Chapter 31 Daybreak #2
He nodded. “I make bad men go away.”
She looked into his eyes, searching for justification she’d never find. “Peter was on your list.”
He shook his head. “Not anymore.” When her breath caught, he quickly explained. “He’s fine. Still the self-centered prick he always was. But he’s not my problem.”
“What do you do to them—the men on your list?”
He tried to measure her curiosity, unsure if she truly wanted an honest answer. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, but trust me when I say, some things are better left unsaid.”
“I want to know.”
He let go of her hands and drew a deep breath. “First, I dismantle their lives. I strip away their power, force them to sell off everything they have until they understand what true vulnerability feels like. Then, I remove any source of hope and let them suffer in that existence for a while.”
“But you…murder them?”
“Some. Not all.”
She looked away, and his stomach soured. “How do you decide?”
“I mirror them. It depends on their crimes.”
Her brow pinched. “Did Dr. Tannh?user kill someone?”
His jaw locked as his mind ripped back to the last time he saw the good doctor. This was where the line between redemption and condemnation blurred most. This was where he expected to lose her.
He traced the backs of his fingers down her cheek, needing to feel her soft skin one last time. “You’re the first person I ever let in. The first person to truly see me. I know it’s not a pretty view—”
“Jack.”
“Let me finish. I know it’s not…” Words seemed to clog his throat. “I know who I am, Daisy. I know what you see when you look at me, and I think I fell in love with you the first time you didn’t look away.”
Her lashes flickered as pink flooded the whites of her eyes.
“But there’s no way to pretty up the shameful things I’ve done.
The things I might continue to do. I’m not meant to have a life of leisure like other men.
I don’t know how to have a family.” He shook his head.
“I know my purpose. The world needs men like me, men who know the evil out there and have the means to put it out.”
He was saying too much. “You asked if Tannh?user ever killed anyone, and the honest answer is I don’t know.
What I do know is—had I not stopped him—he would have killed something pure and beautiful inside of you.
And that bleakness, that yawning, suffocating space…
It would have stayed with you for the rest of your life.
” He closed his eyes as he saw her there, on the floor, screaming in another man’s blood.
“And it destroys me every day, thinking I might have been too late.”
“Jack, no.” She lifted his face and kissed him again. “He didn’t… I’m still…a virgin.”
Relief surged through him like a tidal wave, not because he wanted to claim her innocence for himself—that was never it—but because he wanted to protect her.
“And you have no idea what I see when I look at you. Yes, I see your scars, but I don’t see them the way you do.
To me, they’re marks of courage. Brushstrokes.
Hidden keys to your past. Scripture that tells exactly who you are.
And I know I might never fully understand your story, but I want to try.
Even if it comes in tiny broken pieces. I’d spend a lifetime puzzling it together if it helps me get closer to you. ”
He scowled, unable to catch his breath. “You’re not listening, Daisy. Beneath the velvet curtains and champagne, I’m a predator. I’ve built empires by stealing power from giants. I’m ruthless. Damaged. You can’t fix me.”
“Jack, I don’t want to fix you. I want to love you.” Her voice pitched as tears streamed down her cheeks. “Don’t you see?”
“No. I can’t possibly see how someone like you could love someone like me.”
She caught his hand and flattened it to her chest. Her pulse beat rapidly against his palm. “Do you feel that?”
He nodded.
“That’s my heart. If you break it, Jack, you would also be killing something pure and beautiful inside of me.
And that would haunt me more than any other agony.
I’d have to live with it forever, knowing you were here, alone, when you could have just as easily been with me.
” Her grip tightened. “Is that what you want?”
He swallowed, trying to beat back the riotous current she woke inside of him, but it was too strong. “I just want you to be happy.”
“Then make me happy, Jack. I want you.”
The words struck him with the force of something physical, settling deep inside his chest where they rearranged the order of everything he believed himself to be.
“You want…me?” He searched her face for doubt, for the faintest tremor of uncertainty, and found none.
“Yes!”
He didn’t wait. Didn’t give her the chance to take back her words. His lips crushed to hers, sealing her confession with unrestrained acceptance.
“I want you, too.” He kissed her again. “So much, it pains me.” His hand slid behind her neck, fingers threading into her hair, and he pulled her into him with a hunger that no longer needed permission to exist.
Not the way he kissed her at The Preserve, weighted with apology and grief. He kissed her the way a man kisses a woman when language has exhausted itself, and the only vocabulary left is touch.
She made a sound against his mouth, something between a gasp and a sigh, and her fingers curled into the lapel of his robe. The thin silk parted under her grip, exposing the hollow of his throat where his pulse hammered so violently she could feel it against her knuckles.
Jack stood without breaking the kiss, drawing her up with him. Her purse clattered to the stone. The letter drifted under the table. Neither of them looked down.
He gathered her against his chest in a single motion that stole the breath from both of them. Her legs hooked around his waist, tight and secure. Her arms looped around his neck as her lips found the underside of his jaw, pressing warmth into his skin.
“Take me to bed, Jack.”
He carried her through the glass doors, into the cool interior. Sunlight filtered through stained glass, gold, and sapphire.
Her breath teased his throat as his bare feet moved soundlessly over marble, through the vestibule with its Art Deco sconces and geometric inlay, past the corridor where Myrtle’s herbs perfumed the air from the kitchen.
The staircase curved upward, and Jack took it without slowing, his arms tightening around her as the landing opened into the second-floor corridor. She weighed nothing and everything. She was the lightest burden he would ever carry and the heaviest truth he would ever hold.
His bedroom door was already open. Pale morning light filled the room through tall windows dressed in ivory linen, the curtains stirring in a cross breeze that smelled of cut grass and the distant salt of the sea.
The bed was wide and simply made, cream sheets pulled taut over a dark walnut frame with clean geometric lines.
No canopy. No crimson draping. Nothing that resembled a cage.
He set her down at the foot of the bed, and the loss of her warmth against his chest registered like a wound. She stood before him in bare feet, having kicked off her shoes somewhere between the garden and the stairs, and the sight of her stripped the remaining air from his lungs.
Faded jeans worn soft at the knees. A white t-shirt that clung to the modest curve of her breasts. No armor. No pretense. Just Daisy, standing in his bedroom with her heart racing visibly in the hollow of her throat.
He gave her a split second to change her mind before closing the distance. She pulled the tie of his robe. Silk whispered and slid down his arms, pooling at his feet in a dark puddle.
The morning air kissed his bare torso, finding every scar, every ridge, every damaged inch of him, and, for once, he didn’t feel the need to hide.
Her gaze moved over him, unhurried, tracing the terrain from his heaving shoulders to the bulge of his black swim trunks.
When her gaze returned to his, the fierce desire he saw in her eyes made his stomach flip and clench.
She reached for the hem of her t-shirt and pulled it over her head in one fluid motion. Her hair tumbled loose around her shoulders, catching the light, turning from honey to spun gold.
A plain white cotton bra cupped her breasts, and the ordinariness of it, the absence of lace or silk or performance, made his throat close with a tenderness so sharp it bordered on violence.
She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
His hands found her waist. The pads of his thumbs traced the ridges of her ribcage where the skin was impossibly smooth, impossibly warm, and she shivered under the contact despite the summer heat.
He mapped the gentle dip of her navel, the slight flare of her hips, memorizing her topography with the reverence of a man who knew how quickly beautiful things could be stolen.
Her fingers moved to the button of her jeans, opening the closure with one flick. When the zipper glided down, and the denim loosened around her hips, he swallowed tightly.
She pushed them past her thighs, ducking to slide them below her knees as she stomped her feet free. Then she stood before him in nothing but white cotton and sunlight.
Jack tugged her to him and lowered his mouth to her shoulder, tasting the salt of her skin where the sun had warmed it.
His lips traveled the slope of her collarbone, dipping into the hollow of her throat, then finding that delicate curve where her pulse fluttered against his tongue.
She arched into the contact, her fingers clutching his biceps, her breath quickening as his mouth mapped her with slow, deliberate precision.
He unclasped her bra with steady hands and drew the straps down her arms, letting the fabric fall between them. Her nipples tightened in the open air, flushing from pale pink to the dusky rose of arousal, and the sight sent blood surging to his cock with enough force to make his vision swim.