47 - CASSANDRA
Janice
Lacey didn't know about Derek Fucking Harrington.
How the fuck does a woman spend a season inside that place, wearing its mark on her wrist, and never once hear whose name is on the deed?
Lacey's my girl and I would be failing her miserably if I didn't warn her about that arrogant sadist. She was too goddamn naive to be anywhere alone with him, of all people.
Which meant I had to go back over all of it.
I mentally rolled my eyes. She'd walked into that house blind, and if she'd been blind to him, then Derek, being the big Dom, had grabbed her wrists on purpose.
Fucking hell, he'd seen her like a snake sees a mouse, and she hadn't even known what was happening.
The idea of what could have happened made me both sick and angry.
The wrists, the part she'd told me on the trail in that flat careful voice I didn't like at all, that wasn't the club following her home.
That was just him. Just dangerous Derek Harrington's powerful hand and nothing else between her and the floor.
Well, that can't happen, not to my Lacey, not on my watch. That shit stops now.
I could see the ice cream stand ahead. I looked back at Lacey and saw that look on her face.
Fuck. She's thinking about that monster like he's Prince Charming, that look I hadn't put on her face, not her best friend and mentor and lover, but the towering tin soldier turned petty king.
"Come on, Lacey. Let's talk over ice cream," I nearly barked at her.
I kept sneaking looks at her the whole way up, which she'd have caught in the old days and called me on.
I didn't like anything about that expression.
Fascinated and rebellious and everything Lacey shouldn't be right now.
She was right, I found her wire, which was an interesting way to put it.
I found it and showed it to her. I could introduce her to that world in a safe, loving way. Derek would destroy her.
The stand came up on the left, and we laid our bikes against the rail.
I bought two cones I didn't want, because buying them gave my hands a job.
She took hers without a word. We carried them to the far table, the one at the edge of the gravel where nobody was.
Be careful, Jan. Don't move too fast this time.
"So," she said. She hadn't touched her cone. "Derek Harrington."
I hated walking on eggshells, but I had to. The egg had already cracked.
"Lacey, Derek Harrington isn't the man you think he is." I had barely gotten started when she interrupted me. She never used to do that.
"I doubt you know what I think he is." She was looking at the melting edge of the ice cream and not at me.
"He built that place. He and his wife." She turned the cone a slow quarter, watching it.
"I keep thinking about it. He's not what I decided he was.
Five years I had him mislabeled a cold fish and he's the opposite.
He made the hottest thing I've ever walked into.
" She looked up. "You okay, Janice? You just went pale. "
I didn't feel okay, and her smirk made it worse. She was a lamb walking merrily into the lion's den. I'd heard the little lift in her voice, the one people get when they've started to want someone.
"Don't," I said.
"Don't what?"
"Don't go there. Harrington." I set my cone down in the little wire ring on the table. "Of everyone. Not him." Fuck. Fuck. Idiot. Too fast, too hard, she's going to fight back.
"Why?"
I froze. I'd walked myself into a trap at the worst possible time. What I knew about Derek was tied to me. Things I'd done that I couldn't tell her. I can't lose her. Not Lacey. Not to Derek. I could feel it going, the steadiness I hadn't lost in years.
"I don't like military men," I blurted. "The Special Forces, the whole, you know.
He's spent his life being very good at killing people, and men like that scare me, and I won't apologize for it.
" Idiot. Get your head together, this is critical.
"And that place is his, which means he isn't a tourist in it, Lacey.
He's not a man who wandered in. He built it.
He's a Dom, and not a soft one, and I know that part by reputation. He used to be there all the time."
"By reputation," she said.
"By reputation." I was sinking. Her face just showed interest, not the fear that should be there, not any grasp of how far out over the water she was.
"So a man scares you because he was a soldier who has protected our country," she said, "and because strangers say things about him.
" She still hadn't raised her voice. If anything, it had come down, gone even, quiet, and very precise, and I should have known then, because that was new, that flat cold care in it, and I'd never heard her aim it at me.
"That's the case. That's what you've got? "
"Lacey. It's more," I tried hopelessly.
"It's not what he's like." Cutting me off.
She set her own cone down beside mine, deliberate, the two of them dripping in their wire rings, and folded her hands on the table like a woman about to take a history.
"I've been in a room with him. I've watched him be a father.
You've watched a reputation. I've watched the man. "
She was defending him, and every word of the defense was a description of exactly how far in she already was, and I sat there watching her walk toward the edge with complete confidence in her own feet.
She was over it and didn't know, and I couldn't say the one sentence that would make her stop.
Everything I knew was locked in the room I wouldn't open.
I just shook my head, hunting for anything that would work. I was losing her.
"You don't know what he's like when it's not fish and stories," I said. "You've seen his facade. That's what a man like that shows you. I'm telling you what's inside that you haven't assessed yet, and you've decided you can, and that's exactly the moment people get hurt."
"People." She turned the word over. "You mean me. Say me."
"You. Yes. You." Of course her. Of course my sweet, soft Lacey.
She looked at me for a long moment, and I thought I'd finally broken through.
"You're jealous."
No.
"That's not fair," I said, my composure slipping. "That's not what this is, and you know it isn't, and it's beneath you to say it."
"Is it?" Still quiet. "You've wanted to regain control since we got off that ship.
You couldn't stand that I came home from that cruise and started deciding things for myself.
And now there's a man, an actual man, and you're sitting here telling me he's too dangerous, too extreme, when the whole reason I even know what I am is that you decided to show me.
You made me into someone who'd want this.
And the second I want it somewhere you didn't pick, it's dangerous. "
"That's not—" My hands had come up off the table. "Lacey, Ricardo is not the same as—"
"Haven't you spent months handing me extreme?" she asked, right over me, cold. "Wasn't it you? The club. Ricardo. All of it. You, every door, you held it open and pushed me through and told me it was good for me. And now you want to stand here and pick which extreme I'm allowed to have."
"Ricardo isn't extreme." I said it too fast, too loud. "That's the whole reason it was Ricardo. He's gentle, he's kind, he has never once in his life scared a woman, I chose him because he was the softest possible—"
"We had sex in the peace garden," she said.
I stopped.
"At the hospital. The little walled one, off the loading dock.
He got the gate open and we did it on the path, with my back to the bricks.
" She said it the way she'd read me a set of numbers.
"In the open. Where anyone could have come through the gate.
And I liked it, Janice. I liked that part.
The where-we-shouldn't of it. So maybe your safest thing isn't as safe as you think, and maybe I'm not either.
Maybe I like extreme. Maybe that's just a thing about me now, and you don't get to be surprised, because you're the one who unleashed it. "
She thought she'd shocked me, some scandalized aunt clutching pearls over her on the path.
She had it backward. It wasn't the sex. It was the gate.
Ricardo getting a locked hospital gate open like it was nothing, her back to the brick, and the boy calling it a thrill so she'd call it hers.
A badge. A thing she was now. Her whole career hanging off a gate a kid had popped because popping it was part of what he was there to do.
I didn't say any of it. There was no floor left under me to say it from.
Fucking Ricardo. Son of a bitch had played us both.
"That's not a thing about you," I said, and my voice had gone to pieces now, I could hear it, "that's dangerous, that's genuinely dangerous, Lacey, do you hear me, that boy is going to—" The words were coming out ahead of my control.
"He's working you. That's not you liking extreme, that's him working you—"
"Ricardo's manipulating me now too? Gentle, kind Ricardo?"
She said it very softly. I was breathing hard. I didn't lose control of situations like this. Not me. Not with the most important person in my life.
"Ricardo." She leaned back a fraction. Her cone had fallen over in its ring and neither of us moved to right it. "Tell me, Janice. Since you can see it all so clearly. Tell me all the people who are manipulating me. Make me a list."
And I understood, a half second before she said it, that I'd trapped myself.
"You want to talk to me about manipulation.
" Her eyes hadn't left my face. She wasn't crying.
She was the calmest thing at that sorry little roadside.
"You. Who took me apart on a boat. Who knew exactly where every wire in me was and put your hands on all of them and called it a gift.
Who kept going. You want to sit at an ice cream stand and warn me about a man who might manipulate me someday, maybe, by reputation? "
"Lacey—"
"You manipulated me." Flat. Final. "You're the one who belongs on your own list."
No. I wanted to help you. The words were right there and they didn't come.
My breath hitched. I didn't have it. She was right.
Not about Derek, she was wrong about Derek, wrong the way a person is wrong when they can't see the drop, and it scared me that she was going to be wrong about him with her whole confident body.
And I started to cry.
I put the back of my hand against my mouth. I couldn't get the two of them apart, the fear and the guilt, they'd come up together and wouldn't separate, and under both was the plain animal fact that I was losing her and there was nothing I could do about it.
I kept waiting for her to break too. I waited for her face to soften, for the cold to crack, for her to reach across and take my hand off my mouth.
She didn't.
She let me cry the way you let weather happen.
She stood up after a while. Then she got on her bike and started leaving.
When she was twenty feet away, I heard myself screaming "LACEY, I LOVE YOU!" Her bike faltered, she slowed, and my heart soared. But then she started pedaling again. And then she was gone.