Chapter 27 – Damara
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Damara
Ishould have known Magnum would make a big deal over nothing.
There’s no point in going over my past and reviewing all the sordid, fucked up details that entail Damara Simmon’s life.
Magnum glares at me with determination to penetrate my walls and drag the secrets from my core.
Is that what he thinks love is? Telling him all my damn secrets?
I haven’t told anybody about the charges in Texas.
I expect Tamiya might know because of her nosy ass company, but she never asked any questions and as far as I know, that’s a good thing because it means she understands that some shit is better kept a secret.
I did things that I wasn’t proud of to save my own ass and ultimately, I did what I had to do in order to free myself.
Those warrants in Texas could lead to a much bigger investigation than anything Magnum is prepared to handle.
He can just take his baby and go at the end of the day.
The so-called love he feels will evaporate once he knows the truth.
I’ve always known that my past was far too heavy for me to ever move on from.
I never really tried starting over. I knew what I deserved was to spend life on the run, so that’s what I did.
Dyed my hair pink, I went on the run and I never really settled down anywhere until my sister convinced me to come out and stay with her.
I started the daycare, but never felt completely settled or comfortable in that life.
Tamiya and her man can hardly consider themselves settled considering how much time they spend on motorcycles and they both like it that way.
But I’m older. Like Magnum. And this beast of a man makes me question everything I thought about my life and future.
The baby doesn’t make it easier. That baby will probably look just like Magnum knowing my luck and I’ll never be able to run from this part of my life.
Without knowing what I’ve been through, Magnum can’t imagine how hard it is for me to believe he could really love me through this.
Maybe that’s why I’ve been brought to this point. To break the spell before we’re trapped together for this little road trip to Texas. Whoever has this information must be holding it over Magnum’s head or he would have gone rogue by now and we would be going… anywhere but Texas.
“Start talking,” Magnum says gruffly, after giving me all of five minutes to collect myself. The man is all muscle, zero patience. He can’t expect me to speak words to a situation that I’ve never spoken about out loud.
“Did you know anything about me before we woke up on that pool table together?” I ask Magnum. “Like from the club?”
“I knew you had pink hair and a big butt.”
Sigh. I should have known something unserious like that would come from a biker’s mouth, but that doesn’t make it less annoying. I can’t confess the darkest parts of my past to Magnum if he keeps everything so light. This isn’t light.
“Great. I’m not a good girl, Magnum. I’m not like… the type of woman who men want to keep as a trophy.”
Magnum laughs. “Why the fuck would I want a trophy? I want you. But I also need you to be honest.”
“I have three warrants.”
“Excellent. Must be pretty fucking bad if you’re all caged up about it.”
Pretty fucking bad doesn’t begin to describe it.
“I’ve been in a lot of complicated situations.”
“You’re in your forties. I know that. People our age don’t need to dwell on the past.”
“In this case, the federal government might disagree. They think that I was aiding and abetting human trafficking. It’s a warrant from when I was about nineteen years old.”
“If this is a trap to get me to comment on your age, it won’t work.”
“This is serious, Magnum.”
It’s a charge with potentially federal consequences. I’ve been able to lay low thus far in my life and staying away from Texas has been easy for me since I never really liked it down there anyway. I love Texas barbecue, but that’s about it and a lot of places have decent enough barbecue.
“Fine. It’s serious. You aided and abetted human trafficking. Mind telling me why you did it?”
“Don’t you find it upsetting?”
“Depends on the situation.”
“What situation would make human trafficking okay?”
I have no right to put him on trial here.
I’m the one with the warrants. But I’m not trying to justify what I did.
Looking back, I should have questioned Nathaniel.
I should have questioned everything about faking documents, carrying suitcases and forging signatures.
I shouldn’t have “held onto” money. I shouldn’t have done everything in my power to prove to this white boy that I was a good woman.
Different from all the others. Men who want you to prove to them that you’re different from all other women usually have a pretty low opinion of women.
It didn’t take me long to learn that. But I’m not proud of how far I fell from my moral center by allowing an abusive man to coerce and control me into doing his will.
“Everybody makes mistakes,” Magnum says gently with compassion for my past that I’ve never heard from another person before. I never asked for anyone to feel sorry for me but somehow, this feels different. “You’re different, Damara. But if you keep lying about shit and covering up–”
“What about you? I don’t want to be the only one confessing to my crimes. I could end up in prison away from my baby and… I don’t know.”
I don’t know exactly, but I know that what often follows mindless vulnerability is deep regret.
“I’ve done wrong,” Magnum admits so freely that it scares me. “I helped bury a body to protect Tanner Hollingsworth’s wife. She’s a nice woman named Quin who is a little on the young side for him but… No woman deserves abuse.”
He means it and I can feel it so strongly that the shiver that runs through me makes me want to run away.
That’s the problem with my feelings for Magnum.
They’re all way too intense for me to make sense of and just when I have some grasp of how I feel, he wants me to put it all into words.
He gets so close to me that I can smell what must be a minty nicotine pouch stuck in his upper lip.
My heart skips a beat as he touches my face and forces my gaze to his.
“What did you do?”
“I helped my ex-boyfriend bring girls back and forth across the border to Mexico for a while from Utah. We had to go through Texas and… We got arrested after a gun fight in Eagle Pass. My ex pissed off this border patrol agent and he threw the book at us.”
“The other two charges?” Magnum asks without missing a beat.
No judgment. He doesn’t ask more questions or try to find out more details about what went down.
I don’t want to remember all the stupid shit I did when I was nineteen years old and head over heels in love with a man who promised me that he had the true understanding of scripture, of life, of everything.
It almost feels like a life that happened to a different woman, because I’m not the type of woman who would get caught up in that amount of mess today. I’ve seen where it leads.
A hole.
In the desert.
With large black ants eating out your eye sockets…
I know Magnum won’t let up until I confess the other two charges, but that doesn’t make it easy to tell him the truth. I wish it was easier for my feelings to come out of me, but I’m not exactly proud of my past.
“Aggravated assault with a deadly weapon,” I tell him. Hopefully, it’s obvious that I’m talking about the second charge. Magnum shrugs, which just infuriates me more. Does he seriously not think it’s a serious concern that the future mother of his child has that type of weapons charge?
“There has to be a good reason for that. You had plenty of time to assault me and I’ve never felt the need to involve the police.”
His instincts aren’t entirely wrong. I’ve had some rough experiences with men in the past and the situation that led to that warrant was with my vindictive ex-boyfriend.
I don’t want anybody investigating what happened to him.
Although, I know my ex-boyfriend from way back when isn’t anywhere near Texas.
“Why do you keep assuming the best of me, Magnum? I’m not some prissy good girl. Seriously. I didn’t have the life my sister Tamiya had.”
I ran away from home. Even if now I see that my mother was only trying her best, back then all I could see were her mistakes.
I was young, angry, and had nobody to turn to.
Older men saw my pain and I made the mistake of thinking their predatory ability to hone in on a young woman’s pain meant that they genuinely understood me and wanted to help.
Many women fall into the same trap that I did, but it doesn’t make me feel more whole now that I’m grown up with a youth checkered by pain and mistakes. Magnum shakes his head and draws closer to me, infuriating me more by kissing the top of my forehead.
A shiver travels straight through me. My thighs tighten together and try not to let Magnum’s display of affection sweep me up.
“I like that you’re a fucking wild thing,” he says in a deep, gravely voice that doesn’t make the situation between my thighs any easier to deal with. “You’re mine, and that’s what matters.”
He grabs my cheeks and kisses my forehead again. My lips ache with desire for Magnum that feels so painfully unfair. But so far, his responses are leading me to experience this strange craving for honesty that I’ve never felt before.
“Tell me the last one,” he says. “What did you do that was so bad?”
There’s a slight smile on Magnum’s face that tells me he’s weirdly impressed by my crimes.
I didn’t expect him to accept me quite to that point, but I can’t complain about him not threatening to call the feds.
I still have his baby inside me, so at the very least there’s that self-interest in keeping his bloodline from being born while I’m incarcerated.
“What happens to my secrets?”
“I already told you that I buried a body,” Magnum says, his expression growing more serious as he moves closer to me, intoxicating me with his heady masculine scent. “I’ve done some bad things too.”
He holds my hand and before I can stop myself, the pressure valve releases and I spill out my secrets to Magnum Sinclair.
“Child endangerment and smuggling of a minor… It was something like that or both of those things,” I tell him. “I got that charge when I was twenty-three, right before I got out of a relationship and escaped to Missouri for a while.”
“You’re more of an outlaw than half the damn club.”
He sounds neither angry nor thrilled about the situation. Knowing Magnum, he’s making some type of silent calculation in his head that I’ll only be privy to when he’s ready to share.
“I changed my life around as much as I could,” I say to Magnum, holding him in my gaze with as much intensity as he’s giving me.
I have to own my past because it’s a part of me, not because I’m proud of all the fucked up situations I’ve been caught up in over the years.
“I’ve left those bad decisions behind me only to end up here. ”
“What if you were safe here?” Magnum says, his low voice sending another hopeful shiver straight through me. Can I afford to have hope in love at this stage?
“What? With you?”
“Yes,” he says. “Because I love you and none of the shit you said has changed my mind.”
I want him to mean it so badly that it hurts. Magnum leans forward and kisses me. If I can’t believe his words, maybe I can believe his kiss. I close my eyes and feel his lips. He’s so warm and delicious. The baby inside me does a little flip kick as we kiss.
“I love you, Damara,” Magnum whispers.
My heart pounds and even if the words feel right, it’s always going to scare me to confront how I feel so viscerally.
“I love you too, Magnum.”
He grins. “Fucking finally.”
“Shut up.”
“I won’t let anything bad happen to you, baby. I promise…”