“Are you guys in a club or something?” I asked Keltan, the stunning looking man with a sexy accent and a large wedding band on his left hand. He’d introduced himself as the owner of Greenstone Security, the company who was apparently installing a state-of-the-art security system in my house. Which he’d explained after doing the alpha male, furious stare at my face. Which looked fucking terrible. The bruising had only gotten worse, and it was difficult to look in a mirror.
His expression shifted to one of confusion. “Say again?”
“A club,” I repeated, waving my hand at him and then to the three men who were working on something in the vicinity of my French Doors, nibbling on the cookies I’d offered them when they arrived.
“A hot guy club,” I clarified. “One where you all seem to find each other and only talk in alpha male grunts and phrases. Average men need not apply.”
Keltan chuckled. He had a really nice laugh. I wondered what Hades’s laugh sounded like. Felt like. I wonder if the man even laughed. Surely, he had. He was human, and every human laughed, cried, bled. I’d only seen the latter, yet I found it impossible to imagine him doing the other two.
No, he wouldn’t laugh like Keltan. He would not have that air about him, an easy kind of presence that felt warm, comfortable, nonthreatening. Nonetheless, I felt myself longing for that. For him.
And that afternoon, six days after the security was installed, as if I’d wished him into existence, he arrived. The roar of the Harley had both mine and Sirius’s ears perking up. Sirius didn’t have to worry about things like dignity, so he went sprinting to the front door, pouncing on Hades the second he walked through it. And it took me a lot of willpower not to do the very same. Instead, I put down the book I was reading, got up from the sofa and met him in the arch over the hallway leading to my kitchen and living area.
Sirius was pressed to his side, so he was barely able to walk. It took a lot of willpower for me not to do that too. In fact, I had a totally ridiculous urge to run into his arms and never leave them. Despite his jaw droppingly sexy arms, they weren’t exactly the kind of limbs that invited a woman in. They were the kind of limbs that warned people away, that did unsightly and terrible things to others.
My eyes traced over every inch of him, drinking him in like I was dying of thirst. Across his angular face to the strands of midnight hair that framed it, then down his muscled neck, along the span of his broad shoulders, down his sinewy arms then down his lean torso. I held my breath and decided not to go lower than the belt. My body was battered, broken and bruised. Everywhere but below my belt. So instead of torturing myself over what lay beneath his belt, I forced my eyes upward. Right to the patch on his cut that read ‘Enforcer.’ I might have been ignorant about the outlaw lifestyle, but I knew enough to understand what that patch meant. It was meant to scare me away, to communicate that this was a man unafraid to hurt, maim and kill those who crossed him or the club.
The patch did not scare me. Nor did the cut, even though I knew both should. It was the man. The man terrified me.
“You’re back,” I stated the obvious, my voice breathy and weird.
His eyes moved over my face, his jaw set, body taut. “I’m back,” he agreed.
I moved uncertainly from foot to foot. My feet were bare. I didn’t know what to do without shoes on. Without my heels. Even my bright pink slippers with the fluffy bows on them would‘ve been welcome at this juncture. At least my toes were painted bright pink. Marilyn had been over today with her pedicure kit and brownies that Jed made.
I was still in too much pain to put any kind of makeup on, though. It would’ve been fighting a losing battle anyway. The swelling had gone down, and there were only small butterfly bandages on the cut on my cheek, but my bruises had developed these past few days. Sarah had come over earlier today with her doctor’s bag, with her kind eyes, with gentle squeezes on my hand telling me that I was going to heal just fine. On the outside, at least. I figured that my insides would take a lot longer.
This past week had been one of the strangest and hardest of my life. I didn’t spend much time—or any time—thinking about what I’d do if I was beaten up by an ex-boyfriend again. Theoretically, I figured I’d handle it like I handled everything else in my life: by putting on some Shania Twain, some heels and getting the fuck over it.