Love the Way You Lie (Stripped 1)

“No dancing,” I say, strangely disappointed.

“Then let’s lie down,” he says gently. Maybe he knows how hard this is for me, to get close. Maybe it’s hard for him too. “We can look at the stars and let them dance for us.”

My heart clenches with something like wistfulness.

He’s not even gone, but I already miss him. I’ve had so little kindness lately. Or ever. And here he is with a whole weapons cache full of kindness. The killing game. I remember what Blue said about him. Even Ivan warned me away.

Kip stands there looking gruff and intimidating, like he would take on the whole world for looking at him sideways. There are scars on his knuckles that say he tried. And there’s a bend in his nose that says he’s lost. But despite all that violence, he touches me with desire.

He already has my body, already bought and used up. But he wants something else.

He wants me.

* * *

My father loved my mother. I was young when she died—when he killed her—but I remember that much.

I remember how he doted on her, giving her everything she asked for and more. I remember how she would laugh and tell him not to spoil her. I would sneak out of my bed when they threw parties. Even in a crowd of people, all dressed in elaborate gowns and tuxedos, they were easy to spot. She always had a smile, and he only had eyes for her. They would dance in the middle of the room, eclipsing all the other people.

And then one day my father came to me, eyes red and swollen from crying, voice thick with grief, to tell me she had died. I think I knew then he had done it. It was the lack of revenge that told me. If anyone else had shot her, he would have destroyed the whole city to avenge her instead of holding a small closed-casket funeral in the rain. A casket I wanted to believe was empty. But was it really better to believe she had abandoned me?

Maybe that was why I slept with my bodyguard. It had been a way to be close to my mother, to be like her, years after she was gone. Of course then I didn’t understand that a twenty-one-year-old man interested in a fourteen-year-old girl was wrong. I don’t think he even cared about my body. He was a rush junkie, and I was his fix. Fucking the boss’s daughter was just another risk. The men on my father’s payroll didn’t exactly have printed resumes and pension plans.

They never lived long enough to need one.

On the roof of the strip club, we are a thousand miles away from that world. Far away from tuxedos and ball gowns. Far from love and jealousy and revenge.

There is only a man who wants to fuck me. And touch me and make me hump his boot.

A man who will pay for the right.

Inside the walls of the club, he pays in cash. On the roof he pays with gifted weapons and an unexpected gentleness. He pays with thoughtfulness, but it’s a currency all the same. And so I let myself relax. He puts aside the gun and lays his jacket down like a blanket. Then I’m lying with my head on his arm, looking up.

“How long have you lived here?” I ask.

I don’t mean for the question to come out, but it does. We shouldn’t get personal. Fucking and sucking, but no questions. And no answers.

“Not long,” he says, looking up at the sky. “I don’t stay put very long.”

“That sounds nice,” I murmur. Never putting down roots. Never having them yanked out.

“Sometimes. Other times I wonder what it would be like to have everything I need, right at my fingertips. Food, a bed. Sex.”

“You have those things.” It’s not supposed to be suggestive. I just mean he can buy them, in a restaurant or a motel. Or a strip club.

But when he looks at me, there’s heat in his eyes. And resolve, as if he’s finally taking what’s his. The words change and tighten. They become about the taste of him and the warm jacket we lie on. They become about the sex I’ll soon give him.

His gaze sweeps over my body, stretched out. I’m wearing yoga pants and a tank top, but the way he looks at me, I’m already naked. He strips me with just his eyes, leaving me bare and vulnerable and strangely unashamed.

“You’re beautiful,” he says, his voice hoarse.

I flinch, because it’s what Byron used to tell me. Of course when he said it, it was a compliment to himself, praise for finding the perfect accessory to his life.

Kip notices. “You don’t like that word.”

“No. Yes. I don’t know.” I laugh softly. “It’s complicated. I look like my mother.”

That’s what my father always told me, with the bitter light of grief in his eyes.