Chapter 10
Gage
I never wanted to be like my father. Not that you could ever call him a father.
Or like my mother. The woman who abandoned me in her search for her own freedom.
She could have taken me with her, fuck, she could have handed me over to CPS, but instead, she left me to rot with that bastard.
She left me with his rage and his hate, his fists and his demons and the empty fucking bottles that littered every square inch of the house.
I’ve done a lot of shitty things in my life.
Things I don’t regret exactly, because I did them while I was trying to survive.
I want to say that I’m better than that now.
Better than the people who created me, but the hard truth is, their DNA flows through my veins.
They made me from nature and they nurtured me, or rather, didn’t, through the first half of my life. So what does that make me?
It’s lose-lose on both fronts.
Except that, from the moment I step into Ami’s small apartment, I know that every second that I’ve spent trying to distance myself from them and what they represented, was worth it.
She invited me in here because I’ve managed to establish a thread of trust and I’ll do everything in my power to prove to her that I’m worthy of it.
It’s small, that first step, that entrance into her private domain, but it’s more than she’s ever given me and I’ll cling to it like a man clings to his last breath.
And even if it kills me, I’ll sign those fucking papers.
I won’t continue to antagonize her in order to make her pay for a past she really was a victim of as much as I was.
She lied to protect me. Tracker conveniently omitted that point when he spilled to Steel about what he’d done.
I wish she’d told me the truth sooner, but what’s done is done.
It’s been one fucking year of both of our lives, and if we ever want to move on then we just have to do it.
Move the fuck on.
Ami backs up like I have the plague. I shut the door behind me, and she takes another step back, eyes wide and shimmering with something I can’t decipher. For someone who just asked me if I want a cup of coffee, she sure looks like she’d rather throw it on me than serve it to me.
Since I didn’t come here for third degree burns, I lean up against the door and let her have her slow retreat. She whirls and disappears around the corner, and I try not to focus on the way the air dances sensuously behind her, like she left particles of her spirit in its wake.
The place is smaller than I figured it would be.
I didn’t imagine the MC putting my AWOL wife up in a palace, but I thought it would be bigger.
Nicer. Homier. The apartment is none of those things.
I shove off into the living room, feeling nearly claustrophobic by the stark walls and the confined space.
There isn’t any art. Nothing to make the place feel like hers.
She didn’t leave personal touches anywhere.
Not in ornaments or knick-knacks or any of that cluttered up shit that women seem to like so much.
The furniture is basic. It’s too new, too stiff, too… too something. Too unlike Ami.
Not that I know her tastes.
The couch looks like she’s never sat on it. The chairs too. They look rigid and lonely in the room without so much as a coffee or end table, a rug, or a piece of artwork.
Not that I’ve ever been in one, but a prison cell would look a hell of a lot more like home than this apartment does. Okay, I might be exaggerating, but still… home sweet home, it ain’t.
There’s rattling from around the corner of the bleak white wall that separates the kitchen from the living room, and then a hiss and the mouth-watering aroma of fresh coffee. That at least smells a little more like someone lives here.
My eyes stray to the hall that breaks off from the living room I can make out the shape of a door and then the shadowy form of another. Likely, the bathroom and her bedroom.
I can’t help the bitterness that burns the back of my throat.
Is this little box of a place without any warmth really so much better than what I could offer her?
Is her self-imposed loneliness and isolation here, in a city that Steel chose because it was far enough away from Helena and Jacksonville, that much better than her own family?
Her sisters? Her father and her brothers?
Does she hate us all so much that she’d rather spend months here, and never do anything to make it feel like her own, like she’s just biding her time or wading through the years with her eyes screwed up so tight that seeing is an impossibility?
While the coffee burbles from the other room and the scent continues to wrap around me, thick and rich and fragrant, I imagine Ami in there, utterly silent, trying to find the courage to come out and face me, now that I’ve invaded her sacred personal space.
I’m considering joining her in the kitchen, but before I can decide whether that move would be smart, given she looks like she wants to cut my balls off, she stalks into the room, with a mug—white, just like the walls in this madhouse—perched in her hands.
She holds the cup at the bottom like it’s not hot at all and wouldn’t scald her, the other hand curled around the handle.
She extends it to me, and I don’t ask her where hers is or if she has cream, even though I hate drinking it black because it’s likely to burn a hole straight through my stomach.
Instead, I put my palm out and she passes it over, careful not to touch me.
Our fingers nearly brush, nearly, but they don’t, and she pulls back like I have the plague.
Ami walks over to the chair directly across from the couch and parks her ass in it.
She tucks her legs up underneath her, so that I can barely see any of them, even though she’s wearing a dress.
She stares at me and when I notice that her eyes are red-rimmed, like she’d been crying in the kitchen while she was making coffee, I want to crunch that mug in my hand, grind it to dust like a beast, and find the bastard who hurt her.
Except that it’s me. It’s me who hurt her.
It’s like a sucker punch to the gut. Combined with her beauty and her sad eyes as she lifts them to my face, she’s nearly the end of me.
I’ve had a lot of beautiful women in my time. Women were always attracted to me, I guess a lot were attracted to the whole biker bad boy image, and the promise of a hard and dirty fuck—no strings attached. After I signed the marriage certificate, there was never anyone else.
I might be a lot of things, but I’m not a cheater.
I am not my father.
None of the women I had before can compare to Ami.
She’s just… different, and I can’t explain how.
She’s a virtual stranger to me, off limits.
She should be mine, but she’s not, and maybe that’s why I want her so fucking badly that I can’t think straight and can barely keep my sanity around her.
It’s why my body is reacting like I’m a horny fucking teenager and I can’t control it.
For one fucking year, the memory of her haunted me.
It drove me crazy and wrecked me. It turned me to smoke and ashes and razed me to the ground.
I thought of her as a betrayer and an enemy and yet here she is, with her soft beauty and her sad eyes and that broken aura hovering around her like a fucked up halo and I never noticed any of it until now.
Her gentle vulnerability is like a kick in the balls and I curse myself for never having noticed that she’s not all spitfire and anger and flippant beauty. That just a portion of that might be false. That maybe she’s fading away too.
The silence in the air snaps between us like a lightning storm just moved into the tiny apartment and is zapping the air between us. I can almost hear those rolls of thunder.
I raise the mug to my lips and sip at the coffee, surprised to find it’s not as bitter as I assumed, and it’s actually quite good.
Her shoulders rise and fall as she breathes.
Her eyes never leave my face, which is fucking disconcerting, given that her lips are pressed together in a thin, silent line like she’s suddenly been struck mute.
I have no idea what she’s thinking or feeling.
I have no fucking idea what I’m feeling.
Her lips tremble for just a second, before her tongue sweeps out to wet the fuller bottom one.
My cock gives a kick in my jeans, saluting the movement.
I would have accused her of being a temptress, of doing it on purpose, just because she knows it drives me nuts watching her wet those lips, lips that I’ve now tasted, lips that I want fucking more of, but I can’t accuse her of being a tease when she looks like a lost little girl, swallowed up by that big chair like she wishes she could disappear.
I wish she didn’t look so damn vulnerable. Or that she didn’t look so sexy doing it. Because noticing how beautiful she is and reacting to it like a carnal fucking devil make me a real bastard.
It makes me everything I never wanted to be. Everything I fought so hard not to turn into.
“Did you like it?”
I stare at her, as stunned by the sound of her voice as she looks for asking me in the first place. “Like what?” I take another swallow of coffee and this time, I focus on that mug, not on the way Ami’s lips part or how I want to brutalize them with my own.
“Liked it when you- uh- when you kissed me?”
Fuck. If only she knew just how much I liked it.
How I want to throw that coffee onto the damn floor and tackle her in that chair.
How I want to push up that dress and lick my way up her thighs like an animal, straight to her hot little core.
How I want to pick her up and thrust her on top my face, so she can ride and writhe on me while I feast on her cunt before I slam her lower, onto my aching dick and fuck her into another zip code.
“Yeah. I fucking liked it,” I grind out instead, since it’s slightly more tactful.
When I look back at her, I find her blinking hard and biting down even harder into that pillow soft lush bottom lip, turning it an even brighter of cherry red.
Her hair is tossed about her shoulders in disarray, her eyes brimming and shimmering with unshed tears.
Her nostrils flare when she notices me noticing her, and she looks so amazed that it makes my hands tremble on the mug.
Tremble with desire.
Tremble with the need to have her.
Tremble with the need to hold myself back.
Desire to show her that she’s wanted. That she’s needed.
I want to be the one to teach her that her sweet, honeyed rain scent reaching me even over the scent of coffee hovering just below my nose, is the most perfect thing on the fucking planet.
I want her tears, her sunshine smiles, her purity, and her passion.
I want to twist it in my hands, to break it, and shatter it, and fucking protect it because she’s mine to break and no one else’s.
I slowly bend at the waist and set the coffee cup down on the floor.
Ami’s eyes track every single movement.
“I should get those papers,” she whispers, the words like a venomous snake between us.
She stands so abruptly that it makes my head spin. I throw myself to my feet, nearly knocking over the mug of coffee. I close the distance between us in an instant. I stop just short of touching her. I tower over her easily, my height dominating and dwarfing her.
She’s not mine. I know that I’m the last person that she wants and that we might be legally bound, but she’s off limits.
A universe away. She’s always slipped through my fingers.
She always will. Still, I can’t stop myself.
I can’t fucking help that her sweet scent floods my nostrils, intoxicating me, making me drunk.
I can’t help that I feel her heat eating up those few inches between us, leaching into me.
I don’t stop myself when I reach out and grasp her chin, bracing that delicate porcelain skin between my thumb and index finger. Her eyes go wide with unfathomable expression. They darken to black and her pupils eat up the irises.
“I’m not worth it,” she whispers, a terrible plea, flung into the space between us as she stares up at me with the night sky glistening in her eyes. “I’ll never be worth it. Just let me get the papers.”
A few days ago, I would have agreed with that sentiment.
That Ami is trouble. That she always was and always will be trouble.
That’s she’s selfish and insensitive. That she betrayed me and walked out on me.
That she left me to fester in my shame and wallow in my own self-loathing for years. That I blame her for all of it.
Now though…
She’s just a girl. A young girl. Frail. Tiny.
Willowy and lost. Her sass and fire have deserted her.
The fearless mask she normally pastes on is gone and I see the underside, the cracked porcelain and flawed interior and the painful uncertainty.
The hollow and the ache and the mortality of bone and blood.
I lean forward, until the heat of her bare skin melts against the denim covering my thighs. She trembles, but she doesn’t break away. Her eyes change, becoming two aching pits of uncertainty, fear, and self-loathing.
It’s all laid bare to me, all of her emotion and her pain, pain that I don’t understand. I don’t know how to soothe it away. If I could, I’d breathe that ache out of her. Suck it through her skin and meld it into mine until it’s a part of me that I can carry around forever.
The pulse hammers at the side of her neck.
Her lips part and her eyes close and she waits.
She waits for me, like she’s been waiting all these years.
I always thought she was the one who needed to come back.
Come back to Helena. Come back to me. Come back to atone.
I realize, as I lean and tilt her face upwards and crush my mouth to hers, that it was me. All along, it was me.
That I was always meant to find her.