Dirty Sweet Wild (Bad Billionaires 2)

Trent gasped something unintelligible, and Max lifted him and slammed him back against the pavement, once, hard.

“Did you hurt her?” he roared again.

“Max!” I shouted, but he didn’t hear me. I didn’t want to touch him—I wasn’t sure he even knew I was there. He was so focused on Trent, I wasn’t sure he saw anything else.

“Fuck you, Reilly!” Trent finally managed to shout. He was squirming now, kicking his legs, probably trying to kick Max’s bad leg out from under him. “You fucked me over! I was going to pay them back—”

Max lifted him again and slammed him down, and this time I heard Trent’s head thud against the pavement. In the distance, police sirens were approaching.

“Did you hurt her?” Max shouted a third time, rain dripping from his face, his hair.

“Jesus!” Trent said, sagging in Max’s grip. “It was just one hit! It was nothing! You’re fucking crazy, you piece of shit!”

Max went very still. I watched his expression change. It was a little like watching coal go white-hot—it may not be visibly burning, but you know it’s deadly to touch. His brow cleared, and his eyes glittered. In his position, crouched over Trent, I could see the veins bulging in his flexed arms, the perfect tension in his big body. He went deep inside himself, right there before my eyes, went deep inside his head and saw something no one else could see. He put one hand around Trent’s throat, pinning him to the ground and pressing. Trent squirmed and made a strangled sound. The moment held on a knife’s blade.

“Max,” I said.

This time he heard me. He blinked, and I watched him slowly come out of himself, though he didn’t remove his hand from Trent’s neck. The police sirens were coming closer. “Gwen,” he said—just that one word, said in a low growl, but I knew it wasn’t a curse. It was a plea.

I came toward him and put a hand on his shoulder. The muscles were bunched like rocks. “You should let him go,” I said. “The cops are coming. I’m fine.”

He angled his head slightly toward me, but he didn’t turn. “Is it true he hit you?”

I didn’t look at Trent, who was starting to struggle to breathe. My stomach was sore, and I couldn’t take a deep breath. But I said, “I’m okay.”

Max knew that was a yes, and for a second his big hand squeezed harder. His voice, when he spoke, was low and dangerous. “I should fucking kill you,” he said to Trent.

The police cars pulled in to the parking lot, their lights flashing. They stopped and a door slammed.

“Max,” I said again, squeezing his shoulder.

“Stand up, sir,” I heard one of the cops say. “Right now.”

“It’s over,” I said softly, so only Max could hear. “Let him go.”

He did. He relaxed his hand from Trent’s throat and lifted it. He stood. He looked me up and down, his dark eyes unreadable. And then, without saying a word, he looked away.

Chapter 24

Max

They didn’t arrest me. They took me to the station and questioned me, but they didn’t arrest me. It seemed that after everything, Trent Wallace didn’t want to press charges for assault.

Gwen, however, pressed every charge against Trent that she could get her hands on. Abduction. Assault. Threatening her. She went to the hospital, where she had a report done on the injury to her stomach, and the cops took pictures. I wanted to tell her that she was my fucking superhero in those few hours, but I couldn’t. Because I was stuck in an interview room.

What is your relationship with Miss Maplethorpe? What is your relationship with Mr. Wallace? You claim you’ve never met him. How is it that you’re the new co-owner of the building where he rents an office, and you evicted him a week ago?

For fuck’s sake, just let me go. Just let me get back to her. Just let me go.

Devon sent Ben to sit in the interviews with me, just in case, and Devon himself was waiting in the police station when they let me go. He was sitting in a hard chair, wearing jeans and an old gray t-shirt under a zip-up sweatshirt, a pair of motorcycle boots on his feet. Despite being a billionaire, he looked right at home with the drug dealers, pimps, and hookers coming and going through the station, and not one of them looked at him twice.

“You done?” he asked when I stood in front of him, pulling on my own sweatshirt.

I shrugged. Ben had gone home already, taking off in his beat-up Civic, his day’s work done.

Devon stood up. “I’ll take you back to your car.”

I didn’t want to go back to that parking lot, where I’d had one of the most disastrous moments of my life, but I had no choice. My car was still there. I’d come here in the back of a police cruiser.