When the door closes behind Daniel, there’s no one left but us. I relax and kiss Rae’s cheek, her ear, her neck, her shoulder and back. I wipe her tears when they start again, and I don’t stop until they’re gone. At last, I raise my head and push up enough to clear the strands of hair sticking to her damp skin and tuck them behind her ear. I kiss her salty cheek one more time. “You good?”
She nods mutely, and I pull out of her at last. I tuck myself back into my pants, then slide onto the couch and lift her onto my lap, wrapping my arms around her in case she gets any ideas about going anywhere before I recover my senses.
I’m not sure that’ll ever happen now.
thirty-four
Rae West
We sit on the couch so long I think Maddox might have fallen asleep. I don’t dare move and set him off again. Besides, as fucked up as it is, I need the closeness too, the comfort of his arms around me, human contact after the trauma. I nestle into his chest, remembering the first time I tried to do that, at the first party at the pool on Mill Street. This time, he doesn’t push me away. Every now and then, he squeezes me against him, and when I shift even the slightest bit, his arms tighten around me as if by instinct.
I wonder absently if I’m in shock. Nothing feels real. In my real life, I’m Lennox’s fiancé. In my real life, I’m a virgin. In my real life, Maddox is a painful ache of memory, not this solid body against mine, warm and animal and wild, with a beating heart and brutal strength and unpredictable fury, who smells like summer rain and cum.
Somehow, at the same time, nothing in the past year feels real. Maybe this is my reality, and my life with Lennox was nothing but a dream, a year of suspended animation while I waited for his brother to come for me. Because some part of me always knew he would. Some part of me is shocked, but I’m not surprised by his reappearance into our lives. In some hidden place inside me, a seed nestled down in the depths of my soul through the cold winter of my engagement, waiting for the rain of Maddox’s wrath to awaken it.
I don’t know if that seed was doubt or hope or dread, or something else altogether. But somewhere buried in the dark recesses of my mind, I was waiting. I knew we weren’t done. That it wasn’t over.
Is it over now?
“Maddox?” I whisper, twisting around to see him. Pain lances through me when I move, and I wince, not only from that but also the sound of my wedding dress rustling around me.
A jolt goes through me like lightning when our gazes lock. He’s not sleeping. He’s… Crying.
His eyes are open, their dark green depths soft and full of so much turmoil and emotion it stuns me. Silent tears leak down his stony, chiseled face. He doesn’t try to hide it, just stares back at me.
“Maddox!” I cry, grabbing his face between my hands. An instinct that’s close to panic rises inside me, and I lean in, holding his face and kissing his cheeks frantically until the tracks down them are gone. He just watches me, and I wait for the shutters to fall back over his emotions, for him to close himself off the way he always does and become the asshole he always is. I want the asshole. I miss him. That’s the devil I know. I don’t know what to do with this side of him. I never saw him as breakable, as even capable of this kind of emotion.
“I’m okay,” I promise him, giving him one last kiss, this one on the mouth. His hands tighten on my waist, and he pulls me against him. I burrow into his chest, wrapping my arms around him and squeezing him hard. His long arms wind around me, securing me against his broad, muscular chest. His shoulders are so much wider than what I’m used to, his body like a wall that protects me from every danger except this one.
In his arms I feel small, delicate, like his little girl. Against all rational thought, I feel safe. He warned me not to make an enemy of him, and for the last year, I held my breath to see what the consequences of that mistake would be. I waited, weighed down by guilt, for my punishment. Now it’s over. I’ve paid. I’m not his enemy anymore. I can breathe again.
I’m the one who falls asleep. I wake up disoriented, not knowing how long I’ve been out or where I am until I sit up straight and a knife of pain slices through my center.
“Where are the keys?” Maddox asks, standing and hoisting me into his arms. My arms circle his neck automatically.
“What?” I ask, still groggy.
“The car keys,” he says. “Where are they?”
“By the door,” I says, nodding to the hooks. “Where are we going?”
“Somewhere you’ve always wanted to go,” he says. By the time he’s stuffed all my dress into the passenger seat with me and buckled me in, my brain has dusted off the cobwebs of sleep and kicked into high gear. In fact, reality seems to have returned.
It’s three in the morning, and this is my wedding day. Maddox may have come barging in and made me forget that for a few hours, but nothing can save me from the truth. He’s not some white knight who magically appeared to whisk me away from my doubts and fears about marriage. He’s not my savior. He’s my destruction, and he’s only doing this to get back at us—Lennoxandme. We hurt him, and he wants to hurt us back, and he knows that he can only get to his brother through me. He only took me instead of Lennox because it’s convenient for him. He can hurt us both through me.
He slides into the driver’s seat of the El Camino and fires it up, shifting into gear and spinning the tires before the car thrusts forward. He shoots me a grin and shifts again, burning up the tires and leaving a cloud of smoke behind.
“Ready to have some fun, little mama?” he asks, apparently back to his old self. I can’t remember why I missed this side of him, why I wanted it back. He’s terrifying. He’s a member of the rival gang to the one my fiancé is in, and he’s basically just kidnapped me. I reach for the door handle, contemplating leaping out of the moving car.
What the fuck came over me earlier? I was fucking cuddling him like he was Lennox. But he’s not. He’s the furthest thing from his brother, and more than that, after a year of not seeing him, he’s a stranger. I don’t know what he’s capable of. Is it worse than what he just did to me?
This man doesn’t want me. He wants revenge. He doesn’t even really want to fuck me. He only wants my body to take out his wrath on, to punish me and gloat to Lennox that he fucked me first.
Despite our tender moment earlier—if that wasn’t just a dream—this man is dangerous and unhinged. I can’t forget that. And now I’m in a car with him, going fuck only knows where. Getting kidnapped is not in my pre-wedding plan.
“Take me home,” I say sharply, turning to him.
“The night’s still young,” he says, the car screaming through the night so fast it makes my chest feel like I’m being sucked back into the seat. “I’ve got you for five more hours, little girl.”