I smiled at her and saw her eyes brighten when my dimple appeared in my cheek. “Bry, this is the Point, it thrives on things like major crises and lunatics hell-bent on vengeance. I get what you’re telling me. The little things matter just as much as the major things. I will always choose to be with you, Brysen, but I can’t just walk away from what I’m doing here, even if it means you can’t stay.” She gaped at me and I brushed her bangs off of her forehead. “I do love you and I need you to keep me from turning into something I hate, but I can’t ask you to give yourself to the streets, to this life, if it’s not what you want.”
She narrowed her eyes at me and rubbed her lips against my palm. “Then don’t ask.”
I felt my insides seize up and something in the center of my chest twist so hard, my heart couldn’t find a way to beat around it.
“All right, I won’t.” Even if it felt like it would kill me.
“Good, and then when I’m there—on the streets in the city, when I’m there every time you come home, you’ll know that’s the only place I want to be. It’s where you are, Race, so it’s where I have to be.”
I wanted to collapse in relief, but all I could do was lean over and kiss her in a way that probably wasn’t appropriate, considering her banged-up condition.
I would hold on to her with everything I had and I would make sure she stayed just the way she was. I would never take the little things for granted, and just as tightly as I planned on holding on to her, I was going to hold on to this dark and dangerous place that was my home. They were both mine, and I would give up anything and everything to keep them.
“It’s not a place anyone really wants to call home, but if you give me some time, let me figure some things out, I can make you the queen of my broken kingdom. I can make this a place that isn’t so terrible to be.” It was a bold claim, one I would battle through hell and move the very earth the Point sat on to live up to. Bax was willing to watch the city burn and eat itself alive for Dovie. I wanted the opposite. I wanted to build it up, give it legs, make it a place that could stand tall and proud.
“There is good on those streets. I know that’s what you’re fighting for, even if you have to do it in a nontraditional way.”
“How can you see that through all the messed-up stuff that has happened to you since getting involved with me? Why aren’t you running the other way?” It would have been the smart thing for her to do the second after I kissed her. Her fate was sealed from that very instant.
“That bad stuff didn’t come from you. Like Karsen said—bad things happen and we just have to deal with them, and I can see it because I’ve been looking at you for a long time, Race—all of you. I know exactly who you have to be and who you want to be.”
If I could rip my heart out of my chest and physically hand it to her for safekeeping, I would. For a long time I had avoided collecting things, avoided feeling attached to much of anything because of the fear that it would get taken away from me. I could tell by the look in Brysen’s eyes and the slant of her mouth that nothing was going to take this girl away from me, and that made risking everything I had for her a no-brainer.
“I’m not going to tell you that I’ll take care of you anymore. But I am going to make it my mission from here on out to see to it that you can take care of yourself. You already have the fight in you; we just need to give you a little oomph and some street smarts to go with it.”
She lifted a blond eyebrow at me and the conversation was cut short as the doctor finally made an appearance. He poked and probed at her until she growled at him, and he told her he did indeed want another CT scan of her head. That knot on her temple seemed to be a concern, but as long as she was awake and looking at me, I wasn’t going to freak out.
Before a couple nurses showed up to wheel her off to radiology, she flashed me a grin that looked an awful lot like the one Dovie had given to Bax and asked me, “Do I get a crown if I get to be your queen?”
That made me burst out laughing, which had the nurses giving me a scolding look.
“I’ll give you whatever you want.” And I would until both the parts of the man I was ran out of things to give.
We weren’t really a good bet on making this work, but I was a guy who liked the long shot, and I always put my money on the long shot. I was hoping the fact that we were undeniably in love with one another put the odds on our side.
THEY WANTED TO KEEP Brysen in the hospital overnight. Her CT scan came back all clear, but that knot on the side of her head was some cause for concern, so they just wanted to keep her under observation. Since there was only room for one of us to stay with her in the room they moved her to, I let Karsen curl up in the chair for the night and wandered off to find out what happened to Booker.
Karsen had informed me that he had taken two bullets in the chest. One went right through his shoulder and the other had lodged somewhere in a rib near his lung. Apparently, since the shots had been fired through the door, the momentum had been slowed enough to prevent the bullets from doing irreparable damage. The hulking giant was going to make it just as soon as he came out of surgery to dig the bullet out of his rib cage. He was still in post-op when I located the wing of the hospital he was in, and since I wasn’t family and he was still unconscious, no one would agree to let me in to see him. I was annoyed by that, but could understand it, and I think I shocked the hell out of the stone-faced nurse I was agreeing with when I told her I needed all his medical bills and expenses forwarded to me.
Ex-cons who offered themselves out to be hired muscle for other criminals weren’t the type of guys that had medical insurance, and even if his actions had been self-serving, Booker had still taken a bullet for my girl when I wasn’t there. There was no way I wasn’t going to repay the guy in the only way I could. Plus I liked him; he reminded me of Bax and I understood his motivations, the things that made him tick. He was the kind of guy I wanted to have on hand moving forward.
I spent the night in the waiting room. I wasn’t ready to leave Brysen alone just yet, even though I knew the direct threat to her was gone. I must have drifted off while I was sitting there, because when my hand that was braced under my chin got nudged, my head fell to the side and I jerked away to find Titus looming over me with two cups of coffee. I blinked my eyes and yawned and took the proffered cup as he frowned down at me.
“Did you sleep sitting like that?”
I yawned again and shook my head a little bit to shake out the sleepy fog that was gathered between my ears.
“Yeah. They only allowed one of us in the room with her and I let her sister stay. What are you doing here so early?”
He took a sip out of his own Styrofoam cup and looked at me over the rim. “Had to get the girls’ statements, and now that Booker is awake, I need to talk to him as well. Seems like a pretty cut-and-dried case of attempted kidnapping and attempted murder. I don’t see any issues shutting it down pretty quick as a self-defense shooting.”
I rolled my neck around on my shoulders until there was a pop loud enough that people on the other side of the hospital could hear it.
“Good. He was fixated on her. He blamed Brysen for her mom crashing into his parents while she was drinking and driving. His rage was totally misplaced and misguided. She didn’t have anything do with the reason he was so infuriated.”
Titus snorted and reached up to adjust his tie.
“Someone is always having to pay for the sins of their parents.” I didn’t know all of Titus’s history, but I knew his and Bax’s mom had a major drinking problem and had a history of going to bed with really dangerous men. Bax’s dad was a murderous, cold-blooded mobster, and Titus’s old man was doing life in prison for a killing spree that included three cops as his victims. My own father had left a legacy of deceit and dishonesty that I never wanted to be associated with, so I understood the point he was trying to make.
“It never seems to get any easier, does it?” He sounded gruff and I couldn’t imagine how much harder it
was for him, constantly trying to fight the good fight and hold the moral high ground in a place that was steadily sinking into the rot and mire. He had already had to compromise his morals in terms of pretending he didn’t know exactly what Bax and I were up to, and I wasn’t really sure how much more tension could be added to that tightrope he was walking before it snapped under his feet.
Just then, Karsen appeared at the edge of the room pushing a disgruntled-looking Brysen in a wheelchair. She looked disheveled and messy, but her eyes lit up from the inside when she saw me. I got to my feet and clapped a hand on Titus’s beefy shoulder.
“No, it never gets easier, but there are some things and some people that make the fight worthwhile.”
I made my way over to the girls and first kissed Karsen on the cheek then bent down to drop a kiss on top of Brysen’s head.
“Are you ready to blow this place?”
She nodded and looked up at her sister. “We were just talking about that. Where exactly are we going to go? The condo is a mess, I don’t know if the bank took the house from Dad yet, and there isn’t enough room at the loft for all of us.”
I rubbed a hand across the back of my neck and thought about it for a second.
“You guys can crash at Bax and Dovie’s. They have a guest room big enough for both of you until I can get the condo back in order.”
Brysen immediately started to shake her head at me. “No. Where are you going to go?”
“Back to the garage for a week or so. I just have to get the blood and stuff out of the condo.”
Titus made a noise behind me and I gave him a look over my shoulder. He shrugged at me and gave me a smirk. “That sounds like it’s becoming your full-time job—cleaning up the blood.”
I definitely had to do it far more often than I wanted to admit to. Not that I was in any kind of rush to tell him he was right.
“Why don’t you take Karsen to your brother’s and I’ll keep Brysen with me in the city until I get things straightened out in a more permanent way.” I glanced at the girls. “Does that work for you?”
Brysen just stared at me for a minute and then looked at Karsen. “Bax and Dovie’s place is closer to the high school, so I guess it’s fine for now unless you want to see if Dad’s still at the house.” Her tone indicated that she didn’t have much faith in her dad still hanging around after the curtain had been pulled back on his selfish actions.
Once again, Karsen proved that she was too wise and too aware for someone of her young age. “No, I’ll go to Dovie’s for a while. I think I’ve had enough of both Mom and Dad for right now.”
Once that was settled, we all filed out of the hospital and went in opposite directions once we hit the parking lot. I helped Brysen into the Stingray and fielded her rapid-fire questions about Booker’s condition and about how Dovie was doing. She seemed far more concerned about everyone else’s well-being than her own, but she was alert and totally on point and claimed that even though she had a nasty shiner and an enormous bruise on her temple, she felt fine. She wasn’t shaky, didn’t seem to be stewing or gloomy over the fact that she had been attacked or seen a man murdered right at her feet. In fact, she asked me to take her somewhere to get her hair fixed and just seemed ready to keep on rolling like nothing major had just happened to her.
I didn’t buy it for a second. Dovie had done the same thing initially after being snatched and scarred by Novak. It only took a few days for the nightmares to set in and then the moment of silence when it became obvious that she was lost in her head and reliving her moments of terror over and over again. I was just going to have to brace myself for when the storm hit with my pretty blonde.
Only I took her to fix her hair, which turned out even edgier and more like a twenties flapper than it already was, took her to get something to eat, took her back to the loft so she could shower and take a nap, and she still seemed rock solid. The next day she wanted me to take her shopping for some essentials, she wanted to go by the restaurant to explain why she was missing so much work and make sure she still had a job, and she wanted to go by the university to square up with her teachers. That night she cuddled into my side and fell asleep like there was nothing in her world to keep her up. The day after that, she wanted me to take her to Dovie’s so she could say thank you and see her sister. I dropped her off with a kiss, fully expecting her to be an emotional mess considering Dovie was still all banged up and had killed a man for her, but when I went back to pick her up after touching base with Nassir and Bax about business stuff, she was her typical cool and collected self and surprised the crap out of me by practically jumping me as soon as we got back to the loft.
I would never turn Brysen down when she wanted to have sex, but I was stunned, trying to treat her with care and delicacy considering her ordeal, but she was having none of it. She pushed, pulled, kissed, sucked, scratched, and writhed against me until it was too much to take and I ended up losing control and fucked her like I normally did. When it was over, I was left breathing heavy with her curled naked and satisfied against my chest. She had a sexy little half smile on her face and her eyes were heavy-lidded and sultry as she stroked a lazy hand up and down my chest. I wanted to question her about it, ask her how she was doing and make her tell me how she was really feeling, but before I could form the words, she was breathing evenly and had dozed off on me again, sleeping like a damn baby while I pondered what her actions, or rather nonactions, meant.
When she stirred an hour or so later, she rolled over onto me so that she was straddling my waist and looking down at me with her hands braced on my chest. Her blue eyes always reminded me of the prettiest summer day, and even with her bruised face she was still the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. The way she was handling herself, her resilience, made her even more amazing in my eyes and I kind of envied her. After Novak’s goons had kicked my ass and left me broken, I had holed away in this fortress for months and months, afraid of what else I might lose in the game I was playing with the Point. She was far braver and stronger than I was.
“Tomorrow I want to start getting things moving on the condo. We should have someone pull all the carpet out of there and put in hardwood.” One of her pale eyebrows arched sexily and she gave me a sardonic grin. “It’s easier to get blood off of hardwood than it is to get it out of carpet.”
I just stared at her until she grabbed my hands and put them purposefully over her bare breasts.
“Stop acting like I’m going to fall apart, Race. At first it was sweet, but now it’s starting to annoy me.”
I gave the full globes a squeeze and rubbed my thumbs over the velvet-soft tip of each. Her nipples puckered fast and hard at the sweeping touch and I told her, “I don’t necessarily think you’re going to fall apart, but you went through a pretty major trauma and that had to have affected you. I just want to be here for you if you need me.”
She lowered her face to mine and kissed me hard then rubbed the end of her nose against mine.
“I don’t feel bad. It sucks Dovie had to shoot someone, it sucks Booker got hurt, it sucks Karsen had to witness all of it, and it really sucks that my mom got drunk and set all of this in motion, but Drew was out of his mind and I don’t have any guilt over the fact that he’s gone and all of us are still here.”
She sat up and reached behind to wrap a hand around my dick, which was way smarter than the rest of me and already jumping to do whatever she wanted it to do.
“Race, if we’re going to do this—make this work—if I get to be the queen to your golden king, then you have to trust that I can handle this stuff. I barely survived a deranged stalker who spent a year pretending to be my friend. My mom is in rehab. My dad is a gambling addict and more than likely on the run from my boyfriend, my best friend is Annie Oakley and lives with a car thief, and my little sister has a full-blown crush on an ex-con that looks like he kicks babies for fun. I can handle all of that and I will handle whatever else comes our way. Okay?”
“Okay . . .??
? It came out strangled and more like a groan because she started moving her hand up and down and rubbing her thumb over the head that was already pearling up with excitement. If she could handle it, then I could handle it, and if this was the end result, she wouldn’t hear me complain ever again.
She scooted over so that she was kneeling at my side and hovering over my very excited dick while she worked it over and gave me a look that had my heart racing and libido howling in anticipation.
“But the fact that you want to be there for me, that you are overly concerned about how I’m holding up, really turns me on and makes me want to do really naughty things to you.”
That made me laugh, a laugh I almost choked on when her warm lips took the place of her hands and she sucked all my hard and throbbing flesh into her mouth. I started out wanting to get her dirty, to ruffle her feathers and thaw some of that chill that seemed to be around her. Now, as she worked me over, drove me crazy with every dip and flick of her tongue, I understood she was perfect, so damn perfect just the way she was, and she didn’t need to get dirty or mussed up. She just needed me to bring it out in her. I made her bold. And all I could do was thank whoever it was that had been looking out for us all this time for that, because as she moved over me, played with me, tormented me to the edge of my control, she never looked away from me and I knew this was the girl that was not just my balance, my compass, but she was also my match in every way. Not only would she take what I gave her, she would turn around and give it right back to me.
She added her hands to the mix, moved them between my legs, and wrapped one around the base of my cock as just the hint of her teeth scraped along the sensitive underside of my shaft and I stopped thinking about it all and just appreciated her and us as I let go and she caught me.