But I like being alone. I like not relying on anyone but me. It’s better that way. Safer.
“You’re trying to be good to me, Gunner,” I whispered. “But I can’t take it. It’s too much for me.”
He reached over then, drawing a strand of my hair behind my ear. I shook my head but he slipped his fingers around the back of it, bringing my skull against his.
“I need to make it up to you,” he said. “Not just want, Tanya. Need. I’ve been running from this for so long. Throwing up whatever hurdles I could just to numb the pain. So I wouldn’t have to think about you, and what I’d done. You think I’m doing you a favor, but really, I’m being as selfish as ever. I need you to be here so I can forgive myself. So I can say I’m nothing like...”
Gunner trailed off, but I knew exactly who he meant. I opened my eyes and looked up at him. “Your father.”
He nodded, fingers wrapped tight around the beer bottle in his hand. His knuckles were white. Slowly, he set it down on his coffee table. “My old man.”
“So don’t,” I said. “Don’t be like him. Start over. Be better. Try.”
“Don’t you get it, baby?” Gunner asked, replacing his grip on the bottle with a grip on the nape of my neck. “I am trying to start over. With you.”
There was so much darkness inside me. So much pain and hate. So much rage. Too much for just one person to handle. And in Gunner’s eyes, I saw that reflected back at me. We were both carrying a load that was too heavy for either of us to bear. But how was I supposed to forget everything that had happened? I’d been holding onto this anger for so long I wasn’t sure I knew how to let go.
I was about to pull away and tell him as much when the parting of his lips caught my eye. They looked so soft. So... enticing. His gaze was on my lips, as well, searching their slopes and curves, memorizing every inch. I wet them with my tongue.
The way he dragged his teeth over his lower lip when he did that sent a surge of adrenaline right into my belly. I breathed in deep through my nose, inhaling the heavy scent of Gunner’s beer, and something else, too.
I’d kissed men before. I’d touched them. I’d let them touch me. Just because I hadn’t gone all the way didn’t mean I hadn’t done some things.
So I knew what lust smelled like—hot, hard, masculine lust. I knew the fragrance of a man’s desire. It was heady. Intoxicating. Even if he was my stepbrother.
I started to say something. I’m not sure what. It was a reflex, you know? Like when a silence gets awkward, or when you know something’s about to happen, but waiting to find out is just... murder.
When Gunner kissed me, that was what it felt like: murder. Like he was killing everything bad that was inside me. His mouth flooded my body with a heat I’d never felt. Not even when I’d been dying in the fire he’d pulled me out of.
Safe and sound. That was how I’d felt then, and how I’d felt now. I closed my eyes and let myself, for just a second, feel like I was home again. Like I was where I belonged.
I kissed my stepbrother back. Sweetly. Passionately.
And then jumped away from him at the sound of breaking glass and Jax’s bark.
Gunner was already up and at the door. “What the fuck?”
I followed after him, my lips still numb from our kiss. My heart was hammering a million miles a minute and the world seemed to spin. What were we thinking? What had we just done?
What had I just done?
And then my gaze settled on his Mustang. His pride and joy. Specifically, the busted-in back window.
“Holy shit,” I whispered. Jax was at Gunner’s side, ears pricked, tail out straight, staring at the dark road. Gunner was reaching in through the glass and cussing up a storm as he pulled out a piece of paper lying beneath a brick—the brick that someone had put through his baby.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, his wild eyes darting over the text. I could see it even from the stoop. Someone had scrawled all over the other side of that paper, big and in Sharpie. Gunner looked up at him, his face pale. “Tanya, do you know anything about this?”
I walked over to him as if in a dream, my legs quaking all the way. Once I reached him, Gunner pushed the note into my hands. My fingers trembled as I read it.
“THERE IS A SMILE OF LOVE
AND THERE IS A SMILE OF DECEIT”
BUT MY SMILE IS DIFFERENT
MY SMILE IS A KNOWING ONE
I KNOW WHAT YOU DID
AND I WILL DO MUCH WORSE
“Tanya?” my stepbrother prompted. But I couldn’t speak. I was too busy looking at the brick in his hand. At the black scorch marks up and down its sides.
That brick that had almost certainly come from my apartment building—the one that had just burned to the ground.
Chapter 9
Gunner
“You have any angry ex-boyfriends I should know about?” I asked, setting the brick down on the kitchen counter. I felt like I could have crushed the damn thing into dust with how tightly my fist was clenched around it.
“No, I don’t have any exes,” she said, her eyes locked on the dirty red thing occupying my counter space. “None that’re this... crazy.”
“Then what the fuck is going on, Tanya?” I asked, breathing hard through my nose. I knew I shouldn’t be taking my frustrations out on her—none of this was her fault—but the fact that someone had smashed up my damn car—had seen what we’d done—what I’d done with Tanya...
My stepsister turned her gaze away from me, looking off toward the window. Her weight shifted from foot to foot as she bit down on her lip.
I frowned. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“A while back,” she began, looking back into my eyes with a pained expression on her face, “there was this guy who came into the club.”
“Okay,” I said, biting back a comment about how this was exactly why she should never have started working as a damn stripper in the first place. “What happened?”
“He paid for a lap dance in the champagne room. I thought everything was on the level—he paid cash and had asked for me specifically, which isn’t unusual—until I walked into the room.” Tanya paused, closing her eyes tight for a moment before forcing herself to continue. “He was wearing this weird drama mask—the tragedy one, with the sad face and shit.
“It was weird, but I figured it was some kind of kink or something, and as long as he didn’t get freaky I’d do the dance and get the fuck out of there. But that’s not what happened. He started talking, and he had one of those fucking voice machines, that make you sound like that damn puppet from Saw. He was telling me about how his mother had been a whore, and how he’d stuffed her panties in her mouth and killed her. Then he asked how I’d sound when I was choking—if I’d sound just like his mother did.”
I watched Tanya’s eyes well up with tears, her chest heaving as her words turned to sobs.
“I told him not to fucking touch me, but he started choking me. I screamed, and one of the bouncers came in and pulled him off and threw him out of the club. God, I was so fucking scared. I hadn’t done a private show since then—not until you showed up.”
I watched her for a long moment, my thoughts churning in my head like a brewing storm at sea. The thought of someone almost killing my baby sister making my blood boil in my veins as I imagined that fucking psycho hurting her.
“You think that it’s the same guy?” I asked, glancing out at my car through the kitchen window. Would any of this have happened if Tanya had never given me that dance? If I’d never made her?
“I don’t know who else it could be, Gunner,” she said, her voice faint and breathy as she brought herself back under control. “I don’t have any other enemies, none that would throw a fuckin’ brick at your car. I mean, Jesus—this is some Lifetime-special bullshit.”
I rubbed my hands over my face, resting my elbows on the kitchen counter. I’d done something horrible to my own stepsister, let her grind on me like that—I could have stopped her. The more
I thought about it, the more the images of her ass rubbing against my groin filled my mind. My heart started to race and I could feel my cock stirring in my pants again.