Touched By The Devil (Devil's Riders 7)

I’d thought he was being respectful. But now I thought that maybe he just wasn’t all that interested in romance. He’d been asexual. I had been too inexperienced and shy to know the difference.

I exhaled and opened the album. There was David with his handsome face and pinched smile. He looked vaguely uncomfortable in all the group photos, especially the ones with my distant cousins trying to hug him at the rehearsal dinner.

That side of my family drank. A lot. It had made for lots of overly friendly hugs and some interesting blowups over the years. Not that I had ever been involved, but Thanksgiving and Christmas were not unlike watching one of those Real Housewife reunions on Bravo. I hadn’t seen them in years now. They hadn’t even bothered to come to David’s funeral.

There were some casual shots of us that someone had taken the morning of our wedding. It was bad luck for the bride and groom to see each other beforehand. I’d known that. But I hadn’t believed in bad luck back then.

After losing my husband at the tender age of twenty-six to a rare form of blood cancer, I believed in bad luck now.

I wished he were still alive. I did. I thought about it all the time. But lately, I was wishing that he were alive somewhere else. Not with me.

Just an old friend from college, living his life. Hopefully, becoming the man I always knew he could be. Less critical. Less obsessive about things that didn’t matter. David’s hobbies had been his passion. Not me.

And when I closed my eyes and imagined that, I imagined myself on the other end of the occasional phone call, but here in California, doing what I was doing now.

With Mac.

In fact, I couldn’t really imagine anything I was looking forward to without him. Mac and I working in the garden. Eating dinner. Traveling. And… other stuff. Other stuff we could do together naked. Stuff I hadn’t fantasized much about over the years.

But I was fantasizing about it now. A lot. All the sweet and dirty stuff. All the happily ever afters.

How had this happened so quickly? I wondered. How had he inserted himself into my hopes and dreams so soon?

It scared me. I was already at the point where he had the power to hurt me. I sighed, realizing there was nothing I could do about it now. It was too late.

I flipped through the album slowly, really looking at each picture. Snapshots of a former life. A life that I didn’t want to go back to, no matter how badly it had hurt to lose it. But I’d healed. Just thinking about moving forward with Mac had proved that, whether it worked out beyond a few dates or not.

When I closed the album a little while later, I felt different. Clearer-headed and lighter. This is my past, I thought as I slid the album back into the bookshelf. Maybe, just maybe, Mac could be my future.

It felt like I had finally said goodbye to David, I realized as I kicked off my bunny slippers and scooted onto the rumpled bed. Goodbye to the hopeful and innocent girl I’d been when we met. Goodbye to that old life and that particular set of dreams.

I slid underneath the blanket and fell right to sleep.

Chapter 13

Mac

“You unbelievable jackass.”

I ignored Lucky, who was at the job site, helping me load up the trees. We had plenty of overage to take a few, and I’d gotten unofficial permission to do whatever it took to keep ‘the crazy lady’ happy.

Of course, they had no idea how far I was willing to go to make that happen. I wanted her to be more than happy. I wanted her purring with pleasure and crawling into my lap. Just like her cat.

I’d bristled when the suits who were funding the housing development called her nuts. She wasn’t crazy. She was beautiful and brave and she liked nature. She really cared about the planet and the plants she cultivated. That was all.

And there wasn’t a damn thing that was crazy about that.

I really fucking hoped the trees made it all more bearable for her. Otherwise, I was going to come up with a Plan B. The truth was, something was percolating in the back of my brain, but I wasn’t ready to admit it yet.

“What?”

“You had her right there, and you let her get away?”

Drake was shaking his head at me. Nick and Kyle too. I’d given them the sketchiest of details, but when they found out I left without sealing the deal, they had reacted like rabid sports fans whose team had just lost.

“Shut up.”

“You are a traitor to our kind,” Drake said solemnly. We all laughed. It sounded like a line from a movie.

“I like her,” I said, wrapping a red plastic ribbon around a nice, full-looking tree. “It’s more than just sex.”