“You’ve helped,” she replies. “Never Alone has, I mean. My Dad’s killer was prosecuted last week.”
“And my daughter’s killer is dead,” I tell her. “It never makes it any easier.”
She looks closely at me. There’s so much emotion in her eyes. They’re a light green color, giving her a somehow optimistic look despite the grimness of the conversation.
Or maybe it’s just her essential goodness.
I do not know this woman at all.
My thoughts are flipping around and around into unlikely futures and rewritten pasts. Lucy stares at me from every single one, tempting me.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Locke.”
“Logan,” I say quickly.
“Logan,” she goes on without missing a beat. “It’s awful. I hate it. I hate….”
She trails off with a sigh. Her shoulders sag.
When she looks at me again, I’m left wondering about that optimistic glint. She looks ready to give up, and it makes me more than sad, more than angry, more than human.
It makes me a wild beast who wants to hurt the fucker who made her feel this way.
He’s in prison. Our charity did its work.
Anybody, then, who’d eventhinkabout hurting my woman.
“Hate feeling so numb?” I finish for her.
Her gorgeous eyes widen. “How did you know? Or I guess that’s a stupid question. You lost yourwife.”
“We weren’t married.”
I say that way too quickly and with far too much sharpness in my voice. I make myself think of Anna, with her gap-toothed grin and her dark hair in pigtails, singing as she skipped around the garden blowing bubbles.
“I’m sorry,” Lucy says.
“You’ve got nothing to be sorry for,” I tell her.
“I guess it’s a silly thing to say. Iknewshe was your girlfriend. I just forgot. I don’t know. I guess it’s hard to think straight…I’m sorry.”
She steps back, bumps into the wall, then lets out a big huffing sigh. I can’t help but smirk; then it feels like a smile, an actual smile, the sort I haven’t felt since Anna.
It’s a weird feeling, and I wonder if I’m imagining the lightness in my chest, the momentary break from all that nothingness.
“You don’t have to keep apologizing,” I say. “Especially if it’s going to get you hurt.”
She grins with a hint of sassiness, a challenge in her green eyes. “Okay, fine. I’ll never say sorry to you again.”
My smirk widens. It could be a mistake, but I can’t stop.
“That sounds like we’ll be seeing each other again.”
“What for?” she mutters.
So I can tear off your clothes, rip them to pieces like the wild thing you make me. So I can grab your thick thighs firmly, really fucking indulge in them, then split your legs and taste your eager young slit.
I’m almost panting. I want it so badly.