Chapter Three #3
“I’m a fuckin’ monster, baby. You haven’t flinched once, and you know the real me. That man who is capable of killing five men in under a minute. The man who fucks everything that moves and then walks away, uncaring of whatever havoc he wreaks because he laid it out plain. Why trust that man?”
She traced his jaw with the pad of her thumb.
“I realized we were completely incompatible, and I knew you saw it as well. That’s what makes you safe to trust. And me safe for you.
I don’t have to worry you’re going to make a move on me, no matter how flirty you get, or how hard you get.
And you don’t have to worry that I’m going to be clingy and want more of your attention than you want to give. ”
Keys did his best not to react to that statement.
She said it like she believed it. Was totally sincere.
He had believed it as well. That falsehood had allowed him to become friends with her.
To want to be with her. To give one person the real man, not the facade he’d built so carefully to conceal the worthless monster walking dead among the living, rotting from the inside out.
He’d wanted to be seen. He even needed it.
He wanted one person to know him. To validate his existence.
She had done that, and he’d become addicted to her and the feeling of belonging to someone.
“Why do you think we’re not compatible?”
That magical laughter of hers slipped out. It was low, but it was there, sliding over him like the touch of fingers.
“Seriously? You have a type, Keys, you have to know that. You go for women with very abundant curves. Women with tons of experience. You like tall women. You’ve been coming here nearly six months, and in those months, I’ve seen you with them in the bar.
They always are the same or close to it.
You jerk your chin, they leave with you, you come back and don’t ever look at them again.
You treat them as if they’re so far beneath you it’s kind of sickening.
But what’s worse, they always want more.
They follow you around practically begging, but you don’t deign to notice. ”
She was telling an absolute truth about him.
Before, he didn’t give a damn what anyone thought.
He still didn’t, unless it was her. Lyric.
Right in that moment, he didn’t like his sins laid out, not that she was being in the least judgmental.
And that was one of the things he most loved about her.
She wasn’t judgmental. She had never been with him.
Not a single time. She just gave him that amused smirk and intriguing dimple along with a little shake of her head as if she’d reduced his blistering one-night stands to mere antics.
When he would leave the bar after picking up a woman, before he walked out the door, he could never stop himself from scanning the bar to find her.
He found he needed that genuine smile of hers before he fucked something that didn’t want or know him, only the dubious pleasure he provided and the right to say they’d been with him.
She always gave him what he needed. Seeing him.
Seeing what she probably had thought at the time was the worst of him, and she still gave him that smile.
The one she reserved for him. Open. Like sunshine.
He was the darkest night, and she was the brightest day.
She shared that light with him. Only him, and he’d come to count on it.
“Tell me more of your bullshit reasons why we don’t work.”
“They aren’t bull, Keys. It’s all solid evidence. You like yes-women. You say something and you expect the woman to do whatever you tell her, when you tell her. Bossy as hell. Arrogant enough to think you can get away with it.”
“I can,” he agreed.
“There you go. You can when they want something from you. Those women treat you like you’re a…a…”
“Cock,” he supplied.
“Yep,” she agreed. “They don’t treat you like a man. They don’t see the man. They want what you can give them, so they do whatever it takes to persuade you to do that.”
“Kind of like I treat them is what you’re saying. I don’t see the woman, just the available pussy.”
“Exactly, so you can get away with telling them what to do because if they don’t follow what you say to the letter, you dump them and go find someone else. Isn’t that right?”
“Yep.” He wasn’t going to apologize for his lifestyle.
On the other hand, she wasn’t asking him to; she was explaining why they weren’t compatible.
He detested that she thought that, but he could see her skewed reasoning.
He did treat women as fuck toys because that’s what they were to him.
In turn, they treated him the same way, and that allowed him to walk away with no strings to try to hold him down.
He lived free. He rode free. He didn’t live within the accepted society rules and thought most of them were bullshit.
“It’s much more difficult to get a woman to do exactly what you say when you don’t have a hold over her,” she pointed out.
Now she was getting into dangerous territory. Really dangerous. First, she was his whether she knew it or not. He didn’t give a damn that he didn’t know what he was going to do with her. He did know if another man got near her, that man wouldn’t live long.
“Your face is swollen, babe. Eyes have turned black.”
“Are you saying I look like a raccoon?”
“Not a good look. Makes me want to backtrack and burn those bodies all over again.”
He felt the puff of heat on his chest as she gave an unladylike snort. “It stunk. I don’t think I’ll ever eat meat again.”
Bog, but she was beat-up, her body black-and-blue.
Even her breasts. Those bastards had put her through so much.
His club would come for them, and they wouldn’t come alone.
The Trinity chapter was close. They could and would take down the Headed for Hell club just for what they’d done to Lyric.
If he named her his old lady, claimed her for his own, there wouldn’t be any question.
They all knew the Headed for Hell club was dirty.
Every one of them. They might keep a low profile, but they were using the mountains to run their products.
Keys and Destroyer were the kind of men a club would recruit, but there wasn’t a single bite.
That meant the club had locked their shit down tight because there was a reason.
Czar had pulled them when he could see it was a waste of time to leave valuable resources in play when they weren’t getting anywhere.
Keys needed distraction from his thoughts. He needed to know every one of Lyric’s objections to their merger. “Keep going with your reasons you believe we aren’t compatible, even though we spend every fuckin’ day together and know more about each other than anyone else.”
She was silent for a long moment. The fire crackled and popped. He needed to lay their clothes out to get them dry, but he was too comfortable with Lyric lying on top of him. He wanted to know what she was thinking, but after that brief hesitation, she resumed her bullshit list.
“Did you know that statistics show that a tall man and a short woman will rarely stay together? He gets tired of always bending down. Hurts his back and neck. She gets tired of always standing on her toes. Just doesn’t work.”
“Where the hell did you read that shit?”
“Internet. You can find all kinds of obscure data on the internet. You’re nearly a foot taller than me…”
“Nearly? Even when you wore those ridiculous heels to the bar that one night, I was over a foot taller.”
“My point.”
She was beginning to thaw. Their skin-to-skin was not only heating her but scorching him. Keys did his best to ignore his body’s reaction.