Chapter Four
Leah
Sneaking out in the middle of the night isn’t a great idea if you’re me. My dad is all about his image, and it would kill him for someone to find out that his daughter is creeping around like a stalker.
Ever since my brother’s death, he wanted less than nothing to do with me, but that isn’t surprising, for a hell of a lot of reasons.
He ignored me before, but now he openly despises me.
He can’t even stand to be in the same room as me.
My mom does nothing to defend me. She doesn’t notice me either.
She’s little more than a ghost—yet another one I have to live with.
When I find myself straddling my bicycle in front of a cute little ramshackle bungalow on the edge of town, just a night after Steel basically told me to fuck off, and that we were something that was never going to happen, I am not exactly surprised.
I went for a ride to clear my head. I’m not afraid of the dark the way some people are.
In fact, I welcome it. I love the cooler night air rushing up to meet my face.
I love the wind in my hair, tangling it as it flows free like a cloud behind me.
The night cloaks me, offers me its protection.
It is the one place I don’t have to be someone I’m not.
I’m free from the memories that weigh me down at home where literally everywhere I go I’m reminded that I once had a brother there.
Even though it’s three years since he died, my mom still hasn’t even cleaned out his room. She refuses to let anyone touch it. Like he’s just going to stroll back through that door one day, and the last three years were all a bad dream.
It’s not healthy. Like everything else at home, my dad just ignores it. I say nothing because I don’t want to hurt my mom more than I have already. I know she doesn’t blame me like my father does. But seeing her lifeless eyes and the way she’s shrunk into herself, tears me apart.
Christmas. I hate the fucking season. Even though it’s three weeks away, it weighs me down with leaden dread.
Before it was just a bunch of going through the motions.
Shit with my grandparents, my mom’s parents—since both of my father’s are dead.
Fake. Gifts that we didn’t really need or want because we were spoiled enough already.
I just never saw the point of it, but now, after Liam’s death, it’s harder on me than ever.
Each holiday is another one without him.
So… yeah... It started out on a bike ride to get away from the constraints of the house and everything that has become my life… and ended up here. At Steel’s house. I’ve never let myself come here before. But tonight, it was too much of a temptation. I need him. I’ve always needed him.
I’m sure a grief counsellor would have a word for what this is. Transference or something. But it’s more than that. Even though on the water tower we only spoke for a few minutes, it changed the course of my life.
As if my presence calls to him, the front door opens and slams shut.
Light spills out for a brief second from somewhere deep in the house.
It’s a normal looking little building. Small.
Quaint. Old. I’m no architect, but it seems to embody the typical Florida architecture.
It’s the kind of white house with wrought iron detailing on the porch that surrounds it, that you would see in the movies.
It’s up on blocks because there’s no basement, just a huge, treed-in swamp off in the distance behind it.
I hold my breath when Steel’s dark form materializes.
The slice of moonlight illuminating the night sky glows silver on his already harsh features, sharpening his cheekbones.
His lips are turned down in a thin line, and it doesn’t take the anger in his powerful stride to let me know that I’m in deep shit for showing up at his house.
I don’t even know how he knew I was here.
I’d been sitting on my bike outside for no more than a few minutes before he came crashing out the front door, his dark hair flying around his shoulders like the halo of an avenging angel.
As usual, he has a black leather vest on and jeans, as well as his regular shit-kicker boots. He stalks up to stand right in front of me, stops less than a foot away. I grip the handlebars of my bike like the lost little girl he thinks I am. I swallow to wet my dry mouth. Suddenly, I can’t breathe.
He’s beautiful, and I raise my chin in a gesture of silent challenge, which is, of course, like looking a rabid dog right in the eyes.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing here?” Steel snaps.
He doesn’t yell at me, though, and I realize that he is keeping his voice down. I’m not sure whether it’s because he doesn’t want to disturb the neighbors, or maybe he’s trying not to intimidate me.
It’s two in the morning, and I’m standing here like a creeper fifteen feet from his front step twenty-six hours after he warned me to stay the hell away from him.
Clearly, I have no sense.
“I…er… I was out for a bike ride,” I stammer, the height of lameness.
Steel’s eyes narrow and I can tell he isn’t buying my bullshit. My hands grow clammy on the handlebars in my death grip.
“Seriously. I was. I just had to get out of the house. Somehow. I don’t have a car ever since… Well… you know. All I have is my bike and walking wasn’t going to take me as far away as I needed to be.”
“And you just magically ended up here?”
The sarcastic tone of his words bites into my gut.
His rejection last night didn’t feel final.
It felt like a perfunctory warning, the beginning of a beautiful dance that I wasn’t going to give up on.
This… the way he’s looking at me like I’m just a nuisance, something he needs to rid himself of for good… it cuts me.
My breathing changes again, coming out in little gasps.
“I-I thought I’d be safe here.” I bow my head when the truth comes tumbling out because I can’t bear to look at him.
“Safe? What do you need to be safe from, darlin’?” His voice is softer. “This is a good town. No violence. What could a rich little princess like you need protecting from?”
I will my lips not to move, but the words spill out. He knows, and still, he asks me. “Myself. Everything. Everyone.”
I look up in time to see Steel go tense.
Watching a man like him tighten up, each muscle bunching under that leather jacket so that it creaks, his massive shoulders hunching forward, his thick legs spreading subtly as he changes his stance—it’s a thing to behold.
There is no mistaking the deadly gleam in his eyes.
Or the way my entire body goes hot and reacts. A tremble starts in my stomach. It spreads heat to my thighs, my breasts, deep into my belly and even deeper into my core.
Steel smiles, a rare gift, and the shadows clear off his face almost instantly. That smile. It melts me, takes the rawness off all the edges.
“You can leave here, leave this all behind. Just go.” Rather than angry he sounds tired. World weary.
His words piss me off even though they’re spoken softly.
“Why do you think I want to leave? I left, but it didn’t solve anything.”
“Because that’s what you need to do. Leave all of this behind. All that this town represents.”
I hate that he’s right. I did enjoy the freedom of college.
I want to leave and start fresh somewhere new with every fiber of my being, but he’s also wrong.
I learned that my life always follows me.
And I want to stay more than go. Because this is where he is.
I want to know what’s possible with a man like him.
I know my place is at his side and I’m not leaving. I’m not giving in or giving him up.
“It’s not what’s best for me.” My tongue darts out to wet my lips so I can say something else, but I notice the way Steel’s eyes track to my mouth, the way his jaw clenches and something in those gray depths stirs to life.
My eyes drop boldly to his jeans, and the noticeable bulge there makes my pulse pound, my belly tingle, and my thighs ache, but it also tells me that I am right.
He wants me.
At least, his body wants me.
I might be shy and inexperienced, but I know I’m pretty.
I’ve seen the way men look at me, but I’ve never cared.
It was all for him. All of me. Always. Seeing him react to me, no matter how he wants to keep himself immune, seeing the hunger in his eyes, strengthens my resolve.
Something dark and primal inside of me answers that feral black sexuality he oozes.
We would fit together. I know it.
Steel’s whole body seems to go rigid again, and I can tell he is fighting it. Fighting me.
“You need to turn that bike around and go back home. What the hell are you doing out at this time of night? Don’t you have any sense? Don’t come here again. You’re playing with fucking fire, and I guarantee you won’t like getting burned.”
“I think I’d actually like being burned,” I retort. “Always did have a fascination with fire.”
“You weren’t built for this life, darlin’. I’ll keep telling you that until you see sense and believe me. Now, go home. Stop sneaking out in the night. My answer is no. It’s always gonna be no. Don’t keep coming around here, tempting me, or you won’t like what happens.”
His words send a delicious shiver clawing its way through me. I toss my hair, letting it fly around my shoulders like a gold curtain.
“Yeah?” I arch a brow. “I’m pretty sure I’d like it.”
Steel swallows and my eyes track the movement.
His Adam’s apple bobs in his corded neck beneath the jet-black stubble.
I want to press my hands to it, feel the outline of it as he swallows, feel him, alive under my fingertips.
My stomach tightens, and I have to sink my teeth into my bottom lip to stifle a groan.
“You’re acting like a spoilt brat. You talk about being my queen, but you’re a girl.
A little girl who has no idea about how the world works and a complete disregard for the consequences of her actions.
Last night you acted like a whore, a woman who gives herself to other men.
You wanted to use your body to get what you wanted.
To manipulate me into it. Are you a child and a whore, Leah? Is that who you are?”
He is baiting me, but I can’t help sass him back because his words fester inside of me, turning the beautiful things I want to say to him, do with him, into something black and terrible and dirty, and I hate that he’s doing it to me.
“I’m not a whore, and I’m certainly not a child,” I snap.
“You made me a promise up on that water tower. You saved my life, Steel. You. It’s that promise that I clung to.
I’ve wanted you for three years. I’m here now.
I’m not above begging you, if that’s what it’s going to take.
I know you want me. I can see it. I know you’ve thought about me too, all this time.
I know because I can see it in your eyes.
You can lie to me with your words, but your body knows what it wants. ”
My eyes track down to the erection straining in his jeans.
All Steel’s sharp edges appear to harden into an unreadable mask.
I want to keep pushing at him. I want all of him.
His feral wrath, his soft laughter, his body, his soul, his love.
His lips—lips capable of offering me the sweetest benediction, of bruising my mouth with hungry kisses, of taking my body.
“What I feel is fucking annoyed since I’ve been delayed from sleep in the middle of the goddamn night to listen to more of this fucking shit from a woman who has a crush on me like a fucking teen.
It’s insane. Get it through your head—that shit I promised you up there wasn’t real.
I was just saying what I thought you’d listen to. ”
“No! You-you can’t just stand there and tell me what isn’t for me and what is! You can’t tell me how to think or write me off because I’m younger than you. You can’t call me a child when I know my own mind, and you’re just scared to fucking death of it.”
Steel sucks in a breath, and there is no mistaking the rage radiating off him.
“That’s a big accusation—accusing me of being scared. Now, get on that bike and get out of here fast, princess. Don’t come back.”
“Yeah?” I challenge because I can’t help myself. I’m grasping at straws. “What are you going to do? Punish me?”
“This? You think this is the behavior of someone who would ever be my queen?” Steel shakes his head.
When he turns and strides back towards the house, I know there isn’t anything in the world that’ll bring him back to me. The bang of the door closing behind him echoes through the night with deafening finality.
Was it true what he said? That he didn’t mean any of it? That he’s never meant anything he ever said to me? I can’t believe that it’s true. It hurts too fucking much to consider that he wasn’t just trying to drive me away tonight by being an asshole.
I have no choice but to whirl my bike away in the opposite direction.
I mount up and pedal fast. My chest feels like it’s going to implode, but still…
still, that shred of hope clings like a stain, refusing to be washed away.
It’s pervasive, that hope, like a virus.
Hope isn’t always a good thing. Sometimes, hope is the worst thing.