Did that mean I thought Brian killed Tracy? Every day that passed by, I was leaning more and more toward yes. If he wanted to kill me to get money, then why wouldn’t he kill Tracy, so she didn’t have the baby?
My teeth chattered, clicking together from the cold and the rain, and let’s not forget the rollercoaster of emotion inside me right now. Jaxon was right.
I was the monster.
I wrapped my arms around my chest, covering my breasts as I ran, as best I could, through the water and climbed up the steps. Swimming naked was a bad idea. Now, I was freezing since I wasn’t in the heated pool, and my clothes were soaked from the wind blowing every which way. I ran to the black cabinet where Jaxon got his towel and opened it, pulled out a tan beach towel, and wrapped it around me, tucking the edge under my arm. I was grateful that the towel was long enough to fall to my knees, but I was still nude underneath, and I had to walk through a house full of men, rough, no-bullshit, kind of men.
With a deep breath, I opened the door and stepped inside. “That’s cold,” I shivered when the air conditioning nearly froze me to death. I shut the door behind me, locking it, and made my way down the hall, coming to the room with books. I’d have to come back here. I needed a good book, especially since I wasn’t going anywhere for a while.
I continued down the hall, sliding my hands along the wall as I tried to figure out a way back to my room. I thought about how much love Jaxon had in his heart. I knew he’d never hurt anyone he loved, and that was why when the guilty plea came through, and they sent him away to prison for ten years, I was shocked, devastated, and I felt betrayal.
He didn’t kill her, the voice in the back of my head told me for the millionth time.
What was I so afraid of?
Being left alone in despair.
If I went out on a limb and was honest with myself, I was scared to be disappointed and left in the dark again, surrounded by people who wanted to see Jaxon die for what he did. What if I gave him a chance and he ended up killing her? He said he was a killer; did that bother me?
I had so many questions.
But there was one thing I knew, undoubtedly, I loved Jaxon. I never stopped being in love with him, and that should be enough for me to believe him. I was just a kid at the time, afraid of what it meant for Jaxon to go to prison, but we were adults now. The reality of the world didn’t scare me as much now as it did then.
I was a girl who lived in a mansion, and he was a guy who hustled on the streets on the wrong side of town. We weren’t supposed to be together in the first place, but he brought me down to his wicked ways, and I became addicted to him.
A catcall rang through the air, and I clutched my towel tighter, but when I searched the livingroom, it was just the old lady, Ingrid. “I remember when I was young, and I had a body like that. These guys wouldn’t stand a chance if I looked like you. I’d fuck all of them just to say I did. Oh, to be young again.” A nostalgic grin crinkled her lips as she thought back to the time when she was my age. I bet she had so many stories. I’d love to hear them; if I ever got past the twinge of discomfort, she made me feel. She said what she wanted, and I wasn’t sure what to think of her.
“Where are the guys?” I asked and opened the fridge to grab a beer before going back to my room and showering.
“Jaxon told them to get lost before you came inside. Did you tap that fine ass of his?”
“Ingrid!” I hissed, giggling from her crass words.
“You did, didn’t you? Good for you, Rabbit.”
I did many years ago. And if it was better now than it was then, I would probably die if we ever had sex again. The kiss was enough to leave me weak in the knees for a few days. His lips were aged like fine wine, and I wanted to drink him down and get drunk. “Why do you call me that?” I twisted off the top and tossed the cap in the blue recycling bin he had under the lip of the counter.
“Because it looks like you’re about to bolt at any second. You’re a skittish little thing, but cute. It makes sense to me.”
“Right,” I said, not understanding why she thought I’d leave, I hadn’t made one single attempt to.
Holy shit.
I hadn’t tried to actually leave. I threw a fit, sure, but I could have tried harder.
You don’t want to leave.
The thought had me pausing mid-tilt of the bottle before I sipped the beverage. I was learning a lot of truths today, and they were causing me to get a headache. I reached into the fridge for another beer, so I had one to drink while I took a bath. I needed to unwind before I decided to throw myself at Jaxon.
My days were numbered.
The countdown began the moment I saw him standing up in that church. He was always the kind of man that broke the rules, and I was always the kind of girl to follow them until Jaxon invaded my life and taught me that rules were made to be broken.
Rules were meant to be erased and changed.
My love for him, I treated it like a rule, but it was the exception. No matter what he did, no matter the rules he broke, no matter the people he has killed, my love for him was the one thing that stayed constant.
It should scare me, loving a man so lawless, so fearless, willing to do whatever it took if it meant he was on top.
Him on top was where I liked him.
Why bother counting down? My time was up.
Chapter Fifteen
Jaxon
“We have a job,” Sebastian said, throwing a file at all of us as we sat around in the living room. We didn’t come up with our mad plans in a secret room. We laid it all out in the open where we were comfortable.
My mind wasn’t on work, though. It was on Quinn and how fucking good she felt in my arms again. My focus was clouded, but work was how we made money and how we donated it. I needed to get my head in the game. If we wanted, we never had to work again. Selling those diamonds set us up for life, and now we didn’t work as often, but we were criminals at heart, so we kept on.
At least we were the good kind of criminals.
“What do you have for us, Sebastian?” I asked, flicking the file open to see the faces of two men. I recognized one. He served fifteen years for rape and attempted murder. “I know him. He was in the same prison as us, a different block. He got out?” I asked, flipping through the pages of the hefty file. Page after page of arrest reports from the time he was thirteen.
“Yep, released a few days ago, and guess what?” He clicked a button, and an image popped up on the TV. “Bank robbery in his hometown. Two million stolen.”
“Why do you think it's him? Bank robbery isn’t his MO. He likes to rape women; this isn’t him.” I closed the file and tossed it onto the floor.
“I thought so too, until I saw this.” He clicked onto the next screen and a picture of him holding down a woman, holding a gun to her head and her shirt torn filled the screen.
All of us grumbled and looked away. I hated seeing shit like that.
“I know it’s hard to look at, but it’s him. He has a sparrow on his thumb, look,” Sebastian pointed out and zoomed in on the screen until the sparrow with red eyes stared back at all of us. “It’s him.”
I leaned forward. My elbows bending until they dig into my thigh. “Two million? It’s kind of low for what we usually go for,” I said, and a few of the guys murmured an agreement.