Chapter 23 #4
From what Calliope had told me about Jasper, I knew he saw the discreet cameras that Calliope hadn’t even noticed. That he had purposefully put himself in the frame.
He wasn’t there for Calliope. He was there for me. To scare me, threaten me, I didn’t give a fuck. There was nothing that man could do to make me let go of Calliope.
I didn’t greet him straightaway. I opened the trash lid, threw in the bag, closed it then turned slowly.
“You’re on private property.” I folded my arms over my chest. “Though I doubt that matters to you.”
“No.” He stepped out of the shadows, straightening the lapel of what was no doubt an expensive suit.
He looked like the kind of man I would’ve expected to see Calliope with the first day I met her on the dock. But not since I got to know her. Not once I discovered her fire. Her heart. Her fucking soul.
This man with the dead eyes would never be worthy of her, no matter how much he paid for his suits.
“I figured it would be apt for us to have a discussion without Calliope dominating it. I’m familiar with the way she takes control over most conversations. Most people.”
There was a gleam in his eye. His unsaid message was that she was too strong for me, that I couldn’t handle her.
“I don’t have a problem with my woman taking control,” I told him. “She’s capable. And I’m comfortable letting her take the lead.”
I didn’t stoop so low as to even insinuate that I could take the lead in other places, although the baser parts of me wanted to throw that in his face.
Even though she hadn’t spoken about their physical relationship—the mere thought of his hands on her made me want to rip his fucking limbs off—I knew instinctively that she’d never trusted him to take control.
To let go completely. That was a gift she gave only to me. One I’d hold sacred.
“Don’t mistake my easygoing demeanor for weakness.” I was looking in the eye of someone I was rapidly beginning to hate with a malice I hadn’t known I was capable of. “If you try to hurt Calliope, you will see just how easygoing I am not when it comes to my woman.”
He showed his teeth, white and straight, and I wanted them embedded in my knuckles. Never had I felt such murderous fury in my life.
“I don’t mistake you for being weak,” he replied mildly. “I just know I’m stronger. And I’m willing to fight dirtier to ensure I own Calliope.”
My blood boiled as I fought to keep my composure. He was trying to rile me. That much I knew. He had come to my restaurant, now my home, to scare me, to stake his claim. Neither of which I was going to allow.
“If you have to fight to own Calliope, without knowing she isn’t a possession, then she was never yours to begin with, and she’s lost to you forever.” Satisfaction swam through me as I stepped forward. “And you place one foot on any property I own again, we’ll have problems.”
“You own?” He arched a brow. “Or does Calliope? Since she’s the one who paid off all of your debts.”
I didn’t let my shock show. Though it did surprise me that he had access to that kind of shit. He was swinging his dick, showing me how powerful he was, trying to make me feel less than. But I couldn’t feel less than when Calliope slept next to me every night.
“What can I say?” I shrugged. “I’m okay with my woman being successful. Powerful. Now get the fuck off my property.”
He watched me for a long beat, smiling and putting his hands in his pockets before he turned and leisurely walked away.
I knew that the lock I clicked on my front door wouldn’t keep him out if he planned on coming in. But my father had given me a lot of things, had taught me a lot of things, and one of those was how to take measure of a man, if that’s what you could call Jasper Hayes.
I figured he wouldn’t go straight to violence, to using brute strength.
And I dismissed my earlier suspicion of him being involved in the shooting.
No, that was too simple for that kind of man.
This was a man who waited, who toyed with his prey.
He had it in his head that he could coax Calliope into his web, back to his side then taunt me with that.
Yet I knew her better than him, despite their history. He only knew her darkness. I knew her in the sunshine.
My breathing was back to normal by the time I walked into my bathroom, eyes skimming down Calliope’s bare back, exposed in a silk nightgown that dipped almost to the small of her back.
I knew it was silkier than any fabric I’d bought. She had expensive, luxurious things, and I fucking loved her in them. Not as much as in my tee but a close second.
She was dabbing cream on her face. Another thing I loved, all sorts of fancy glass bottles cluttering every available surface in my bathroom. Her making herself at home. Because this was her home. I was her home.
“That was a long trash trip.” Calliope met my eyes in the mirror.
Despite the events of the night, what she’d revealed—broken pieces of herself she’d been expertly hiding—she looked relaxed.
Her hair tumbled down her back, her face free of makeup, exposing the freckles that were becoming more pronounced with the warmer weather and the time she spent outside. In the sunshine.
I’d vowed to myself to never lie to her, to never deceive her, and I kept my promises. “Was some kind of scavenger, trying to weasel in. Had to take care of it.”
It wasn’t a lie.
She shook her head, dipping her fingers into a glass tub of some kind of cream before slathering it on her arms. The floral scent filled up the small space.
“Better you than me,” she muttered.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Much better me than you.”
An hour later, she was sleeping in my arms. Though she seemed so much bigger in stature—something I’d never say to her face, lest she misunderstand it—when the sun was shining and she was wearing heels, being Calliope Derrick, it was only in the darkness where I realized how petite she was.
How delicate.
Her bone structure, her nose, her wrist bones.
I traced the skin that was red from Jasper’s fucking hands being on it.
She was never soft for him. She’d never curled against his chest, hair splayed over his shoulder as she mewed faintly in her sleep.
Because if she had, he would never have even dreamed of marking that milky skin, of harming her.
My brain wouldn’t shut down.
The Russian Mob…
I ground my teeth together, thinking of how Calliope had said it.
The way she said everything else. In a cool, even, self-assured tone.
That tone had made my cock twitch on the dock when I first saw her, waving papers in my face, in those high heels, that hair, the fucking suit.
Yeah, the power she carried around turned me the fuck on.
But what happened earlier wasn’t that. I knew her well enough now to recognize that she was clutching on to that veneer of power with her fucking fingernails. Maybe someone else might not have caught the catch in her breath, the way sweat beaded on her upper lip. The tightness to her shoulders.
Listening to her, I’d battled to control my own reactions. Because I knew any small response would have had her shrinking back, putting up her defenses, shrouding the truth.
And fuck, part of me might’ve wanted that. The cowardly part of me might’ve been tempted to let her do that. To sanitize whatever might’ve come next because I wasn’t brave enough to hear what the goddamn Russian Mob did to my woman.
I’d had to remind myself that she’d been brave enough to survive it, that she was brave enough to tell me all of that while standing in her power like she had on the dock. Like she had each time she walked into the room since I’d known her.
So I’d weathered it.
I listened to her tell me that she was beaten half to death. That she was raped .
That she hadn’t called the police, no ambulance, that she stitched herself up in her bathroom, with broken fingers.
I’d resisted the urge to snatch her hand into mine, to inspect the slight crookedness of her middle finger that I’d noticed but never in a million years had thought would have such a sinister history.
Instead of holding on to her so I could ensure that she didn’t float into that horrible memory, I’d listened.
I’d digested everything she told me. She bled in her apartment on her own then stitched herself up .
And that asshole, Jasper, the one she had a relationship with that I both didn’t understand and hated with every fiber of my being, had known about it.
He’d known that she was beaten and bloody and alone, and he hadn’t done a fucking thing.
I knew which was worse, theoretically. A man who put his hands on a woman, on Calliope, that man was worse than scum. Yet a part of me thought it was somehow worse that that man, that sinister character, that scumbag, let Calliope be alone because he thought she could survive without him.
Yes, Calliope could survive anything and everything without a man to be her savior. She could get through it alone.
But she didn’t deserve to. Shouldn’t have had to.
She needed someone to be there for her.
She hid her needs underneath her facade, beneath her shield, but Calliope needed it. Even if she would’ve rather died than admitted it.