I smiled as I took a sip of coffee when he burst out laughing and stalked over to grab his discarded tee.
“Better?” he asked when the tight athletic shirt in a shade of green that exactly matched his eyes was glued to every inch of his beautiful body.
“No,” I answered truthfully, but I waved the concern away with my hand. “Continue anyway.”
“What happened last night, it’s not going to happen again,” he promised. “I called Sgt. Renner this morning and we’re going to put a plainclothes officer on your apartment while you’re at home. We’ve got the budget and thanks to that crap you pulled yesterday morning, you’re worth it to the RCMP to keep alive so they’re extending the funds to do it. You’re also going to fucking obey me when I tell you to take Hero with you every-fuckin-where you go unless you’re with me. He’s a trained police and guard dog, Harleigh Rose, and he loves you. There aren’t many situations he isn’t an advantage in.”
I chewed my lip, hating that I had to agree with him.
He continued despite my lack of agreement. “I’m really fucking unhappy with that stunt you pulled offering up your services as a fucking C.I. but now you’ve done it, there are some rules.”
“They went over those with me,” I interrupted, only to receive a glacial look from Danner.
“Yeah, they went over their rules, but you’ll see Rosie, I got rules of my own. The most important of those being, you do not, under any circumstances, go off half-cocked without me, you understand? I know you’re dead set on endin’ this club for a variety of reasons I won’t argue aren’t valid, but you don’t know shit about police work and that same passion that got you into this could end up ruining this investigation.”
“I’m not a dumbass, Danner,” I snapped.
“No one said you were. What I did say was that you got a tendency to go off half-cocked when you get your teeth into something big. Don’t do that.”
I glared at him. He stared impassively back.
“There goes my good morning,” I muttered, staring into my empty coffee cup. “I need more coffee.”
“You’ll get an ulcer the way you drink that stuff,” he told me as he walked to the other side of the counter, planted a forearm into it and leaned over to palm the back of my head. “And you’ll still have a good morning, Rosie. We just haven’t got to the good part, yet.”
“Uh huh, sure.”
He bit the corner of his grin. “You wanna get there, tell me you’ll stick with me in this, okay? I need to know you’re safe or I’ll do stupid shit I don’t need to do to make sure of it.”
“Like what?” I asked, perking up with curiosity.
It didn’t say good things about me that I loved when he was stupid for me, even more when he did bad for me.
“Like never leave your side.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, now be good for me and say you get me.”
I wanted to. God, I wanted to.
But the asshole had left me for three years without so much as a fuckin’ goodbye. How the hell was I supposed to trust him?
“Left me once, Danner. No reason, no fuckin’ explanation. You think I’m goin’ to trust a guy who could do that?”
“Trusted yourself with a guy that beat you,” he snapped back, cruel with sudden anger. “You know I’d never do that. You fucking know if I left without sayin’ goodbye it was for a good fucking reason.”
“There is no reason on this goddamn planet to abandon your family,” I shot back, standing up in my rage so I could snarl over the counter at him.
“What the hell do you call what you want to do now? Isolating yourself from The Fallen?”
“I’m doing it for them,” I yelled, throwing my mug of coffee across the room because my anger had no eloquence and I needed him to understand. “I’d do anything to keep them safe.”
“You think I don’t feel the same fucking way about you?” he challenged, unfazed by the crash and clatter of the mug or the shard of it all around him. “I’d break my own heart a million times over if it meant keeping you alive.”
He stormed over to where I stood panting, and wrapped a hand firmly around my throat, thumb over my pulse. It was such a dominant move, one that instantly made me weak in the knees and weak of resolve.
I was a badass biker chick, but I wanted to submit to him as he was now, transformed by anger and need into an alpha so dominant he demanded my obedience.
Only for him had I ever felt that desire, and only for him would I ever give in to it.
“I’ve been savin’ you since you were six-years-old, Rosie,” he said, eyes blazing. “I’ve done it again and again even when it meant going against what I stood for because in the end, what I stood for was you, safe and happy after all the shit you’ve been dealt. If I left you, you think it was for any other reason than that?”
“How am I supposed to know when you never explained it to me,” I countered, leaning against his hand at my throat so it tightened like a collar against a rabid dog, so I felt leashed by him in a way that made me wet. “How am I supposed to ever know how you feel when you’ve never fucking told me?”
“Maybe you haven’t been takin’ notice, but I told you every time I played music for you, every time I hung out with you at Mega Music, and every time I stayed home as a young guy to look after you and King. I told you when I bought you that bike you wanted with fucking pink skulls on it and when I took you to pick out Hero and name him. That’s not enough for you, I told you when I picked up your call, havin’ kept that old phone for the sole reason that I wanted to have it in case you called, and dropped fucking everything to risk my undercover cop and rush to your side.”
He bent closer, his lips against mine. “You need more, I’ll tell you now. You said you don’t abandon family and that may be true, but you’re doin’ it now because your family needs that and I did it then to you because you needed it, even if you didn’t know it. Wasn’t right that our friendship was turning into something physical, not when you were a teenager, not when I am the way I am.”
“And I didn’t get a say in that?”
“No, Rosie, you didn’t. Because whether you like it or not, I was the adult and you were the kid. We don’t come from the same side of the law and more, our fathers would kill each other if they could. Anything romantic was, and is, impossible.”
“So, you left,” I whispered, hurt and so angry, lost again like I had been at eighteen when he’d left.
“I did, not saying now I know what that did to you, turning you to Cricket like it did, that I would do the same now. Maybe I could’ve found the strength to keep my hands off you and still protect you from all the ugly in the world. But I didn’t, and Cricket’s death is just as much on me as it is you.”
“Yeah,” I told him, because I was honest and it was true. “It is.”
I’d been with Cricket to fill even a fraction of the void Danner left behind and after a year, when he still hadn’t returned, I decided having any kind of love was better than having nothing at all.
“Not gonna leave you again,” he told me sternly, in a voice low, smooth and dark as smoke curling around my body. “Swearing it right now.”