“Your brother has always been the smartest guy I have ever known. He not only blackmailed the old man for his college fund, he made him set up a trust with you as the beneficiary on it. There’s over a million dollars in it, and if anything—and I do mean anything—happens to you, the money in the trust gets donated to that halfway house you work at.”
Dovie blinked at me in stunned shock and whispered, “But what good is that? Lord Hartman can just change the terms anytime he wants.”
I shook my head. “No. Race made sure it was rock solid. The only person that can add or subtract anything to the trust is Lady Hartman, and for her to do that someone would have to tell her not only about the old man’s wandering dick, but about you too. Race has it locked down. He firmly has your piece-of-shit father by the balls.”
As for where that left us and the rest of the mess trying to suck us under, I told her as honestly as I could. “Everything else depends on what Race has. The only reason they haven’t snatched you and dragged you in to draw him out is because I’m in the way. He knew I wouldn’t let them use you to get to him. As for Hartman, if your mom is out of the way, and with me and Race circling around you, I can’t imagine he would be dumb enough to try anything with you. Plus Novak is the only guy he could ask and look how that turned out for him last time. Novak isn’t big on favors and right now you are far more useful in terms of him getting to Race and whatever Race has. That’s the threat we have to worry about.”
“Are you using me to get to him, Bax? Is that what all this is really about?”
I sighed and felt the vein in my temple throb. I looked down at the broken chains circling my wrists and then back up at her. I didn’t know the answer to that anymore.
“I don’t know.”
“Why not?”
“I need to find Race. I like you, like getting you naked even more, maybe more than I’ve liked anything in my life up to this point, but at the end of the day, whoever is responsible for taking five years from me is going down. I know that won’t jive with you if it ends up being Race, and after I’m done with Novak, there won’t be anything left, so I don’t know what this is, Copper-Top.”
She got up off the bed and walked over to where I was sprawled in the chair. I just watched her until she was standing in front of me. Her hands hung loosely at her sides and her eyes were wild and full of fear and something else I couldn’t name. She was the epitome of everything good that came from bad people and a bad place. She was like a flower that grew out of the impenetrable face of a cliff wall. How she maintained that softness, that care, was a mystery to me and I hoped to God she found someone willing to kill for her in order to protect it after I was long gone.
She sighed so hard I felt the depth of it from the space that separated us. She bent over so her hands were on each of my knees and we were eye-to-eye. I couldn’t help but let my gaze wander down the now gaping neck of her shirt, but when I jerked it back up to hers, it was almost impossible not to get lost in that dense forest of green.
“Titus didn’t just happen to be there that night, Bax. Put the pieces together. Race was stuck between his loyalty to you and Novak holding me over his head. Call your brother.”
“Half brother.” The correction was automatic, which made her roll her eyes at me.
“Ask him about that night. I bet you anything that Race was the reason he was there. Race did set you up, Bax, but he did it to save you.”
I felt my heart rate drop and then thunder right back up so that blood and something else was rushing in my ears. “What do you mean?”
Her hands slid up my thighs and she leaned even farther over, so that her full lips, that mouth I wanted to just let make everything better, was a breath away from my own.
“He was always looking out for you, trying to save you. You don’t think in Race’s mind the option of sending his best friend to jail for five years versus watching you commit murder and forcing you to be Novak’s dog for eternity was the lesser of two evils? He was stuck. Maybe he asked Titus for help and that’s how the meet-up got busted. You made it worse by running, but that doesn’t surprise me.”
I wanted to recoil, to let the fury that had simmered under the surface of my skin for the last five years loose, but she was the only one close enough for it to land on, and I knew she deserved better than that from me. I was going to push out of the chair, I needed a minute to process this, to get my brain to stop spinning, but she didn’t give it to me. She closed the last fraction of space between her mouth and mine. Her lips, soft and welcoming, made everything else screaming at me go quiet. She always somehow managed to do that to me.
It was just a featherlight touch, so brief and delicate I could have imagined it had she not pulled away and lifted her hands to either side of my face. She held me in place while we watched each other. Her thumbs brushed under each of my eyes and her mouth kicked up in a sad half grin.
“The first time I saw you, I thought these eyes were empty. That there was nothing in there. I couldn’t understand why Race thought you were so trustworthy, so worth coming back to this awful place for. Now when I look into them, I can see everything he was trying so desperately to save.”
Something felt like it was squeezing me alive from the inside out. I couldn’t breathe, and suddenly this dingy apartment was the last place on earth I wanted to be.
“And what’s that, Copper-Top? What’s in there that you think makes me different from any other two-bit criminal you’re going to run into in the Point?”
She let go of my face and took a step back. She absently rubbed her arms as she considered me with a heartbreaking expression on her lovely face.
“We’re more than the sum of our parts, Bax. If we weren’t, I would be a cold-blooded murderer or a junkie. You talk about making the hard choice and living with the outcome . . . why don’t you try it? Try to live beyond the scared kid who had to steal so he could feed himself and his mom. Try to look past the bitter young man who is mad at his brother for leaving him behind and purposely doing the opposite of what he does to prove a point. There is more to who you are than the bad things you have done.”
I felt her words crawling all over me like angry ants. I shoved out of the chair so hard, I thought I heard a snap. She was just watching me and I had to get away from her for a second.
“I need a smoke. I’ll be back.”
I wanted to think I was smooth enough, had a tough enough shell, that she couldn’t see me running, but the truth of it was reflected in those leafy eyes. She turned her back on me as I stormed out of the door.
I had the cigarette lit before my feet touched the sidewalk out in front of the apartment building. I flipped my phone around and stared at the darkened screen for a long minute while the smoke filled my lungs. For the second time that night, I called Titus. Just like the first call, he answered on the first ring.
“Shane.”
I didn’t bother to correct him. “The night I got busted, did you know what was going down? Did Race tell you Novak was trying to put me on the hook for murder?”
I heard him swear, heard some background noise as he obviously excused himself from whatever cop business he was doing. I squinted into the night and tried to figure out how I had gone, in the blink of an eye, from thinking I had all the answers to being so clueless.
“I didn’t know the whole story. Race told me if I didn’t have a SWAT team at the warehouse that night that you were going to be fucked, that Novak was going to own you forever. He said you were both trying to get out, and that Novak didn’t want to let you go. I didn’t know about the kidnapping or the murder. It was all just a shit show. I think Race was trying to mitigate the damage, but he didn’t do anyone any favors by keeping us all in the dark. If you hadn’t run and got caught in the Aston Martin, chances are you would’ve never seen the inside of a cell.”
He sighed and swore again. Apparently foul language ran in the family.
“We tried to pin the murder on Novak, but ther
e were too many people there and too many conflicting stories. He has too many people indebted to him, willing to do time for him, for us to make a case.”
“Race was trying to protect his sister. That’s why he kept it all quiet. Novak was holding her over his head, but he didn’t plan on Race going to you because he knew how I felt about you.”
“Well, you’re a grown-ass man now, Bax. Get over it. We’re family, and whether I agree with your choices or you with mine, we are all the other has.”
I snorted again and that tightness in my chest started to spread.
“Now you want to be family? What about when I was too young to take care of myself and actually needed you to give a shit?”
A long-drawn-out silence met my outburst and I could almost feel regret and something else coming across the phone connection.
“I was just a kid, too, Bax. I was bound to make mistakes. I was only trying to survive.”
I closed my eyes and forced myself to breathe in and out steadily before I chucked my phone into the street. I didn’t want to relate, but here, in the Point, survival was the only language we all spoke fluently.
“Did you take care of the Runner while I was locked up?”
He gave a dry little laugh that held anything but humor. “No, Gus did. I just made sure I paid the storage fees on it.”
“And the apartment?”
“Jesus, Bax. I know you hate my guts, but did you really think I was going to throw your ass behind bars and not make sure you had a place to go when you got out?”
I didn’t know what to say to any of that. Titus and I had never seemed to be on the same block, let alone the same side of the street. I didn’t know how to process all this new information.
“You need to be careful. All of this stuff with Race and Novak isn’t over, and for now they’re leaving the girl alone because they don’t want to tip their hand. But if Race doesn’t show soon, all bets will be off.”
“She stays out of it. Novak can come after me anytime he wants. I welcome the opportunity to let him know what I think of his plans.”
There was another sigh. “Bax, I don’t want to put you back in jail, or worse yet, have to identify you in the morgue.”
Now it was my turn to laugh without any kind of humor. “Funny how those are the same options I see. I never thought we would agree on anything.”
“That girl cares about you, Shane. You really gonna just keep living your life like it doesn’t matter?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose and squeezed my eyes shut like I could black out all the new insights I was forced to take in tonight.
“I don’t know, Titus, I’m just going to keep living it the only way I know how.”
“Learn from your mistakes, little brother. That’s all you can do. I gotta go, there was an armed robbery at a bar in the District.”
I didn’t bother to say good-bye, I just put the phone back in my pocket and meandered back upstairs. Now I didn’t want her here. Dovie saw too much, got too close to the heart of things. When I pushed open the door, I had to do a double take. In the fifteen minutes I had been outside, she had stripped and remade the bed, vacuumed the floor, wiped down the TV, straightened up the little kitchenette, and piled all the discarded clothes and junk on the floor into one pile by the closet. It looked like a normal person lived there, not like a place that was used primarily for sex and sleep.
I scraped my hands roughly across my head and made my way over to where she was lying on the bed. I sat down on the edge and looked down at her. She shrugged her shoulders and gave me an “oh well” look. I reached out a finger and moved one of her curls away from her face.
“You can clean it up, but that doesn’t change what it is, Dovie.”
“Are we talking about the apartment or you, Bax?”
I moved my finger down so I could run it across the plush pout of her bottom lip. “Either or. I’m not going to ever be a good guy, Copper-Top.”
She caught my hand in her own and it made my blood go hot when she put a soft kiss right in the center of my palm. “No, you’re not, but that doesn’t mean you always have to be a bad guy either. Why can’t you just be a little bit of both?”
Because for me it had always been all or nothing. Just like this situation with her. I could keep tabs on her, make sure everyone knew that I would jack them up if they messed with her and that they’d better not lay a finger on her, but no. Instead I was having a hard time figuring out where she started and I ended, and she was starting to look like a reward for all that I had missed in the last five years. Just like everything else in my life, going all in meant when it went bad, and when it was all over, there was a good chance it would leave me wrecked. I didn’t want to think about it anymore, didn’t want her to keep looking at me like she saw more to me than there was, so l leaned down and kissed her. I didn’t have to think about right or wrong when she made everything better.
CHAPTER 12
Dovie
THIS WASN’T WHAT IT was normally like when we were together like this. There was a level of intensity in him, a strand of danger that would have scared me had I not seen the struggle he was fighting in those fathomless eyes. I didn’t know if it was the location, the chat with his brother, or the idea that Lord Hartman was heartless and all shades of evil that had him so impatient and edgy, but whatever it was, I could feel the lash of it across each part of my flesh that he exposed with rough hands. He was trying to make a point, to teach a lesson. Only I don’t think he knew which one of us was supposed to be learning it, so instead of fighting him, instead of adding fuel to the fire, I just went still. I was naked and he was still fully clothed, a position I seemed to find myself in a lot around him.
I laid my hands flat on the clean sheets I had just put on his mattress. I kept my eyes locked on the swirling black void in his eyes and refused to move, to give him any kind of reaction as he moved over me. His mouth was too hard, his hands were too rough, and it was the first time since I decided I could handle the trouble he represented that I actually felt like I was in over my head. I had just learned I had narrowly escaped a professional hit on my life thanks to dear old dad; Bax should be coddling me, trying to soothe me. Instead he was trying to push me, trying to scare me into begging him to stop. I wasn’t going to play his game, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of winning it either.
I felt the scrape of his teeth across the sensitive skin of my neck as he bent over me. He pulled his shirt off by the collar and I fixated my gaze on the pulse thundering at the base of his throat. I wanted to kiss him, to let him know it would all be all right, but I wasn’t going to lie to him. If he kept this up, as soon as it was over, I was leaving this apartment, leaving all the darkness and danger that was Bax and taking my chances on my own. I knew Race wouldn’t let me down. I just had to stay alive long enough for him to let his plans play out.
The hard planes of Bax’s chest pressed against the soft curves of my own. My body reacted. How could it not? I wanted him, had wanted him from the get-go, and now that I knew the way he used his mouth, the way he used his hands when he wanted to bring pleasure and light instead of pain and darkness, there was no way my nipples weren’t going to perk up, no way my skin wasn’t going to pebble in arousal, and no way my core wasn’t going to go slick and hot when he gathered both of my lifeless hands in his own and pulled them up above my head.
He used his jean-clad knee to force my legs apart and settled himself in the cradle of my hips. I just stared up at him, pleading with my eyes for him to stop. He wasn’t Shane, he wasn’t Bax, he was just a cold stranger who didn’t care that this was all wrong. I focused on the star on his face. It should be ugly, should make him look ridiculous, but right now I felt like it was my only navigation in a pitch-black sky.
He was waiting for me to stop it, waiting for me to tell him to do the right thing. I could feel him shaking, and not because he was turned on, but because he was forcing himself to hold on to me, to threaten
the tenuous threads of the fabric that was holding us together. He was quaking in such a way that had those chains inked around his wrists been real, they would have been rattling and clanking together. I didn’t utter a protest when he pressed his lips to the crest of my cheek and drew them along the ridge until he reached my mouth. I was going to have bruises around my wrists from how hard he was holding me, and I could feel his heart thundering against my own.
His lips settled firmly over mine. It wasn’t a kiss so much as it was an assault. I was pliant. I was still. I refused to give him what he wanted, even when I was tempted, because it felt so good when he ran his tongue along the sealed seam. I wanted him, just not like this.
His chest heaved and billowed against mine, and belatedly I realized the normally insistent erection that was typically trapped between us by this point was missing. He didn’t want to be doing this any more than I did, but I wasn’t going to stop him. He had to stop himself, or really, all there was in Shane Baxter was badness, and whatever part of him I thought I saw when his guard was down, when he kissed me, when he looked at me like I was his reward, was only going to be a figment of my imagination.
He growled against me, his mouth too hard, too fierce, and I couldn’t stop the single tear that slid out of my eye. We were so close together that he felt the tear when it touched his cheek.
“Tell me to stop.” He whispered it against my mouth, the same conversation we had the first night he put those diabolical hands on me.
Last time I had given in to the demand, even though I didn’t mean it.
“No.” I whispered it right back.
“Tell me to stop, Dovie.” His fingers opened and closed in a spasm around my wrists and I had to flinch a little. I saw his reaction flare in the velvet color of his eyes. He didn’t want to hurt me, but he couldn’t stop it either.
“No.”
“You can make everything better.”