Ryker #2
He stands there waiting for me to go with him, and I keep hearing “Alice” in my head. It hurts. I’m rarely wounded, but I’m half cowering against the wall with an icy numbness sweeping through my veins. I claw at the bricks, blunting my nails and scraping the skin of my fingertips.
I could hurt Freddie back. The thought thaws my blood.
Yes, I could go with Nathaniel, brush past Freddie on my way back into the bar.
Freddie would think I’d gone in there to fuck him, that this—whatever just happened between the three of us—didn’t mean anything to me and I can carry on with my plan to partake in casual sex in The Fox and Hound toilets.
Although I won’t look at Freddie, his gaze is on me. He’s waiting to see what I’m going to do.
“Don’t.”
I snap my gaze to Liam who’s regained control of his face. He reads me like a book and knows I’m contemplating lashing out and hurting Freddie after he hurt me. I have no desire to go through with sex with Nathanial, but I do have a savage desire to get even with the man who hurt me.
I turn my back on Nathaniel, and he gets the hint. He leaves.
There’s another long, awkward silence that I don’t feel compelled to break. I think Freddie’s going to slink off under Liam’s glare, but my brother surprises me by saying, “We need to talk.”
“Not . . . not tonight,” Freddie replies.
Liam doesn’t push it.
I know Freddie’s gone when Liam’s arm falls limp at his side.
The whole time his hand had been pressed to his handcuffs like he was considering kidnapping Freddie and throwing him into the back of his car.
A few minutes pass, a long enough time that Freddie will be gone and won’t be visible from the mouth of the alley, whichever way he left.
“Let’s go,” Liam says, and I wordlessly follow him out of the alley, down the road, then around the corner to where he parked his car on double yellow lines.
I don’t need to ask. I messaged him saying something was up with Freddie and gave him our location, and Liam reacted the way I knew he would, like it was an emergency and fuck the law, despite being a serving member of said authority.
We climb inside, and he hands me a few tissues to wipe my hand.
“He didn’t mean it,” Liam says.
I clean between my fingers. “Huh?”
“When he shouted that name. He didn’t mean it. It was all you, Ryker.”
“It was all us,” I correct, then drop my voice to a ghosting whisper. “I know . . .”
There’s was no way Freddie had been thinking of her with Liam’s and my muscular bodies smothering him, our hard dicks rubbing against his body, and my firm hand pulling an orgasm from his cock.
He called out her name because he knew how badly I wanted him to scream mine.
He did it to hurt me. What he said is true.
He actually hates me. And that hurts worst of all.
He really, truly hates me, and he wants me to know.
“He doesn’t.”
“Fuck,” I shake my head. “Stop reading my mind.”
“Stop showing it on your face.” Liam starts the car but doesn’t pull away.
“Freddie is angry, yes. He hated us in the moment, yes. But he doesn’t hate us.
He doesn’t hate you.” He looks away from me and nods like he’s confirming something.
“We’re going to sort this—we have to sort this.
He . . . he wanted us, Ryker, and it may only have been for a moment, but we can work with a moment.
A moment can be the start of something . . . something magical.”
I chuckle wetly. It takes Liam lowering his guard for me to feel more like myself again. “I think that’s the most you’ve said in one go all year.”
Liam scowls and I laugh, already feeling lighter. But all too soon I’m frowning as I think back and analyse the finer details.
Why did Freddie have his rucksack?
Why was he out drinking on a Monday when he has work the next day?
Why was he entertaining Alice and not Keegan?
“There was a domestic dispute outside Freddie’s house earlier,” Liam says.
“What?”
“Freddie smashed Keegan’s brother’s windscreen with a vase.”
That doesn’t sound like Freddie. That doesn’t sound like him at all.
I shift so I can pull my phone from my pocket, then I’m tapping away, asking vague questions to gossiping people. My popularity means people are eager to help. I hit gold with Keegan’s best friend Mel.
They broke up x
Liam drives as I go back and forth, messaging Mel. Information in bits and pieces isn’t his style; he needs it all together, so I gather as much as I can. When we arrive home, I have enough to deliver to him even if the details are lacking.
“He and Keegan broke up today. She said he came home from work unexpectedly and found Keegan with the stepbrother in bed. She said she’s known for a while there was something between them, but Keegan swore she’d stop.
Freddie smashed his car, then left, but she doesn’t know where he’s staying.
” I sigh. “I’ve asked around, but no one has seen him. ”
Liam clenches his jaw and looks past me to the house. “Not with us,” he replies, and that’s all that really matters.
Freddie didn’t reach out to us.
I close my eyes. “We’ve pushed him too far away.”
“No. Not too far. Never too far. We can still pull him back,” Liam says through his teeth. In the darkness of the car, I can still see the shine to his eyes. “And once we’ve got him, we’re never letting him go.”