I couldn’t read his reaction. I had no idea whether I was getting through, or if he was going to walk out the door and do whatever he wanted anyway.
God, what was I doing here? In this situation? I was an art school dropout, a junior graphic designer at an advertising firm. I was just an average woman. There was nothing special about me, nothing important. I wasn’t one of those women who was destined for a big, dramatic life. Devon Wilder made me feel different, but what if it was all an illusion? I’d just mentioned him and me becoming something real, going somewhere, and he was looking at me as if he’d barely even heard.
You should have found a nice guy in art school.
That was wrong. I knew it when he said it, and I knew it now. I wasn’t the right woman for a nice guy in art school. I wasn’t the right woman for any man I’d met until him—that was why I’d hated dating, why I’d only had sex when the loneliness was too much, why I hadn’t bothered with sex at all for a year and a half. There was nothing to second guess about my past. Until Devon Wilder, I’d been adrift, not really fitting in anywhere, not finding men who understood me.
Then Devon happened. That spaceship hatch that blew my life apart. He not only bothered to understand me, he’d seen past even the lies I told myself, straight to the truth. Or part of it.
The problem was that I still didn’t know what that truth was. Who I was. What I wanted.
Did I want Devon? Part of me—most of me—wanted him so desperately I could barely breathe. But I hadn’t been lying. A man who could go out and beat another man, hurt him or kill him, was a man who could do that to me someday. Who was capable of hurting me, or our future kids. And if I took on a man who was capable of inflicting pain, I was taking a risk I knew from the very first. So part of my future would be decided by what he did today.
He was still watching me, his hands on his thighs. “Do you trust me?” he asked.
I swallowed. I wanted to say that I didn’t, but I’d gotten into his car that night in the rain, and I’d trusted him ever since. “Yes.”
“You don’t,” he said, still calm. “Not really. That’s just your body.” His gaze moved over my body, hidden under the covers. “Your body trusts me. It always has. But right now the rest of you doesn’t.”
I stared at him. I felt like I’d been slapped.
“I get it,” he said. “I haven’t earned it. Not from you. Not deep down. I went and got myself put away, like a fucking idiot, but sometimes things happen so fast we can’t control them. You got shut out for two years. You didn’t know where I was. You thought when I got out that I was living with some other woman. Why the hell would you trust me?”
It stung. “I do,” I argued. “You’re just so angry right now. I’ve never seen you angry, and it’s scary.”
His eyes flashed, and I felt it all the way deep into my gut. A mixture of fear and reluctant admiration that was almost awe. “I am very fucking angry,” he agreed, his voice still calm. “Make no mistake. I am very, very fucking angry. But I am not going to prison, Olivia. There is no fucking way.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re going to do. And I’ve asked and asked about what’s going on with you. So maybe, Devon, you don’t trust me.”
He flinched just slightly, and I realized, with surprise, that I’d hurt him. “I have to go,” he said, his voice colder than ever. “I’ll see you later.”
“Devon,” I said.
But he walked out the door, and he was gone.
Chapter 23
Devon
Amy was late. I sat in the shitty dockside pub in Oakland, across the bay and far from the tourist center of San Francisco, and stared out at the water for nearly half an hour before she showed up.
The stripper from Pure Gold wasn’t wearing one of her sexy outfits at eleven o’clock in the morning. She had on worn jeans and a loose peasant top that flowed down over her hips and hid her figure, though nothing could fully hide the tits underneath the fabric. Her hair was thrown back into a messy ponytail and she had no makeup on. She was still a good-looking woman, but I didn’t think I’d ever seen a woman so bone-tired.
Still, she mustered up a spark when she took the seat across from me. “Shit, Devon, you clean up nice,” she said.
I gave her half a smile. I was still churned up over the conversation with Olivia. The way she’d looked at me. Like I was a stranger, and I didn’t entirely blame her. I felt like a stranger right now. “Does anyone know you’re here?” I asked her.
“Of course not. I can’t stay long, though. My kid’s with a sitter.” When I looked surprised, she said, “I guess you wouldn’t know. I had a kid while you were inside. He’s a year old now.”
Some people might ask where the father was, but I knew better. The map of exhaustion on her face told me he was nowhere around. Though she still lit up a little when she mentioned the kid himself.
“You took a risk doing this,” I said to her. “I appreciate it.”
She scratched her temple with nails covered in chipped polish. “You saw what it was like in that meeting, Devon. You missed some things while you were inside, but Craig Bastien—he’s practically taken over the club. And the girls. It’s no picnic.”
“He seemed particularly interested in you,” I said.
She bit her lip, and I knew she was holding back a shudder of revulsion. “There’s nothing I can do about it. He likes to have me around, like a piece of furniture. He likes to put his hands on me. Sometimes, when I make him happy, there’s money in it. But even when he doesn’t pay me, if I don’t make him happy, he knows I have a son.”
And there was that fire inside me again. Licking up, up. “I get it,” I said. “I’m not judging you.”
“You never were that type.” She smiled at me through her tired haze. “You always were a good guy, Devon. I’m glad you got all that money. If you can get away from Bastien, you can turn around and do good.”
Starting now, I thought but didn’t say. “I need some information,” I told her. “In fact, I need everything you have. Everything about Bastien that you’ve heard, that you’ve seen. Everything you’ve overheard in these meetings of his.”
She bit her lip. “You gonna do something to him?”
I watched her. “Amy,” I said, “don’t you worry. I’m going to set him on fire.”
“He’ll kill me if he finds out I was talking.”
I shook my head. “He isn’t going to get the chance.”
She looked at me, and then she grinned. She always had guts, Amy had. “Okay,” she said. “Here goes.”
I’d noticed, in our little meeting, that Craig Bastien liked to treat Amy as if she wasn’t there. He liked to fondle her like she wasn’t a real woman, like she was a possession. It turned out he liked to do that a lot. Which meant Amy had sat in on a lot of meetings, getting her tits and her hips grabbed, and she’d learned a hell of a lot of things.
And now she told me all of it.