Chapter 17 Reva #2
I look away first, out past the fence line into the dark. “Then add this to your notes, Nash. I asked for help. You told me no. I got the message. Now I’m done here. Where I stand, things are perfectly clear.”
He comes to the edge of the pool, close enough that I can see the darker navy surrounding the brighter blue of his eyes.
“You got part of it, maybe.”
I roll my eyes. “Then how bout you finish the sentence.”
His gaze drops to the waterline where it skims my chest. He doesn’t linger long, but he doesn’t pretend not to look, either. Heat rises under my skin before I can stop it.
“Get out of the pool,” he says.
I blink at him. “What?”
“Now.”
The word is low and even, not loud, but it lands with more force than if he’d barked it.
I open my mouth to push back, and he reaches down, snatches up the towel from the chair, and snaps it open with both hands.
It’s the holding it open that gets me. He doesn’t toss it, but holds it. Waiting.
The move is so unexpectedly practical—and so annoyingly intimate—I go still.
He glances at the duffel at his side. “You can glare at me after. I might spank your ass for it, but you can glare.”
I hate that a laugh almost comes out.
I hate it more that my nipples tighten in the water, and he definitely notices. Nash has to be close to forty. He’s old enough to be my father, damn him.
It’s absolutely the cold, and not the authority in his voice and every line of his voice, that’s making my nipples tighten and liquid curl between my legs.
I push off from the wall and wade to the steps slowly, aware of every scant inch of wet fabric clinging to me. The patio air hits my skin. I climb out with water streaming down my stomach and thighs and stop just short of him.
He doesn’t move back. His gaze travels down my body, lingering on the areas where the water has left my underwear wet and essentially transparent. Then he lifts his gaze to my face.
“You don’t know what you’re playing with, baby girl.”
He holds the towel open, arms braced, gaze on my face now with all that dangerous discipline that makes me wonder what he’d do if I leaned in the wrong direction.
For one insane second I think about testing it.
Instead, I step forward, right into the towel. Right into his space.
His knuckles brush my shoulder as he wraps it around me, not accidental enough to ignore. Heat flashes through me, sharp and low. He smells like soap, clean cotton, and something darker under both—male and warm and impossible to separate from the memory of him in that office.
My breath catches. I hate that too.
He feels it. I know he does.
His voice drops, close enough to rough my ear. “You’re shaking.”
I yank the towel tighter around myself and look up at him. “I would say I’m cold but we both know I’m furious.”
“One doesn’t cancel the other out, you know.”
He steps back then, just enough to put air between us, and the loss of heat makes me instantly meaner.
“Start talking,” I say.
His gaze cuts once more to the duffel on the chair, then back to me. “You leave tonight, alone, with half a plan and a target on your back, and best case you make it to sunrise without anyone noticing. Worst case, somebody notices first.”
“Somebody meaning Deacon.”
“Deacon,” he says. Then his jaw shifts. “And maybe not just him.”
The words pull me up short.
“What does that mean?”
He looks toward the dark beyond the fence as if he’s checking the tree line for things I can’t see. When he looks back at me, his expression has gone flatter, harder.
“It means you haven’t been very careful. You may have kicked up a hornet’s nest you don’t know exists, just by coming here and asking questions you shouldn’t be asking.”
The night goes very still around us.
I swallow and hate that he sees it. “That’s vague on purpose.”
“That’s as specific as I’m willing to be tonight.”
“Convenient.”
“Protective.”
I let out a short, disbelieving laugh and hitch the towel tighter over my chest. “This isn’t protection. This is control.”
“That, too.”
No shame. No denial. Just the simple admission that I’m not wrong.
He steps closer, close enough that I have to tilt my chin to keep eye contact.
“You think I’m only worried about Deacon.
” His voice stays low. “I’m worried about what follows a name like his.
Men. Debts. Old loyalties and enough blood to drown a city.
The kind of things that don’t care whether you understand them before they close around your throat and end your pretty little life. ”
A chill snakes down my spine despite the heat.
I hear the truth in that too, and it makes me angrier because truth is harder to fight than arrogance.
“So what,” I say, “you’re locking me in my room now, Dad?”
His eyes flick to the duffel again, then to my face. “I’m taking your keys so you can’t run.”
My hand jerks toward the towel on reflex, toward the pocket that isn’t there. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am.”
I stare at him. “That’s insane.”
“That’s ensuring your survival.”
“You don’t get to decide that for me.”
“No,” he says evenly. “I get to decide what happens under my roof, on my property, and with the woman who just painted a target on herself in my bar.”
The words hit me in a rush—the woman—not employee, not guest, not problem. I don’t know whether to be more offended or more aware of how my pulse kicks at the way he says it.
I decide to go with offended. It’s a hell of a lot safer than anything else I’m feeling.
“You don’t own me.”
His gaze drops once, slow, to where the towel gapes at my throat and then returns to my eyes. “Not yet.”
I don’t have an answer for that. I’m too busy trying to remember how to breathe.
He reaches past me toward the chair. I turn with him, towel clutched shut, and watch him pick up the duffel by the straps like it weighs nothing. He sets it farther back from the pool, out of immediate reach, then extends his hand.
“Keys.”
I laugh in his face. “Absolutely not.”
His hand stays out.
“Reva.”
The way he says my name should be illegal.
“House rules,” he says. “You want to stay in my house, keep your room, keep your job, eat my food, and breathe long enough to hate me for it, then this is how it works.”
I grit my teeth. “Let’s hear your precious rules.”
He lowers his hand but doesn’t step away.
“Your keys stay with me at night.” He ticks them off calmly, like he’s discussing weather and not stripping me down to terms. “You don’t leave this property after dark without one of us.
You don’t go into town alone unless we tell you that you can.
If you leave during the day, one of us knows where you’re going and when you’re expected back. ”
I open my mouth.
He keeps going.
“You do not ask my staff about Deacon, hired men, or anything connected to either one. You don’t wander this property after midnight. You lock your bedroom door. You answer when one of us knocks. If you don’t, we’ll remove the door entirely.”
Every line lands like a latch sliding into place.
“This is a prison.”
“No,” he says. “Prisoners don’t get to leave at all.”
He nods toward the house. “You can leave under the stipulations that I gave you. They’re all meant to keep you alive, even if you disagree.
You have no idea the world that you’ve stepped into, Reva.
Ever, Shiloh, and I? We live here. We’ve bathed in the blood of the city and walked away.
You wouldn’t be that lucky. But if you want to go? You want to try to leave? Go ahead.”
I stare at him.
We both know he left out the part where they’d follow me and force me back to the house kicking and screaming.
I let that ride for now. I’m busy trying not to shake.
“And if I stay?” I ask.
His eyes hold mine. “Then you follow the rules until I know what came awake when you started asking questions.”
The phrasing sends a fresh chill through me.
I hate that some tired, ugly little piece of me loosens at it too.
Protection, my brain whispers, treacherous as hell. Structure. Someone paying attention.
Fuck that. Fuck all of this shit.
I straighten under the towel, trying to gather whatever dignity I can with wet hair dripping down my spine and my bra still soaking through cotton. “You make it sound like you’re doing me a favor.”
He steps in once more, close enough that the air changes.
“Call it whatever helps you sleep at night.”
My breath catches. His gaze drops to my mouth, then lower, to the pulse in my throat. He doesn’t touch me, but the space between us feels crowded with phantom contact.
“Keys, Reva.”
It comes out rougher this time.
I should tell him to go to hell.
I should throw the towel in his face, grab the duffel, and prove him wrong out of spite.
Instead I stand there fighting my own body and my own fear and the fact that he might be right about things I can’t even see yet.
Very slowly, I slip one hand in the duffel bag and fish my keys out from where I tucked them, and slap them into his palm. The contact is brief.
Electric.
His fingers close over mine for one beat too long before he takes the keys fully.
“There,” I snap, yanking my hand back. “Happy?”
“No.”
That answer surprises me enough I look up.
He’s watching me with that same dark, controlled stare, but something in it has shifted—less command, more grim resolve. Like he didn’t want this job and took it anyway.
Fuck my life.
He hooks my keys on one finger and glances toward the door. “Get inside. Dry off. Lock your door.”
I lift my chin. “Or what?”
His eyes move over me once, deliberate and hot enough to make my skin tighten under the towel.
“Or you’ll learn exactly why I told you you’re not safe with me.”
He turns and walks toward the house, duffel in one hand, my keys in the other, like he’s carrying off pieces of me he has no right to touch.
I stand on the patio in wet underwear and a towel, furious and humiliated and far too aware of the way my body is still answering him.
He won’t help me kill Deacon.
He won’t let me leave.
Somehow, in the span of five minutes, he’s taken my keys, my bag, and any illusion that I was in control of anything that happens next.
And I’m shaking with relief that he did so.