3
Magnus
I should have killed them.
That’s thought has been plaguing me for the entire drive away from my apartment. Myoldapartment. I’ll never be able to go back there now. Not unless I find a way to take down Vincent and his entire organization, and believe me, I would do that for Josie. But that will take a lot of planning and more resources than I have. For now, the best I can do is make sure she’s safe and that nothing like what happened back at my apartment ever happens again.
I look over at her, curled up beside me in the passenger seat, looking absolutely gorgeous in her red dress with her blond hair spilling over her shoulders like a waterfall of gold. She’s the sexiest goddamn girl in existence, and she’s inmytruck, and that makes me the luckiest goddamn man in existence. The way she’s sitting, and the way her dress is cut has the top of her left thigh exposed and even some of her ass, which I can see is perfectly sculpted and firm, just like the rest of her. Yeah, that’s a young woman’s body for sure. My testosterone is absolutely flowing through me after that fight, and all I can think about is being balls deep inside her right now.
How tiny she is compared to me…how easily I could just throw her around…Christ, what her slim little waist would feel like between my hands.
She glances back over her shoulder and catches me looking at her. I quickly look back at the road and try not to make it too obvious what I was doing, but she’s no dummy. She knows what I was doing. She’s drop-dead gorgeous. She must be used to men checking her out her entire life. The corners of her mouth twist into a tiny smile.
“Where are we going, Magnus?”
“It ain’t the Hilton, I’ll tell you that,” I reply. “And it ain’t my old apartment either.”
“I told you I don’t mind, Magnus,” she replies.
“Yeah, well when you seethisplace, you just might,” I laugh. “We’re almost there.”
A few minutes later I take a turn I haven’t taken in years, but still it feels like I took it yesterday. I remember the familiar old bump on the left side as the road turns from paved to gravel and pull right to avoid the large rock that popped my front left tire when I was seventeen. I take a deep breath as the old house comes into view through the trees.
“This was my pops’ old place,” I say to Josie as I pull up in front of the porch, which looks dangerously close to collapse. “Only thing he left me when he died.”
I hop out of the truck and walk up to the stairs and test them with my foot. They seem to support my weight, so I make my way up onto the porch, which also thankfully doesn’t give way into a pile of rotted-out lumber. I turn around just in time to see Josie take her heels off and hop out of the truck barefooted into the dirt.
“Don’t do that, gorgeous!” I protest, reaching for her to pick her up. But she puts out a hand to stop me.
“You grew up here?” she asks, walking past me up the stairs to the front door.
“I…yes I did.” I join her at the door. The house key is still on my keychain, although it hasn’t been used in years. I slide it into the lock. “But I haven’t been back in a while. No one but me even knows about it.”
“Well, let’s go inside.” Josie smiles.
This is insane. A girl as beautiful as Josie in a place like this? It’s like eating caviar while sitting on a dumpster on a street corner in the worst part of town. This girl deserves the best, and I’m taking her here. It’s the only way to keep her safe, and I know she’s just doing her best to be nice to me by acting like it’s no big deal, but she deserves the princess treatment, and I’m treating her like somebody’s side piece.
With a deep sigh, I turn the key in the lock and open the door.
The place is just how I remember it. The old couch is still there, my dad’s chair in the corner, the coffee table, the fireplace, and the door leading out back. Sometime in my absence, the door to the kitchen came off its hinges and is lying on the floor in the middle of the doorway. There’s a musty smell too, like an old bookstore.
Josie walks to the back window and looks out at the sun setting through the trees. “It must have been nice growing up here.”
“Stop that,” I say.
“What?” She turns and looks at me.
“I know you’re just trying to be nice. You don’t have to do that.”
“Magnus, I’m not—”
“My dad was a con artist,” I say through gritted teeth. “Always working one scam or the next. The only valuable thing he ever taught me was how to fight. And one could argue if that’s the best thing you ever taught your son then you failed miserably as a father.”
I can see us both standing in the back yard, him holding up his hands, shouting at me to swing, cuffing me in the side of the head when I was too timid to go on.
“Magnus…”
“My mother was what you might call a ‘working girl’ these days,” I go on. “She had me, and I guess when she saw me, she decided she didn’t want me. I never met her. All I have is a vague image in my mind of a woman I think is her.”