Isabel is awake again; the hours tick by as she keeps glancing nervously at the front door, waiting for it to open, waiting for Wesley to come back. She wonders if it will always be like this with them, if she will always have this knot of dread in the pit of her stomach.
He’s later than normal. It’s already past 2.two-thirty and there’s still no sign of him. She’s picked up her cell any number of times but so far she has managed to refrain from calling him. What would she say if he picked up? “I just wanted to hear the sound of your voice,” or maybe “I just wanted to check that you were still alive!” Either way she would feel like an idiot, but that is preferable to the paralyzing fear that she’s found herself gripped in.
Just as she picks her cell up again, deciding that this time she will make the call, she hears the sound of a key in the door. She springs out of her seat and hurries to the entrance hall, overpowered by the strongest need to see him. She barrels into him, throwing her arms around him and he grunts at the impact, but his hands snake around her, holding her back just as tightly.
“I told you I’d be careful.” He murmurs the words against her ear, stroking her hair, without releasing her from his grip.
Isabel nods, feeling too choked up with tears to say anything. Tonight has been the worst so far; she tries to put it down to the fact that the encounter with her friendly neighborhood stalker had put her on edge, but it is more than that. She’d had a bad feeling about where Wes was all night.
Gently, he disengages her from him, holding her out in front of him so he can see her. She ducks her head so he doesn’t see the single tear of relief slide down her cheek, but she’s not quick enough.
“Hey.” He chases the tear with his mouth, kissing its path down her cheek. “You must really have been hoping I wasn’t going to make it!” He smiles at her wryly as she balls her fist and punches him in the arm. He grunts at the impact. “Anyone ever tell you you’ve got a helluva right hook, Bel?” He shakes his head. “You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?”
Isabel throws him a withering look that does nothing to wipe the smile off his face and she finds herself responding with a goofy smile of her own. She shakes her head, clearing her thoughts and getting back down to business. She does a quick visual inventory of him. All things considered, she’s seen him in much worse shape. His hands needed attention, though.
“Come into the kitchen. I need to clean those before I wrap them. I’m assuming not all of that blood is yours.” She motions towards his red-stained knuckles. The shrug he gives her tells her all she needs to know.
Isabel sits down opposite him and, just like always, he watches her intently as she goes to work. Once she’s cleaned off the blood, she can see that his knuckles are just badly scraped; the bruising will come later. Other than that, he doesn’t have a scratch on him. But from the state of his hands and the knowledge that the majority of the blood isn’t his and the blood spatters on his shirt, it’s not hard to imagine that the person on the receiving end didn’t walk away with such superficial injuries.
For the first time, she feels the urgent need to know. It’s more than just idle curiosity. The man sitting in front of her, the man she shares a bed with, seems to be a totally different beast to the one who beats up other men for money. He’d called himself an enforcer, but how can he separate himself into the kind and tender man she knows him to be and the killing machine she’s only seen a glimpse of?
“Where were you tonight?” She concentrates on his hands, not looking at him, knowing she won’t want to see his face when he tells his story.
“You don’t want to know.” It is the way that Wesley has fobbed her off before whenever she’s gotten up the courage to ask. She always lets it go, secure in the knowledge that he was right, that she really didn’t want those images of him in her head, beating some guy into submission. But this time it is different.
“You’re right, I probably don’t want to know. But I need to.” She looks him in the eyes, so he can see just how serious she is. “If I’m going to keep patching you up, night after night, if I’m going to have to watch you walk out that door night after night, I need to know, Wes. Please.”
She watches as the stubbornness leaks out of his expression. His features relax and his shoulders slump a little in resignation. He mumbles something she doesn’t hear.
“What?” She leans closer to him, careful to keep her focus on wrapping his hands.
“I said, ‘I don’t want you to look at me differently.’”
The vulnerability in his voice makes her heart ache, but she doesn’t look at him. She knows he wouldn’t want her to see him laid bare like this. It’s hard enough for him to say the words out loud.
“Nothing you could say could make me feel differently about you.” Isabel bites her lip, knowing this is the closest she’s gotten to telling Wesley how she feels about him.
They sit in silence, Isabel barely breathing, hoping she’s said enough for him to confide in her.
“We were down by the docks.” He starts without preamble, speaking low and quiet as if he doesn’t really want to be reminded of what he’s done. “That’s Devil Dogs’ territory. But there’s another gang, the ‘Bleeding Hearts,’ that has been trying to muscle in on the drug trade the Dogs have going on with the ships. The Dogs don’t share and they don’t back down from a fight.”
“That’s where you come in.” Isabel keeps her voice muted, not wanting to interrupt him.
He nods tightly and she can see how hard it is for him to tell the story. It’s as if he can’t quite relate the man he turns into when he’s called to fight with the man he is. He was a Marine; he’s been trained to kill. It is in his blood. But the guilt that had driven him out of the Corps must have changed him. You don’t walk away from something like that without carrying more than just the physical scars.
“Yeah, that’s where I come in.” He shrugs, uncomfortably. “I jumped a couple of the Bleeding Hearts when they were about to make a deal with one of the boat captains. They won’t be doing business together again.”
“What did you do to them?” For some reason, Isabel feels like she needs all the details, all of the facts, laid out in front of her.
“Do you really want to know?” The look on her face tells him she really does. “I dislocated one guy’s shoulder, broke his leg, and he probably won’t be seeing too well out of one eye for a while. The other guy, I twisted his knee, broke a few ribs, messed up his face pretty well. It wasn’t like he was going to win any beauty contests before I touched him, anyway. The captain, he got let off with a warning, so I just roughed him up a little, made sure he knew he was lucky to be getting off so lightly when he was dealing behind the back of the Dogs.” He says it all so flatly, as if it is the most normal thing in the world to talk about the horrific injuries he’d inflicted on three men only a few hours before.
“So it was you against the three of them?” Wes nods. “Is it always just you?” He nods again. “Don’t they ever have weapons? I’m guessing bikers aren’t above carrying knives or God knows what else!” The thought turns Isabel’s mouth to sand. It’s bad enough having to imagine Wesley fighting with his bare hands, let alone being up against armed adversaries.
As if he senses her thoughts, Wesley leans closer and lays his hand on her bare thigh, reassuring her with his touch. “I’ve been trained for this, Bel. It’s what I’m good at.”
“It’s not the only thing you’re good at, Wes. You’re not just some mindless fighting machine!” Isabel turns away from him, busying herself with tidying up the first aid kit.
“It’s all I know, Isabel. It’s who I am.” There’s an edge to Wes’s voice, as if her obvious disapproval of what he does has irked him.
But Isabel is too emotional to care. She whirls around to face him. “No, Wes. It’s what you do, not who you are. There’s a difference. You can be anything you want to be. Don’t you see that? You have so much talent, so much potential. You don’t need the Dogs. You don’t need any of them.”
Wes shakes his head, a bitter smile twisting his beautiful mouth. “Are you talking to me or to yourself, Bel? At least I know who I am.” He beats his fist against his chest to emphasize the point.
“What and I don’t?” Anger flashes in her eyes, anger that he would go on the offensive just because she was trying to have a real conversation with him.
“You’re the one with six years of education that you’re about to throw down the tube because you’re scared, so don’t give me the ‘be all you can be’ speech!” He stands toe to toe with her, filling up the room with his presence just like he always does.
Isabel is reeling that he would strike such a low blow, especially when he knows how much her mother’s death had affected her. She had shared her deepest feelings in confidence with him and she can’t help but feel like he’s throwing that trust back in her face. Rationally, she knows he’s just reacting without really thinking about what he’s saying, but the attack still hurts.
Reading her mind again, he sighs deeply, rubbing his hands up and down his face, clearly exhausted. “I don’t want to fight with you, Bel. That’s the last thing I want.” He takes her hand and she lets him pull her to him.
She lays her head on his chest and listens to his heartbeat, feeling calmed just by being in his arms. “Let’s go to bed.” She has no desire to argue with Wesley and bed seems to be the only place where they don’t fight.
A noise at the back of the house, on the porch brings all the tension back into Wesley’s body and she feels him stiffen against her.
“Don’t get too excited, Wes. It’s just Jeffrey.” Isabel extricates herself from him, grabbing a can of food she’d bought at the market that day.
“Jeffrey?” He eyes her narrowly. “You named the cat.”
Isabel shrugs. “Well why not? The cat needed a name and Jeffrey is as good a name as any.”
Wesley chuckles warmly and she thinks how much she loves the dark chocolate of his eyes when he laughs. “You pretend you’re all serious and ‘don’t fuck with me, I can take care of myself.’” He does a pretty poor impression of her and she raises a warning eyebrow at him. “But really you’re just a big softie.”
“Well, this big softie is going to feed the cat.” She throws him a pointed look over her shoulder before unlocking and heading out of the porch door. “Here, Jeffrey, here kitty-cat. Food’s up.” She peers out into the gloom of the night, straining to hear the mewling cat. Out of the corner of her eye she catches movement, but it’s too big to be a cat. Realization hits her too late and she only has time to let out a quick yelp before a beefy hand has covered her mouth and she can feel the prick of steel at her throat.
“Told you I’d be seeing you, pretty girl.”
She recognizes the voice instantly and it sends a shiver down her spine. She struggles but he has one hand firmly clamped down over her mouth and nose, virtually cutting off her oxygen supply and the other is holding her tight against him, too tight for her to throw out an elbow or kick out. He pulls her in even tighter, so there’s no way she can’t feel his erection digging into her back. The awareness of his excitement makes her try to get away even harder. She tries to scream but it comes out more like a moan and she wriggles against him, trying to get free.