Craving Hawk (The Aces' Sons 3)

“You gotta stop,” I murmured as she kept crying, her body jerking with every hiccup.

“That was bad,” she whispered back. “That was horrible.”

“It wasn’t,” I argued calmly. I’d been headed toward my tent, but changed direction and moved toward the edge of the building. The tent was in the middle of everyone and I needed to get her alone.

“He was—” she stuttered to a stop again and sniffled.

“We were just messin’ around,” I said again, stopping once we were finally out of sight.

“That didn’t look like messing around,” she argued.

I let go of her so she would get down, but the girl had some serious muscle because she didn’t even sag an inch down my body without my support.

I took a deep breath to try and calm myself down, but it wasn’t happening.

“And you thought it was a good idea to get in the middle of that shit?” I yelled, startling the hell out of her. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

That got her legs to drop to the ground and her arms to fall from around my neck.

“What?” she asked in confusion, tipping her head back to look at me.

“You have any idea what coulda happened to you? Either one of us coulda knocked your fuckin’ teeth out before we realized you were there.”

“He was—,” she swallowed harshly, her eyes starting to water again. “He was choking you.”

I could see how bad she was freaking out. She was still crying. Still shaking.

But now I was shaking, too. My stomach was in knots.

If there was one thing on this earth that got to me more than anything else—one thing that made me go fucking crazy—it was someone putting themselves in danger to try and save me. I couldn’t handle that shit. Couldn’t deal with it.

I reached out and gripped her face, leaning down so we were nose to nose. “Don’t ever do that again,” I ordered harshly. “You hear me?”

“I was trying to help you!” she yelled back, her voice cracking. “He was hurting you, I—”

“Listen to me!” I yelled back, making her flinch. “Don’t you ever do that again.”

“Okay,” she whispered, tears rolling down her face and onto my hand. “Okay.”

“Son?” my dad called, coming around the corner. “Everythin’ good?”

“It’s fine,” I replied. I barely glanced at him because the minute he’d walked around the corner, Heather had put her hand over mine, and I couldn’t tell if she was holding it against her face or getting ready to pull it away.

“Come on,” Dad ordered. “Need to get everybody packed and get ’em the fuck outta here.”

“I’ll be there in a bit,” I answered, watching Heather. She was still crying, but she wasn’t making any noise. She wasn’t even moving.

“Now, Thomas.”

I looked at him in annoyance and noticed he’d moved a couple steps toward us. His entire body was braced and it took me a second to realize why.

He thought I was going to fucking hurt her. He thought he was going to have to step in.

Jesus Christ.

“Stop cryin’,” I said, looking back at Heather. I couldn’t deal with my dad then. She was the priority, not his fucked up view of me. “Come on, sugar. I can’t leave ya like this.”

“We can go home?” she asked, pulling my hand away from her face. “Finally.” She sniffed and wiped off her face with the palms of her hands.

“Wait for me,” I said, leaning forward to kiss her forehead. “I’ll bring ya home.”

She nodded but didn’t say anything else as she slid past me and walked quickly toward the front of the building.

Two hours later when I went looking for her, she was gone.

Chapter 5

Heather

“Ahhh,” I sighed as I dropped backward onto my clean sheets.

I’d spent the last few hours cleaning the nastiness out of my fridge and wiping up the dust that seemed to have accumulated on every single surface of my house over the past three weeks. It was good to be home.

I’d kept up with my online summer classes while I’d been on the compound, but it was going to be so much easier doing homework from the comfort of my own bed. In the relative quiet of my own apartment. With my own orange soda in a glass on my bedside table. Wearing nothing but a sleep shirt and a pair of underwear. Bliss.

I was lucky. My parents had set up college funds for me and my sister when we were just babies, and since my sister hadn’t used most of hers they’d added the leftover money to mine. The little windfall meant that I didn’t have to get a job for the next four years. As long as I lived frugally I could focus solely on schoolwork. It drove my sister Mel crazy, but it wasn’t my fault she’d dropped out of college, and my parents wouldn’t let her use the money to backpack in Europe for a year.