Chapter 16

Riley

Jax rose from my desk and held the top rung of the chair, his grip so tight the scars on his knuckles flashed white against his skin. My journal was open beside him. The medical records beside it.

God, I’d come back here to talk to him about what Veronica had told me. To be mature and talk to him about what I’d started feeling for him, and this was what I walked in on? Him snooping in my things, touching and reading, and, god, it gave me the shivers.

“How could you?” I asked. “Who gave you the right to go through my things?”

“No one,” he replied. “I wasn’t going through them. I was looking for your address book. Fuck, I don’t need to make excuses for this.”

“Get out,” I said, my arms trembling. I smoothed my hands over the baby blue cocktail dress I’d chosen for tonight, feeling the soft fabric beneath my fingers, trying for a semblance of control. It was all I had left.

“No,” he replied and tapped his fingers on the back of the chair. He shoved it out of his path, and it toppled over, hit the floor. He strode toward me. I flinched, but he kept on coming. “I’m not leaving, and neither are you. What the fuck did I just read, Riley? A baby? Insemination? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Why didn’t I? We’ve known each other a week!” I screeched, my sense of calm fraying at last. “A week! And you haven’t exactly been open and honest with me. Oh yeah, you pushed me for more information about myself, but you told me absolutely nothing about where you were at.”

“Pushed you?” Jax stood in front of me, not touching me, but looking down on me. This was what he did. It was his power play, standing tall like this.

I refused to crane my neck. “Yeah, pushed me. Why were you squeezing me for information like that?” And now I’d found him snooping in my private business. “This is too much. It’s been what, ten days? Ten days? I don’t even know you. I should just leave.” Veronica had insisted I sleep on her couch. She wouldn’t take no for an answer, and for once, I could see the sense in it.

“No,” Jax said and grabbed my wrist. “You’re not moving a fucking inch until we talk about this.”

“What’s there to talk about? You’re an ex-con, and you’re snooping in my shit. I don’t know you, and it’s time for me to leave. That about sums it up, doesn’t it?”

“No, it fucking doesn’t.” His cologne, lemony and sharp today, suffused the space around us. It choked me because I didn’t want to let it in. “You want to know all about me, Riley? You want to know my sad sob story? I don’t talk about that shit because it’s weak. Because it doesn’t have any bearing on who I am today or how far I’ve come.”

“Oh, so I’m weak?”

“What kind of woman magic brought you to that conclusion?” he asked.

“I spoke about my shit to you. That makes me weak by your reckoning,” I snapped.

“This isn’t just about you.” His grip on my wrist tightened. It wasn’t painful, just firm, and I despised myself for letting him keep it. Even now, his touch brought me to life. “It’s about both of us now. You want the truth, I’ll give it to you.”

Quiet. A beat passed.

“So?” I asked. “What’s the truth, huh?” I didn’t want to think about the details Veronica had given me.

Jax ground his teeth against each other. He walked me out of the bedroom, down the hall, into the living room that looked out on the night sky, then sat me down on the sofa. He stood in front of me.

“You want to know about me, that’s fine, but I’m doing it on one condition,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“That you don’t go fucking anywhere afterward. You gotta promise me that, Riley, because I’m not letting go of you now. I’m too…” He pressed a palm to his forehead. It was the first time I’d seen him anxious. “I’m just not letting you go. That’s final.”

“You don’t get to stop me if I want to leave.” I folded my arms across my chest, constricted now by the tightness of the dress. God, I’d wanted to look amazing for him. I’d put on makeup—I hardly ever did that—and I’d worn heels. I’d even put on a pair of lacy underwear.

In short, I was an idiot, dressing up for a man I barely knew because of some squirmy emotions in the pit of my stomach.

It’s more than that, and you know it.

Jax shifted the books on the coffee table aside then sat down on it, balanced his strong forearms on his knees. The front of his shirt flapped open a little, revealing more of those tattoos that fascinated me. Monsters and angels, a cupid here, a heart there. Thorns.

“You’re not leaving,” he said, as if that decided it.

I didn’t reply.

“My mother died when I was fifteen years old,” he said. “I didn’t know my father. Veronica was five. She didn’t understand what was happening at the time, but there was a custody battle over us. My grandmother wanted us. My uncle did too. My uncle wanted us because he thought there’d be a payout at the time. I went with my uncle. She went with my grandmother.”

“How does that even happen? Why didn’t you two stay together?”

“They believed I was a danger to my sister,” he replied. “There was an incident a couple months before my mother died. My sister and I were in the back garden, and she fell, broke her arm. She told everyone I’d hurt her. The judge decided it was in our best interests to be separated.”

“That’s bull,” I replied. “Veronica wouldn’t lie about who’d hurt her.”

“She was five, Riley. She told a little white lie because she was afraid of getting in trouble. She took it back later, but by then it was too late. Everyone thought I’d gotten to her and made her take it back. They didn’t trust me. She didn’t understand why were separated. No one told her. She just thought her big brother left and didn’t come back.”

Listening to this impartially was impossible for me. I loved Veronica like a sister, and she’d been downright distraught when I’d suggested I had to come back here and talk to Jax about this.

“What happened after you were separated?”

“I lived with my aunt and uncle. Hated them. With all my guts. Fuckers. Uncle was abusive to my aunt, but she never left him. I ran away.” He forced each of the sentences out as if he had to peel back layers to reach them. “They brought me back. It happened several times until I was eighteen years old. By that time I’d filled out. My uncle tried to force me to come home, and I punched him in the fucking face. It was the final straw. I was sent to prison. You see, I’d spent most of my childhood on the street, stealing shit for a living, making unsavory connections, and the cops were already aware of me. I was tried as an adult for aggravated assault. I served three years. Probation for two.”

I swallowed hard. “That had to be difficult.”

Jax dropped his head as if the weight of the world had just settled on his neck. “You have no idea. I came out and had nowhere to go except back to my dick uncle’s place. Grant took me in despite what’d happened, because he believed I’d learned my lesson. He offered me a job at his strip club.”

“What?”

Jax chuckled and raised his head, speared me with those sharp blue eyes. “Not as a stripper. As a bouncer. I started learning, adapting. I took an interest in the business side of things. My uncle passed when I was twenty-six, and to my fucking unending surprise he left me the club.”

“But you hit him,” I said.

“He comes from old stock. It was either leave the club to me or leave it to my aunt Brenda, and that was out of the question because she’s a woman, and he viewed women as weak. Lesser.”

I pursed my lips.

“I don’t.” He touched two fingers to my knee. I didn’t move away. “So, he left me the club, and I expanded. I used what my mother had left me and what he had and created an empire. I reached out to Bane, my buddy at the club—he had some financial backing from his parents—and we decided that we’d own Miami. Then Florida. Then the States. Then the fucking world. And that’s exactly what we’re doing. What I was doing until last week.”

“Last week?”

“Yeah, until I met you, Riley,” he said. “You’ve screwed up everything for me. I can’t think straight with you around.”

His tone was so gentle, so sweet. I leaned in slightly. “I’m sorry about tonight. I didn’t realize it would go that way,” I said, “but it’s not OK that you went through my things.”

“I was trying to find you,” he growled. “I’m not going to make excuses for wanting to find the woman I—You’re mine, Riley. Mine.”

“I’m not a building, Jax. You can’t buy me or claim me. I’m a person. And I have my own life and my own plans. I—look, maybe it’s better if I just leave before things get too complicated here,” I said. “I appreciate you telling me all of this, but I shouldn’t have asked. I—we don’t owe each other anything.” I got up.

“We do.” Jax rose too, looped his arms around me, and pressed his palms to my upper back. “We owe each other everything.”

I studied the curve of his bottom lip, the crook in his nose, the roughness of his beard. He didn’t just smell of cologne, but of him. Of his own illusive manliness, as silly as it seemed, and I was addicted to that more than any other part of him. “Why?” I asked.

“You know why, by now,” he replied. “This is more than just two fucks and you’re out.”

I sucked on my bottom lip. “Stop. I can’t take thinking about it. I—”

“You’re afraid,” he replied. “And you don’t need to be afraid of me, Riley. I’ll never fucking hurt you. I’ll protect you from all the pain in the damn world.”

“Like you did with Veronica? You never contacted her. You never cared about her and that’s a big deal. I get having problems with family, believe me, but—”

“I tried. I tried calling her and talking to her, but she shut me out.”

Why?”

He shook his head, jammed his lips together. Jax wouldn’t talk about what he felt. He was like me in that sense. He didn’t want to believe that any of this was real, but he wanted it nevertheless.

“Jax.”

His lips eclipsed everything in my view. I was fixated on them. They brushed mine, and I squeezed my eyes shut, melted into him. How could I want this man after everything that’d happened? And after everything that hadn’t?

Ten days.

Two nights together.

And now this.

He licked my top lip, softly. “You’ll always be mine, Riley. I’m not going to let you walk away from this without a fight.”

“If it’s a fight you’re looking for…” I trailed off and kissed him back, bit his bottom lip.

To hell with the past and the future. There was only tonight, and in it, he was all I needed.

Jax’s fingers worked the zipper on the back of my dress, pulled it down. He kissed my lips, my cheek, my throat, my collarbone, all the way down to the straps, then slipped his fingers underneath each of them and pulled them to the sides.

The dress fell free, and I stepped out of it, still in heels, naked except for my lacy panties.

One more time. That’s all. One more time. I’ll figure it out in the morning.