Chapter 5 #2
I didn’t expect her to answer in sweats and a Slasher tee, face free of makeup, dark hair clipped back hastily, unlike the tight and severe buns I’d seen her wear.
Tendrils escaped here and there, highlighting a face that was beautiful and instantaneously pissed.
Though furious, she looked younger. A flush of color raced across her flawless, alabaster skin, contrasting with her expressive, dark brows, electric eyes, and full, rosebud lips.
“What are you doing here?” The signature sharpness in her tone that endeared the fuck out of me rang loud and clear.
I liked that she didn’t force herself to soften for social graces or politeness or whatever society had drilled into women to make them believe that they must be meek, soft spoken, palatable.
Calliope was none of those things but was still palatable to me. To say the least.
“Hello to you too.” I made myself smile despite the reason for the visit. And I reminded my dick that this visit was not to take Calliope Derrick to bed. Not with what I suspected she was involved in.
Calliope gripped the door like her life depended on it and presented me with a scowl that I guessed had scared a hundred men before me.
It didn’t scare me. Not in the slightest. It amused me, and it made my dick as hard as a rock. I forced myself to ignore my baser instincts.
“If you’re here to collect on our bargain, I agreed to a dinner, not a booty call,” she said through her teeth.
The mere idea of a booty call with her, despite it never having been something I’d practiced, made my already stiff cock twitch.
I’d push through the door, press her against the wall, claim her mouth, hook her leg around my hip so my denim clad cock pressed through the thin fabric of the leggings she was wearing.
Leggings that showcased long, defined, powerful legs.
Everything about the woman was powerful, even stripped down to her barest form without the clothing that she wore like armor, the makeup she used as a mask.
I wanted to be the one person she relinquished her power to. A need that was selfish and hedonistic. Which wasn’t why I was here.
Focus.
“I have things to do, so you want to keep drooling over something you’ll never taste, or do you want to go home to your little shack, far away from me?”
I blinked myself out of my stupor, realizing I had in fact been leering at her like a slack-jawed teenager, unable to control my hormones.
As my gaze travelled to her narrowed eyes, I had to resist the urge to adjust myself.
Baseball , I chanted to my cock. Dead fish. My ex-sister-in-law’s bruised face.
“Clara’s mother turned up out of the blue a few days ago.” It took effort, but I was somehow able to keep my voice flat.
Her expression didn’t change. Not in the slightest. I didn’t expect it to. I knew she’d have a poker face to rival the professionals making millions in Vegas.
“She’s a match for Clara. We’re hoping to schedule the transplant for as soon as next week,” I continued, watching her carefully.
Not so much as an eyebrow twitch, a quiver of her full lip. She didn’t shift her weight, just kept hold of the door, looking at me like I was doing her a great inconvenience by being there.
“I’m happy to hear that.” Her reply was terse, not a smile or sense of joy to match her words.
On face value, she might’ve come across as entirely unfeeling, cruel even.
But I had done my research on Calliope Derrick, which wasn’t hard in a small town such as ours where she made a splash with just her presence.
Despite her outward appearance, she was more often than not with her family, her nieces and nephews, friend’s children.
She came from a high paying job in New York, and what I could only assume was a busy, glamorous life to a small town in Maine, where she babysat for free and helped out people she’d just met.
I could only guess that she was running from something, that something had happened in New York to bring her here.
Again, something I’d given far too much thought to, and had promised myself I’d get to the bottom of this once the Naomi mystery was taken care of.
I’d be making Calliope Derrick my business—if she was the good person I suspected her to be.
“Suspicious timing.” I didn’t break eye contact, searching her onyx eyes for the truth. “That she’d arrive within days of our conversation.”
Calliope shrugged. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”
“You don’t believe in the Lord,” I reminded her of our previous conversation that had amused me to no end.
Her stare could’ve been a diamond, steely, hard. Precious. “The devil, then.” Her lips curved into a sly smile that didn’t reach her eyes. I felt the need, the urge, to be the cause of a genuine smile for this woman, to take the weight of the world from her shoulders.
“Or the work of a woman who is trying to act as if she doesn’t care about anything but will go to strange lengths for a stranger.” I verbalized what I’d been stewing on for days.
“You read too many fairy tales, Elliot Shaw.” She kept hold of the door, unblinking, but I swore I detected a chink in her armor. “And you’ve got too much faith in people if you think that’s anything but a coincidence.”
She tried to close the door in my face, but I’d been waiting for that since the moment she opened it.
My boot caught it, and I gripped it, pushing it back open.
Her eyes flared in fury and her body visibly stiffened as if she was about to square off with me.
I didn’t miss the flicker of fear in her eyes, though hidden quickly, betraying something else about her.
That she understood she had to fear men.
That there might’ve even been a tangible, personal reason for that.
Anger, rage, built in my body at the sheer thought that someone might have hurt this woman.
I was not a wrathful man, but I instantly wanted to tear apart anyone who dared hurt her.
“Do I need to call the police to get you removed from my property?” she asked curtly.
“Do you want me removed?” I challenged, forcing my fervor down. “Or are you scared I found you out?”
My words had their intended effect.
Her lips parted on a gasp, her eyes thinning to slits. “To insinuate that I’m scared of a small-town fisherman is laughable.”
My cock pressed against the zipper of my jeans again. The way she insulted me somehow turned me on. “It’s just the truth you’re afraid of, then.”
She tilted her head, studying me with a shrewd intensity I didn’t just feel in my cock. I felt it in every atom. “Everyone is afraid of the truth, Elliot.”
Another cock twitch. My name coming out of her mouth was quickly becoming one of the hottest things I’d heard.
“And the truth is, you somehow tracked down my estranged sister-in-law and had her … beaten or scared into submission to come here and save her daughter’s life.” I didn’t bother masking my emotions, my words harder then.
Because although the gesture in itself was remarkable, the violence I suspected it was orchestrated with unnerved me. Calliope Derrick was dangerous. I’d suspected as much when I first laid eyes on her but not to the extent I was rapidly coming to understand.
Her gaze fluttered just a little at the mention of the violence, and surprise, distaste, maybe even panic, flashed across her expression. Though it all happened quickly, making it hard for me to decipher since I didn’t know her as well as I intended to.
She finally let go of the door to fold her arms across her chest. It was with great difficulty that I didn’t follow the gesture to examine the outline of her tits—no bra.
“Considering what little I know of that woman, I don’t have any sympathy for her getting a little roughed up in order to convince her to do the right thing.” She shrugged. “Call it karma, though a very mild version of it.”
Her words were convincing, and there was plenty of distaste for my sister-in-law that was genuine, but I couldn’t help but think she was as unnerved by the violence as I was.
“So are you going to say you’re just like everyone else?” I questioned. “Afraid of the truth? You’re going to stand here and lie to me?”
I watched her emotions battle on her face …
her lips forming a flat line, the twitch in her ebony gaze, the indentation on her left cheek to suggest she was sinking her teeth into the flesh inside her mouth.
“I have nothing to prove to you,” she replied.
“And I can lie as easily as breathing. Have to people much more important than you.”
I waited, not rising to the bait, not shifting my gaze. A stare off with this woman might’ve been unwise since I sensed she was well practiced and could outlast me, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t leave there without trying my hardest to get to the bottom of it.
She let out an audible exhale. “You know, letting sleeping dogs lie is the best way to avoid getting rabies.”
I smirked at her, surprised and delighted that I’d won this round, though I certainly hadn’t suspected I would.
“I don’t think that is the term. Generally, dogs don’t have rabies.”
She smiled, showing all of her teeth. White, straight, gleaming. “The broken ones don’t, the wild ones do.”
Though I was tired of dancing around the issue, I didn’t get lost in the metaphor, no matter how attractive I found it when Calliope showed her teeth.
“You found Naomi,” I said flatly.
When she didn’t answer right away, I watched her look at me, scrutinize me, calculating her response.
“I didn’t personally,” she conceded. “I called in a favor.”
Though I’d suspected as much, it still hit me the same.
I assumed Calliope Derrick was someone who did not like asking for help.
I wondered what the price of that favor was.
I might’ve been a small-town fisherman, but I understood that the world Calliope lived in was one where nothing was done for free.
I wanted to know what it had cost Calliope. But there was another question that had been burning my insides, apt to cause an ulcer if I didn’t let it out.
“Did you specify use of violence?” No matter how much ill will I wished on Naomi, and there were bad days when I did wish her a lot, I couldn’t condone violence against women.
I watched Calliope’s teeth gnash together and her gaze briefly go far away. In that moment she seemed to shrink. She looked smaller, more vulnerable. I glimpsed a wound, a hint of something that might’ve happened to her, and fuck did it ignite a flame in me.
But as soon as I clocked it, it was gone, her impenetrable mask back in place.
She lifted her chin. “I didn’t specify, but sending a man to do a woman’s job—read any job from changing a toilet paper roll to running the country—usually results in unintended violence.” She lifted a delicate shoulder, her tone sharp. “It doesn’t surprise me.”
She tried to look unbothered, as if casual acts of violence and whatever coercion techniques were employed to bring in Naomi were simple, commonplace.
I had about a million questions. About her life. About her past. About whether she ever felt safe, relaxed. If her jaw ever unclenched. If anything made her happy. But I settled on one for now. The rest could wait.
“Why?”
She softened. Just at the edges, though it could’ve been a trick of the light.
“Anyone in my position would’ve done it.”
I barked out a laugh. “No, they wouldn’t.” It was the truth. I did still think that people were inherently good, that given the opportunity, they would do the right thing.
But Calliope hadn’t been given the opportunity, not even presented with it. She had dug, got dirt under her nails in order to do something that no one else would’ve thought of doing.
And that made me even more endeared to her, captivated by what might be under the surface of the alluring, harsh and complicated woman.
“You did a good deed, Calliope Derrick,” I murmured. “A wonderful thing, in fact. You might’ve saved a life.” I thought of my brother and the certainty I had that if I lost Clara, I would lose him too. “Multiple lives.”
She scowled at me as if the compliment was the most offensive thing anyone had ever said to her.
“Don’t forget the way I went about this so-called good deed,” she replied, ice in her tone.
I had thought I lived in the world of absolutes. Black and white. Good and evil. It was easier that way. I was a simple man. I liked easy.
When I looked at Calliope, she wasn’t in either black or white category. She lived in the gray.
The dark gray.
And yet I was there.
“You gonna say anything else?” She practically spat the question at me. “I’ve got to?—”
I didn’t let her finish. I acted on instinct. Rashly. Taking a risk. Not characteristic of me.
I leaned forward, captured the back of her neck and plastered her lips on mine.