fluffy’s answer. Twisting my lips in a scowl, I picked Groot up off my lap and handed him to the Marine. “Hold my dog,” I ordered.
Fluffy took him, confusion crossing his face.
Before he could ask what I was doing, I straightened from the table and hurried down the stairs to the lower floor.
This level of the house was set aside entirely for honing a body to the peak of physical perfection and deadly destruction. Lucas’s personal gym took up most of the space, with two other room leading from it. One was a small shooting gallery, complete with an array of guns that would make the NRA drool, and a target-practice range. The other room was smaller still, and far more mysterious. In the center of the room was a single safe. That was it. I had no idea what was in that safe and honestly, I didn’t want to know.
As Fluffy had said, Lucas had a lot of skeletons in his closet. I sometimes wondered if I would ever get to learn of them all. In his misguided way, I think Lucas was still trying to protect me from the man he was.
Stupid. I loved everything about the man he was. The more I learned, the more I fell in love with him.
Silence stretched through the area. I scanned the gym. Where was he?
Noise from the right caught my attention and I turned, breath catching in my throat.
Lucas watched me from a weight bench in the far corner of the room. He sat on the edge of the bench, elbows on his knees, slowly wrapping tape around the knuckles of his left hand. His shirt was gone, the corded strength of his upper body revealed. The tattoos and scars marring his skin seemed to somehow shout with rage.
Christ, he looked emotionally wrung out.
“I’m not someone you want to be around at the moment, babe,” he said, as he returned to strapping his knuckles. “Maybe you should watch a movie or something.”
A hot lick of anger traced up my spine. “Hey.”
He looked back at me.
I shook my head. “This is not how things happen with us, Lucas. Not anymore. Talk to me.”
“What if I fuck you instead? Will that shut you up?”
Bastard.
“Go for it,” I threw back. “And when we’re finished, I’m still going to be here telling you to talk to me. Telling you to stop beating yourself—”
He stood up and the words died in my throat. His nostrils flared. His eyes narrowed. He radiated rage and contempt and danger. All of it like a thunderous storm waiting to unleash. “I never should have brought you here. Into my life.”
“Too late for regrets, Pratt.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “I’m not going anywhere. You’re stuck with me.”
“In that case…” He began to prowl towards me. “I’ll put you to use.”
The pit of my stomach fluttered. It had been a long while since Lucas had directed his menace towards me. A long while. The last time, I’d been eighteen and had the nerve to tell him to put a shirt on when he’d been washing his mother’s car in their driveway.
That day, he’d stalked towards me until I’d stupidly stumbled backward, my retreat blocked by the big oak in my parents’ front yard. Tree behind me, Lucas in front, I had nowhere to go.
He’d stopped but an inch away, naked torso gleaming with sweat and water droplets, his tattoos a story of darkness and sin my teenage mind couldn’t begin to fathom, his heat reaching for me, taunting me, his eyes…
“You want me to put a shirt on, Ronnie?” he’d murmured, raking his gaze over me. “Sure. Give me yours and I’ll put it on.”
I remember gasping at his suggestion. I also remember my nipples pinching into hard points and my pussy growing wet. I’d been so scared, and so desperately turned on. Shame had flooded my cheeks, and I’d stammered out some pathetic threat to call my dad if he didn’t back off.
He’d studied me for a long moment, his eyes full of menace, full of a promise of sexual domination and dark pleasure, and returned to washing the car. He hadn’t put a shirt on.
That night, lying in my bed under the covers with the lights off, I’d tried not to masturbate to the look in his eyes.