Chapter 41 Daisy
FORTY-ONE
DAISY
I lay gasping as I watched Cash turn and disappear into the bathroom. Aftershocks still tingling through my body and the oxygen still missing from my lungs.
My heart ravaged in my chest and my skin prickled with the vestiges of pleasure that still skittered and danced through me.
All while my mind spun with a thousand reservations and questions.
I was so in over my head, I didn’t know where I stood. What I felt being here. With him. The way I never wanted it to end, but I knew by the fear in his eyes, it would have to.
I could feel it simmering all around. His storm gathering in every recess of my being, preparing to dump and pour.
But I wanted to stand in the middle of it.
Raise my hands over my head and let it rain and batter and lash.
I wanted to hold some of his pain the way he’d been holding mine. Stand like a sentry around his mangled soul, the way he’d been standing as a guard around my family.
His heavy footsteps echoed from the bathroom, and I could hear the faucet run. A moment later, he emerged in the doorway.
A dark phantom that cast its shadow across the walls. Pure malice and intimidation while he still somehow managed to emit a softness underneath.
His footsteps were long and slow as he approached, and those hazel eyes raked over me as he sat down on the edge of the bed facing me.
A tiny groan left me at the warmth of the cloth as he set it on my belly.
“How wrong is it that I want to be stuffing this cum into your cunt rather than wiping it away? How wrong is it that I want to mark you with everything that I am?”
Shock rasped out of me at his crude words.
Okay, there wasn’t a whole lot of softness when it came to him.
That was clear enough.
But I felt the undercut. That brittle tenderness that he didn’t know what to do with.
Shower me with it, apparently, because then he murmured, “Don’t want to hurt you, Daisy. Terrified of it,” as he resituated my underwear and pulled down my shirt.
I pushed up to sitting, drawing one knee up.
I angled myself so I was a little farther behind him, my chest pressed to his shoulder.
My fingers brushed through the silky locks of his hair.
Playing with the barely-there curl at the edge of his ear where his hair had gotten longer in the amount of time since we had been here.
“That didn’t feel like pain to me,” I whispered.
He grunted in return. “That’s what I want. To make you feel good. Treat you like a queen the way you deserve. But I’m afraid the only thing I’m going to do is drag my bad into your good.”
I scoffed. “Yet I’m the one who came to you because my psycho ex wants me dead? Concocted an entire plot to get you to marry me so you’d adopt my kids? Talk about baggage.”
My fingers slipped down to brush along his cheek, my palm settling on the stubble of his jaw.
Cupping him gently so maybe he could feel a little of what I felt when he looked at me.
Cared for.
Shielded and shrouded.
Desolation took over his features. “You witnessed what happened tonight.”
Fear rebounded. Tumbling through my insides and hauling me back into the nightmare. My guts sick with the idea of what could have happened. Sick with the thought of losing him.
“You protected us. That’s what I witnessed.” Dread twisted through my being. “Do you…do you think they’re related to Ethan?”
He gave a harsh shake of his head. “They were specifically sending a message to me.”
Confusion bound. “Who were they?”
His thick throat bobbed. “Not sure. They just implied that I should have known I wouldn’t get away with what I did.” He stalled before he pressed on, “Keep telling you I’m not exactly a good guy, Daisy.”
Maybe it was the first time I really believed it.
The first time I really believed that he might be involved in the sordid.
After today? After meeting his family? After what happened on our way home?
A tremble rocked through me.
“What exactly does that mean?”
He turned away like he was going to shut me down. Ignore the subject. Close himself off the way he’d done since I got here.
The gruff man so different from the boy I once knew.
But he was still the same person.
The same soul and light.
I recognized it as clearly as I recognized the flame that burned in me whenever he came near.
“Tell me what’s going on, Cash. Tell me who you really are.”
Regret billowed out of him. “I can’t let you go to that place, Daisy.”
Disbelief shot from my mouth. “Too late, because I’m already there. I’m already right here.”
I slid my hand around to his opposite cheek and drew his face in my direction.
Forcing him to look at me.
To see me.
To understand he was exactly what I’d been missing, the same as I would proclaim that I was what he was missing.
“You want to know who I am, Daisy? You really want to know who I am?” He clutched his left hand in a fist. The tattoo on the back with the stacked Ss and the dagger running through flexed and seemed to sharpen.
That eye seeing too much, his secrets peeking through the flames that licked up his wrist and forearm from the torch.
All while I felt completely left in the dark.
“Yes.” I basically implored it.
Cash shot to his feet and crossed the room. He roughed both hands over the top of his head. Agony poured from his being.
A riptide that threatened to knock him from his feet.
“I’m a monster, Daisy. Keep trying to explain that to you, but you refuse to see it.” A war went down inside him, every intrinsic part at odds, and he looked to the floor before he returned his attention to me and ground out, “After I left West Virginia…”
My chest clutched in old misery as the horrors of that night stole the oxygen from the room.
“Told you I met the guys when I landed in LA. That they became family. We were all fucked, Daisy. All messed up in the heads and hearts. We joined this brutal MC as a means of survival. But I think we were drawn to it. Needed it.”
His jaw hardened, and his hands curled into fists. “We were depraved. Full of greed and wickedness. We stole and we maimed and we killed.”
Sickness fisted my stomach. It felt almost impossible to picture Cash involved in any of those things. It felt like a vague delusion. Something not quite real, even though he was standing there peeling away the layers to show me who he had become.
And maybe I had completely changed, too. Maybe my trials and traumas had reshaped me so much that it didn’t matter. There was nothing he could say that would make me truly fear him.
“But you said that was in the past.”
His laughter was hollow. “The MC? Yeah. But not who I became while I was involved. I thrive on the violence. It’s always right there, simmering below the surface.
Festering. Compounding. Waiting on the next time I can release it.
I thirst for it. Bringing destruction. Draining the life out of someone who doesn’t deserve to breathe. ”
Nausea toppled my stomach.
He was a killer.
In the truest sense of the word.
I shifted so I was on my knees on the bed. Basically kneeling before him. Begging him not to be as terrible as the picture of corruption he painted. “But you said…you said that you never hurt innocents.”
I could almost see the self-hatred boiling on his flesh. The tattoos crawling like a verdict written on his skin.
He turned away. “Only my family, Daisy. The only innocents I hurt were my family.”
Grief pinched my brow. “No, Cash. It wasn’t your fault. It was an accident. How could you blame yourself?”
“How can I blame myself?” He gripped at his heart like it caused him physical pain.
Like he didn’t deserve for it to beat. “I was the one who caused the whole thing. Matthew told me what I had to do, and I disregarded it. Was selfish because I wanted the win. The achievement. The chance of being great when the only thing I was doing was damning all of them.”
Confusion curled through me, and my pulse throbbed erratically. “What are you talking about?”
His strong jaw trembled. “Matthew was in trouble. Messed up with these really bad guys. He asked for my help, and I ignored it. Ignored it because I was too selfish to give.”
Confusion whipped and stirred.
“I should have known it was going to come back on us.” Every word was full of spite. “On me. On my family. If I hadn’t…”
Grief gushed out of him, and his face contorted in agony.
“When I realized they were in trouble, when I realized what I caused, I went running home. But then…I saw the light on upstairs in my room. And I knew you were there. I had to get to you.”
Horrified shock nearly blew me back into the wall.
He didn’t need to say the last aloud. I heard it as plain as if he shouted it into the vacuum that had stolen the last years from us.
He had gotten me out, but he hadn’t been able to save them.
The words locked in my throat, leaving me on a jumbled sob, and Cash continued before I could reply.
That self-loathing rising to the surface again.
“I—” His chest expanded. His features a warped map of shame and guilt and sorrow.
Then he seemed to swallow down whatever he’d intended to say and instead forced out the pulverized words.
“I failed them, Daisy, and I failed you. I failed everyone. If you even knew…” He trailed off, unable to speak whatever was held on his tongue.
I wanted to push him on that. Demand to tell me what he meant.
But he only rushed on, “And I’m terrified I’m going to do it again. You think you can trust me? You think I’m right for you and for your kids?”
Pain splintered across his brutally handsome face.
I fumbled my way off the bed and flew to him. “You saved me.”
A swirl of emotions swamped me. I wasn’t sure how I could feel both thankful and guilty over it at the same time.
His teeth mashed together. “But it wasn’t enough. Because of me, they’re dead.”
“No.” I gripped at his arm. “You could never have planned for that to happen.”
He whirled free of my touch, and he angled in my direction as a hot huff of self-reproach dropped from his mouth. His entire body vibrated with shame and all-consuming hate.
The horrors he had faced distorting everything.
“Don’t you fucking get it, Daisy? I chose destruction. I went down that path and there was no stopping it. And that is a path I’ll be stuck on forever.”
“Cash.” I attempted to grab him by the wrist.
He pulled out of my hold, and he gripped at his hair as he stumbled back toward the door. “I can’t do this, Daisy. I can’t fucking do this. Can’t do this thing that we keep sliding toward. I want to be someone else when it comes to you. But I’m not. I’m fucking not.”
“But you are.” My voice shook on the denial. “You are that person when it comes to me. When it comes to my children. You are good and kind and gentle, and you’re a protector—brutal and ferocious—when you need to be. Like you were tonight.”
My tone twisted in emphasis. “And when you touch me, I feel alive in a way that I never have. With you I feel beautiful and cherished and brave. You fill all the places that have been empty since you left. With you is where I feel safe, both my body and my heart.”
Each word heaved out on a plea, and I fisted my hand over my aching chest. “I love you, Cash. I’ve always loved you. Since I was sixteen years old, I’ve loved you. I loved the person you were then, and I love the person you are now.”
He flinched with each word I gave him. As if each were bullets that impaled. Darts that delivered agony.
“No. No, Daisy. I don’t get that. I don’t get your love.”
He opened the door.
Torment erupted from the deepest part of me.
My limbs shook uncontrollably, and my heart felt like it was going to fail.
“Do you blame me? Because I was there?” I demanded to his back. “Because I didn’t listen to you and go home, but instead waited for you?”
He froze for the longest time before he turned.
Nothing but grimness filled those hazel eyes. “No, Daisy. The only person I blame is myself.”
Then he walked out, the door clicking shut behind him.
The man ruining me all over again.
Just like I knew he would.
Heartbreaker.
His own too disfigured to love me back.