Chapter 18

Mentally , I’m just a corner on a fitted sheet that keeps popping off.

— Milena’s secret thoughts

MILENA

We didn’t get married at a courthouse.

We didn’t get married in Vegas .

We didn’t get married in a church.

In fact, we didn’t get married at all.

What we did do was move in together later that night.

Into my place.

Neither one of us asked where he would sleep.

He’d walked into my house with a duffle—one that was stuffed so full that I’d had to question whether the zipper could handle the strain he’d put it under—and tossed it into my closet.

He’d then walked directly into my bathroom and stripped for a shower.

Which led me to now, watching him strip out of his sawdust-covered clothes.

Being covered in sawdust was not conducive with closing the bathroom door, apparently.

“ Do you, uh, want me to get the door for you?” I asked.

“ You got a hamper or something?” he asked. “ I should’ve probably done this outside. I’m gonna get the bathroom floor covered in sawdust.”

I bit my lip and said, “ I’ll , uh, get the vacuum once you get in there. That way you’re not getting water all over the floor after you get out.”

“ Thanks ,” he turned to me as the shirt was carefully pulled off of his body.

Now , here was the moment where I might’ve lost a few brain cells.

See , I’d seen the whole “man takes shirt off from the back of the collar thing” before.

My brothers weren’t shy with being half-naked in front of me.

They both took their shirts off like that.

Previous boyfriends, as well as my latest, had always taken the shirt off from the bottom, lifting the shirt up and over their head as they turned the shirt inside out.

But Cutter ?

He carefully lifted the shirt from the back of his neck, hunched his shoulders, and pulled it free from his body.

All the while, in slow motion, making my mouth all but water.

“ Hamper ?” he asked when it was off and he was taking the shirt and rolling it into a ball.

I licked my lips and tried, but failed, to make my brain comprehend the question he’d just asked me.

It didn’t work, though.

Because …tattoos.

Lots of them.

As in, all over his body, from mid bicep to right under his collarbone, to just under his diaphragm.

I opened my mouth, intending to tell him about the hamper maybe, but instead said, “ What the fuck?”

He laughed. “ That’s what everyone says.”

“ Well , maybe if you weren’t hiding all of that…” I said, gesturing to his upper torso. “ Why don’t you have any visible tattoos?”

“ Because I’m already a biker. Professionals need to look professional, in my honest opinion. I don’t need to be adding to the tics on the upper crust of Dallas as they see me pull up to a job site. They’re already wary when I get off a bike. If I get off covered in tattoos, too, they’ll pass on me and go to someone else. And , to be quite honest, I’m not too proud to admit that I could really use the money. I’ll gladly act like I’m respectable as long as they pay me what I’m asking for,” he expounded. “ Hamper ?”

I jumped and moved, opening a cabinet where the laundry chute was located.

When Shasha had this house built, the entire freakin’ place was custom built. Even the laundry chute in the bathroom.

“ This fancy schmancy thingie is a vacuum. You put the clothes,” I reached for his shirt and he handed it to me, “right up against it, and it sucks them through this ducting system into the laundry room where it’ll spit it out into the hamper.”

His brows rose. “ I feel like I just entered the Twilight Zone .”

“ Wait until you see the safe room Shasha had built for me.” I rolled my eyes. “ This place is like a fortress. With the high gates, the alarm system, and then the safe room, I could logically withstand a siege.”

His head tilted as he started unbuttoning his pants.

I turned slightly away to give him privacy, and he laughed.

“ I’ll just tell you now that being in the military has completely cured me of my shyness,” he said as he took his pants off. “ Plus , you saw me in this yesterday.”

I bit my lip, and he studied me, freezing.

“ Is this…”

I knew what he was asking.

Was it too much.

I shook my head. “ I’m …that part of me… I …”

I searched for the words, and he let me, watching me carefully as he completely unloaded his pants pockets onto the counter.

His phone. Wallet . Keys . Cash . Change . A pocket knife. His third pencil he’d lost for the day. A chalk stick. And a…gun. A tiny one. One that was so small I’d never suspected he’d even had it in the first place.

“ That part of my issues…that’s really a non-issue now. I can have sex. I can be with a man in any sexual manner. I’ve worked that out with a therapist a while ago,” I explained quickly, the words coming so quickly that they were like ants pouring out of a disturbed hill. “ My issues stem from other places now. I can trust with my body, but not with my heart anymore.”

I hoped he got what I meant by that.

I was very…standoffish.

If I was being honest, with Asher , I’d not been the girlfriend he deserved.

I was there, and present, but I wasn’t actually there.

He didn’t have ‘me.’

My body? Sure . My heart? Absolutely not.

There was no one in this world that I could trust with that thing.

My brothers didn’t count, either.

They were family.

He finished emptying his pants, pulled the belt out of the belt loops, then walked up to the chute opening and pressed his jeans against it. The pipe sucked the jeans out of his hand, and he chuckled.

When he did, the rib muscles at his side flexed, and my eyes were drawn to a spot right under his armpit—a tattoo—that I hadn’t seen before now.

Vengeance .

I looked at it for so long that Cutter cleared his throat and said, “ You okay?”

I looked up at him and said, “ If you ever see Lyle … I don’t want you getting in trouble for me. I don’t care if you kill him. I don’t care if you help Shasha string him up by his toes and torture him for the rest of his life. What I do care about is other people paying for my stupidity. I should’ve never been with him. I should’ve left when my brothers said to. I should’ve come to Shasha and Dima when I realized how dangerous Lyle was. But I didn’t. I stayed because I was just so freakin’ desperate to live my own life that I didn’t care how I had to live it. I made the biggest mistake that I’ve ever made, and I don’t want anyone else to pay for that.”

He studied me for a long moment and said, “ If that man comes anywhere near you, he’s dead. I’ll do it in a way that won’t blow back on you, me, or your family. Not my club. Not anyone. I learned from my mistakes with my father.”

I bit my lip.

“ I haven’t been caught yet, darlin’. Trust me.”

Then he turned the shower on, dropped his shorts, and got in.

I saw the flash of a white backside, much in contrast to the tanned skin of his back, as he disappeared behind the clear shower doors.

The only thing stopping me from seeing him fully was the red towel that I’d hung there for aesthetics.

I watched him for a few seconds too long, because eventually he said, “ Vacuum ?”

Did he just tell me, without telling me, that he’d killed before and hadn’t gotten caught?

And why was the idea not appalling to me?

I went to get my stick vacuum out of the hall closet, and when I came back, it was to see that Cutter was now onto the soap part of his shower.

White suds were running down his body in rivulets, and I couldn’t stop myself from watching as he rubbed my rose-smelling soap all over his body as I vacuumed up the sawdust.

When I was done, I replaced the vacuum, then went to sit on my bed because I didn’t know what to do.

I knew what I wanted to do, though, and that was sit in the bathroom and enjoy the show.

Which was why I sat on the end of my bed with my hands underneath my thighs and stared straight ahead.

If I turned slightly to the right, I’d be able to see him in the bathroom mirror.

The shower turned off, and I closed my eyes.

He came into the room moments later and said, “ I’m decent.”

I opened my eyes and saw him wearing my red fancy towel around his waist.

I bit my lip as I watched water slide down from his wet hair to the towel. All the way down his chest, his abs, and then into the hollow of his hip before the towel absorbed the drop.

I’d never wanted to be a water droplet more in my life.

“ We’re not even married yet and you’re watching me like you want to devour me,” he teased.

I looked up at him and said, “ I’ve never seen a man have quite so many muscles before.”

“ Manual labor, time in the gym, and good genetics,” he said as he bent down, testing the tuck job of the towel as he did.

The towel parted and I saw the tanned expanse of one muscular thigh before the towel broke free at his waist.

He caught it just in time to keep his junk covered, but not the rest of him.

I squeaked and closed my eyes.

“ Guess I wasn’t decent after all.” He chuckled.

The bag unzipped and I heard fabric rustling.

“ Now I’m actually decent,” he pronounced.

I opened one eye and saw that he was, indeed, decent.

Or , more accurately, he was clothed from the bottom down.

He had on a pair of pants and nothing else.

I doubted he even had underwear on.

But with him turned the way he was, I only got the backside view.

“ Show me that panic room, darlin’.”

Before I could, the doorbell rang, and I sighed. “ That’s probably my family.”

He jerked his chin toward the shower and said, “ Your turn. I’ll get the door.”

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