Chapter 12
Two important things happened the next day. First, Nala finished her script. Second, Vincent made some important decisions of his own.
When they sat down to go over their side of things, he was the first to speak. Probably not in his best interest. Because what came out of his mouth? Was liable to make Nala kill him next!
“You’ve gotta go away.” That was the first thing he said to her. “I hate having to tell you that, Nala, but it’s the truth. You’re in too much danger. If you go away into hiding… maybe he’ll spare you out of disinterest. It’s me he’s mainly after. I can set you up financially somewhere.”
Nala crossed her arms and regarded him with every bit of disdain she could muster. “You’re putting me in Vincent Protection.”
“If you want to put it that way. You can’t stay around me, though. Not for a long time.”
“So you’re getting rid of me?”
“Don’t think of it that way.” Vincent put his hand on her knee, but it wasn’t enough to make her feel better. Don’t think that’s possible right now. “It doesn’t mean I care about you any less. For fuck’s sake, Nala, it’s because I care about you so much that I feel this has to be done.”
It wasn’t that Nala didn’t believe him. He was also kinda right. Xavier Crow would probably lose interest in her if she disappeared quietly and kept her head down, far away from him. She was inconsequential. An upstart. A way to get to Vincent. They would kill her, kidnap her, use her as disgusting fodder to make Mr. Lane fall apart at his already frayed seams.
“Where am I going, hm?” Nala laughed. “Back to Nevada? How about New Mexico, or the vacant wastes of Texas? At least your money would go far there.”
“I found a place in Indiana that may suit you well. As well as it can, anyway.”
“Oh, joy, Indiana.”
“I’m serious, Nala. I want to protect you. This is the only way I know how right now. I have some connections that can get you a job with one of your fake names.”
“What about my mom in all of this? Am I supposed to disappear? That would officially kill her.” She didn’t talk to her mom much anymore, but Nala wasn’t keen on the idea of abandoning her to the whims of the world. All alone. Her family gone, disappeared. What would she do? Go back to Russia and try to scrounge up the last of her extended family?
Die?
Nala couldn’t think about it. “You can’t keep me away from her.”
The way Vincent wrapped his arms around her and drew her into a strong embrace almost placated her. It shouldn’t be this easy. Now he wants to send me away? When would I ever see him again? Nala tentatively hugged him back.
“I don’t want to keep you away from anyone, but until this all blows over, I’m afraid… well, I’ve already bought it.” He pulled a train ticket from his sweatshirt pocket and placed it in Nala’s hand. “Three days from now… I’ll take you to the Amtrak station. You’ll be riding to Indianapolis. I should be getting more money from Lucian tomorrow. I’m giving most of the cash to you to get you started. If I can see you anytime, I will.”
Nala almost shoved the ticket back in his hand. “Are you fucking nuts?” Indianapolis, really? As if that’s my biggest problem… “I’m not leaving you, Vincent!”
She didn’t know what she felt. It was kinda like rage… but also a numbing sadness she hadn’t felt since finding out her sister was dead. Murdered. Yet it was also unlike anything she had ever felt before. Was this betrayal? Was this what it felt like to have the man she loved discard her on the side of Seattle roads? I can’t believe it. I might kill him first!
“Do you think I want you to?” He grabbed her shoulders, as if he had to shake some sense into her. I’d like to see him try! He would probably die. By her hands. “Fucking hell, Nala, don’t you get it? I love you!”
The red eased from her eyes as she looked at him through a film of milky white. She was going blind, but she was blinded by his words… the most recent words, not the ones that nearly killed her a moment ago.
It was the first time he told her such words. Even though Nala had felt his love more than once over the past several weeks, he had never vocalized it like this before. So clear. So determined. So scared.
He hasn’t loved a woman since Desirée. She could see the pain in his eyes now. Pain and fear of losing her. Losing another woman he loved so much.
“Do you? Do you really?” Nala hated how desperate she sounded. I want to hear him say it again. “Do you love me?”
“Yes.” Vincent pulled her into a hard, determined embrace, as if Nala was about to get on that train at any moment. “I love you, Nala. That’s why I can’t let you die. This time I have the power to save the woman I love. Why would I pass up that opportunity? I have to do it. Even if it hurts us both, knowing you’re out there, alive, is all that matters to me. Please, Nala. Please understand.”
She clung to him with as much desperation as he had. “I love you too, Vincent. That’s why I can’t stand the thought of being away from you, especially right now.” She sniffed, even though tears did not come. Not yet. “Don’t you get it? I can’t be out there, in a brand new place all by myself. Not again. Not when I’m so attached to you now. I need you by my side, Vincent. I need to know that I’m not alone.”
“You’re not alone, darling. I’ll always find a way to be near you.”
They held each other as if the end of the world knocked on their door. It does. The end of my world. Nala couldn’t stand thinking like that, and yet here she was, desperately clinging to Vincent in a vain attempt to keep him by her side. I don’t want to leave him. I need him. I can’t lose yet another person like I lost my father and sister. Vincent said he would do everything to be near her, but what if Crow got to him? What if Hawk defied her house arrest to come get the bastard who put her there to begin with? Vincent didn’t stand a chance unless he went into serious hiding as well!
“Please understand, Nala.” Vincent kissed the top of her head. “This has to be done. Please understand, and please follow through.”
“Let’s talk about this later.”
“Okay.”
Nala wiped her face, sitting back as far as she dared without losing Vincent’s touch. This seems like an inappropriate time to bring this up. Nevertheless, she pulled her notebook out, careful to not obscure the train ticket her boyfriend had given her. “I’m gonna give this to you to read through. I marked where the final draft starts.” She flicked the lime green tab sticking out of the notebook. “Take your time going through it. I’m gonna take a shower. Alone.” She had to reiterate that point, since Vincent had taken to showering with her as if they had done it their whole lives. It didn’t always produce sex, but foreplay certainly started in there more often than not. “We can talk about it when I get out of there.”
Vincent kept the notebook closed as Nala disrobed and grabbed her towel to take into the bathroom. It wasn’t until she shut the door, turned on the lights, and went to latch the lock that she ever saw her boyfriend open one of her biggest fantasies. Scary thing? It’s probably one of his too. Nala wasn’t going to hang around and watch his reaction, that was for sure.
He’s going to think I’m a total freak. To be fair, she wasn’t too into him right now either. Mostly because of what he just did. I still can’t believe it. He thinks he can send me away? Nala welcomed the hot water touching her skin the moment she turned on the shower. What am I supposed to do? Just start all over again? The thought petrified her. At least when she moved to Portland, she had a goal. Her spirit. Her name. She was Nala Nazarov, the sister of Tasha, and the harbinger of justice. If she didn’t have any of that after moving to Indianapolis? Then what was the point? Of anything?
The off-chance of Vincent seeing her once, twice a year wasn’t worth it. She couldn’t live life like that. Who was to say that Vincent would live at all? What if she was killed anyway? Their distance would have been for naught.
Nala knew she didn’t have a lot of experience in this realm of the world, but she was pretty sure it was bullshit. Almost as bullshit as realizing that the man sitting out in the hotel room, the man who currently wore a hoodie but could cut a suit like nobody’s business, was the absolute love of her life. She knew it like she knew she loved her sister.
Nala sank to the bottom of the shower, letting the hot water hit her hair and watching it dribble off her split ends. I need a haircut. What was the point? Who would she be dressing and looking nice for in the next few days? Certainly not Vincent, the man half a world away.
Don’t think about that. Think about what we can do together, right now. Never before had Nala thought so much about “in the moment.” But then she thought of his potential reactions to her script, and she froze up again, wondering if it had been a mistake. The fantasy seemed perfectly fine in her head. Then she wrote it down and handed it to her boyfriend. A fucking Dom deep inside.
When Nala turned off the shower, toweled off, and dressed in the clothes she brought in, she assumed Vincent would be disgusted with her. But when she walked out, a towel resting across her shoulders so she could let her long hair air dry, she found Vincent sitting somberly on the couch with the notebook opened. Nala stood in front of him and waited.
“Well?” she finally asked.
Vincent looked between her and the handwritten words in the notebook. “This is totally insane, you know that, right?”
At least he went straight to his judgments. Even so, Nala thought she saw a flash of mischief behind those cold blues he harbored. “You know I’m right, though. If we played that out, we would be… pretty set for a long time.”
“Because it’s insane.”
“You keep saying that.”
“You know I’m right.”
Nala shook her head, suppressing a grin. The first grin she felt like showing all day. “So what if it’s insane? It’s a fantasy. One I’m sure I’m not alone in having.”
“I can safely say I’ve never fantasized about some of this…” Vincent cut himself off. “Quite frankly, a lot of it made me uncomfortable, even when I read it with a Dom’s eyes.”
“Good. You should be uncomfortable. That means I can trust you, right?”
“I’m not sure that’s what you want to go for, Nala.”
“Of course it is. If I handed that to a guy who gleefully read it and then asked, ‘So when do we get started?’ I would be out of here so fast. You should feel all sorts of uncomfortable reading that. But I won’t blame you if your dick stirs while thinking about it.”
“This is like that one night we had together times a hundred.”
“What do you think I was going for? Romantic candlelit dinner and wine?”
Nala was being defensive, and they both knew it, but what woman wanted to have her fantasies thrown back in her face, let alone by her boyfriend?
Vincent sighed, flipping the notebook shut. “You really want to do that? We only have a couple of days to make something as elaborate as that happen.”
“Taken care of. I bought all the supplies we need.” Nala pointed to her small untouched bag in the corner of the hotel room.
“Supplies? Sheesh.”
“Like you’re going to tie me up with your sweatshirt?”
Finally, Vincent smirked. “It would be a good challenge, anyway. Show me what you bought.”
Nala did. She brought the bag over and went through every piece. Sometimes Vincent nodded, and other times he put something back and declared that it wouldn’t do. When Nala thought he wouldn’t tell her what would do, he opened the notebook back up and jotted down a possible replacement and told her where she could get one and for how much.
“There’s only one thing,” Nala admitted toward the end of their discussion. “I don’t have my collar.”
Vincent sat back in his seat before getting up and going to his bag. When he pulled the small silver choker from a pocket, Nala gasped.
“Why did you have that this whole time?” she asked. “We were going to the lawyer’s…”
“I always carry it with me.” Vincent pushed her hair behind her ears, his touch lingering on her cheek. “Because it makes me think of you and what you mean to me.”
Nala clutched his wrist, holding him to her. “What do I mean to you, exactly?”
“You’re not just my girlfriend, Nala.” His lips begged to kiss hers, but he refrained, content to convey his words to her. “You’re the woman I love. Which means we share something much deeper than other people. You’re my foil. I hesitate to call you my sub. To me, you’re much more than that. You are the greatest complement I could ever ask for. You understand me in ways I didn’t think a woman could. Most of all…”
Nala’s eyes widened. “Yeah?”
“You’ve shown me that I can move on too.”
She nearly melted into his arms. “I love you, Vincent.”
“I love you too.”
Nala eyed the spiral spine of the notebook. “Will you do it with me?”
He squeezed her tighter. “Of course I will. Even if it’s the last thing we do together.”
“Don’t talk like that. Of course it won’t be.”
“That’s what I want to believe, yeah.”
Nala held him so closely that she was afraid he would break. Or she would break. It didn’t matter which one of them broke first. All that mattered was that they still had each other for at least a few days. After that? Nala couldn’t think about it yet. Her mind was already running through a list of terrible possibilities. However their role-play worked out would determine Nala’s next course of action.
I love this man. I would do anything for him. I know he would do anything for me. Sometimes that was the only power Nala needed. She couldn’t speak for all women in the world, but if asked, she would confidently say that being able to depend on a man like she could depend on Vincent was one of the most powerful feelings of all… and that was discounting her own inner power.
And she was about to let that loose.