Ten #2
“Good,” I said as my heart tried to claw its way out of my chest so it could leave me and go live in Sam’s, where it belonged. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m okay.” He winced when he sat back.
I squatted down beside the chair, getting a closer look at him, and saw that his shirt was torn and there were marks on his throat. There looked to be a shoe imprint on the white T-shirt that was visible beneath the shredded dress shirt.
“Are your ribs broken?”
“Just bruised, I think,” he told me, giving me a trace of a smile as he trembled just slightly.
While it was hard for me not to touch Sam, it had to be just as difficult for him.
He was hurt, and more than anything, he wanted me to comfort him, kiss him, and put my hands all over him.
“I’m so fuckin’ sorry to drag you into this. ”
“You didn’t drag me into anything,” I murmured, scrutinizing him.
He had been hit very hard, very long, and it was taking a lot of energy for me not to yell. The man needed to go to the hospital, and looking at him—allowed to do nothing else—was twisting my stomach into knots.
“Like I said, we met on the stupid boat, and that was it.”
“Yes.”
“You were with a very beautiful woman.”
“Thank you. I’ll tell her you said so if I get out of here in one piece.”
“She’s gonna be pissed that you were hurt.”
“Oh, you have no idea.”
I nodded, stood up, and then turned back to Cristo Liron.
Every good thought I’d ever had about the man was gone, and because of that, so was his beauty.
It was amazing how quickly it could happen.
Sometimes, people who were not so blessed in the looks department got stunning the longer you knew them because after a while, you stopped seeing the outside and just saw their hearts.
The opposite was also true. Some really hot guy, like Cristo Liron, suddenly lost all his poetry and light because it turned out, after all the sticking up for him I had done, the man really was bad news. I hated it when Dane was right.
“Jory.”
I just stared.
“Something bothered me all night,” he said, leaning forward, his elbows on the table. “It seems that you and Detective Kage have been together for quite some time.”
“Which I told you from the start,” I reminded him.
“And I appreciated that,” he said. “But that was the problem. I know people, and I never make mistakes. People around me sometimes do, but not me, never me.”
“Could you get to the point?”
“Sure.” He nodded, tipping his head at Adan, his bodyguard.
The huge man came around the table and stood behind Sam. He then grabbed Sam’s hair and yanked his head back hard at the same time he put a gun to his temple.
“I own every face you see in here, Jory—make no mistake about that. You yell fire in here, nobody’s gonna move. This is my family. These are people I know. Hell, my brother’s the one who brought you.”
I absorbed that, even as I fought not to throw myself at Adan to get his hands off Sam. I wouldn’t give the bigger man much trouble, but it would be enough to give my husband the upper hand for crucial moments.
Sam must have read me like a book because his eyes flicked to me. “It’s okay. You’re okay. Everything’s fine.”
Sam had a gun pressed against the side of his head, but he was trying to comfort me.
“Hey!” Cristo Liron snapped his fingers at me like I was a dog. “Over here.”
I turned my head slowly.
“Better,” he assured me. “I want your full attention.”
And he had it.
“As I was thinking about you last night, I finally came to the conclusion that there was just no way. A guy like you, Jory … there’s no way you’d fuck some stranger in the back of a club.
And there’s no way you wouldn’t give me hell on the phone last night when I called.
You should have told me off for insulting your integrity, but you didn’t.
You just hung up on me so you could be with whoever was there.
But I know you, and you’re a fighter if it matters, if you care enough, so I have to ask myself …
who would you let fuck you up against a wall in a club, and who was with you last night? ”
I really had to give the man credit. In the short time that we had been acquaintances, he had actually paid attention and figured out the kind of guy I was. Too bad it wasn’t going to do him any good.
“I didn’t fuck anyone in the club,” I told him honestly—because I had let my man put me up against a wall, but he was not just anyone.
“You told me you had sex.”
“I lied.”
“Lied then or now?”
“Then,” I said flatly. “And if you’ve got someone who wants to put me on a polygraph machine, I will pass it.”
He squinted at me. “You smelled like cum at the club.”
“Because I was stroking off, and I can masturbate whenever I fuckin’ want, Mr. Liron,” I told him, looking around the table, making full eye contact with every single man there, ensuring that they were all excruciatingly uncomfortable.
“I’ve been alone for a long time, and so when I finally go out to a club, hell yeah, I’m gonna jack off.
I can stand in back of one of the rooms and watch two hot guys fuck, and then I can jizz all over the wall if I want to … and, God, I really wanted to.”
He squinted at me, Eddie squirmed in his seat, and the guy on the other side of Cristo looked away, embarrassed. The most important thing of all though was that Adan let go of Sam.
“Shall I call you when I splatter on my shower wall too?”
I had Agent Calhoun ready to crawl out of his skin; the others were looking anywhere but at me.
Adan replaced his gun in his holster and looked across the pub.
It was like watching something embarrassing on TV that made you squirm and want to get up and leave the room, but they were all stuck there with me.
“You’re lying,” Cristo said flatly. “You fucked someone in the back of that club, and there was someone with you last night when I called, and since you don’t fuck around—or say you don’t—I think it was your detective.”
I just stood there.
“And if your detective is at a club where I am, we have a problem.”
I pointed at Sam. “Well, I can assure you that ain’t him. I have a picture on my phone if you’d like to see what the real Sam Kage actually looks like.”
Calling him out was dangerous, but it was the only hand I had to play.
“Or, like I said, let’s bust into the police department files and pull him up. It’s a cool picture in his uniform, with the hat and all.”
If he asked me for my phone, he’d look weak. If he checked the police database, he’d tip his hand about knowing someone who could do that for him. Either way, he had not thought this inquisition all the way through. He had acted on impulse, and now he was in over his head.
And of course, he could just shoot me and send Dane fish wrapped in butcher paper, but if he did that, there would be repercussions, and he knew that too. I wasn’t anybody special, but I wasn’t some nameless drifter either.
And Sam was a whole other story. If he was a police officer, Cristo did not want that kind of heat.
If he wasn’t, and Sam was just a guy trying to make a drug deal with him or whatever they were doing, that was bad juju as well.
If word got around that you killed people wanting to go into business with you …
that would be bad for his wallet. Both options were horrible and put him squarely between a rock and a hard place.
Cristo was perceptive enough about me to know that I was made loyal, so he’d deduced my story—my original one about screwing a stranger at the club—was a lie.
And he was right. The problem was that when he cornered me, he wasn’t ready.
So, I had agreed that I had told him a lie and then given him a new one even more plausible than the first. And now he was screwed because it was his word against mine that I was lying, and as it stood, with my brutal masturbatory confession and his floundering, I looked like the guy telling the truth.
I sounded credible, and he just sounded petty and jealous.
“Ask you a question?”
“Certainly,” he said tightly, and I could tell, underneath the calm, he was furious with how this was playing out.
“Why him?” I pointed at Sam. “Why not him?” I pointed at Agent Calhoun. “Or anyone else for that matter?”
“Jace,” he said, pointing at Sam, “was at the club last night.”
“So were a lot of people. How many other guys did you beat up?”
“I—”
“And since we’ve concluded this isn’t Detective Kage, can I go now?” I asked as petulantly as I could. “Because my brother is expecting me at his office in the morning.”
“Fuck you, Jory! You told me you fucked someone at that—”
“I wanted you to think I did because I didn’t want to fuck you!
” I yelled back at him, my raised voice carrying so that family or not, friends or not, paid to be there or not …
people were looking. “You wanna fuck me so bad that you’re tellin’ me my ass looks good, well, fuck you!
I don’t bend and spread for any man but mine, and now because you’re a paranoid piece of shit, you’re beating up random people!
Do the people you do business with know you’re a complete fuckin’ psychopath? ”
He rose so fast that his chair fell over, slamming to the floor. “You fucked him,” he said, pointing at Sam. “I know you did, or why would you have lied?”
“I didn’t fuck anybody, but I lied because even though you’re having a really hard time wrapping your brain around it, I don’t wanna sleep with you!”
It was loud—really, really loud—and shrieky and as over the top as I could make it, and, oh God, I wanted to crawl under the covers on my bed, and I wasn’t even the one on the receiving end of the volume.
I was going to make this bad for him because it was the only way to save Sam. Nothing else mattered.