TEARS WELLED AS I TRIED to yank the stupid garage door up. I hated Candle and his stupid house and his stupid no automatic garage door opener because he didn’t believe in them. I hated his stupid green eyes and the stupid fucking look on his face when I told him he was dead to me. And I hated that he was shot. I hated it so bad, I couldn’t breathe.
I choked back a sob and a strong hand covered mine.
“I got this, chica.”
I hated him too. I hated Cuban Boy like I hated my stupid fucking pathetic life. But I hated it more that I was glad he was here.
I jerked my hand away. “I don’t need you,” I lied.
“I know, baby girl.”
His quiet voice washed over me like the reassurance I’d been desperately craving for six months, and I lashed out. “You don’t know anything.”
He effortlessly lifted the old wooden door up, then he took the keys from my hand. “I know you’re strong and tough and beautiful as hell when you’re mad. But you’ve also been drinking.” He slipped the bag off my shoulder. “You’re gonna let me drive, chica.” His hand barely touched the small of my back.
A reaction I’d fought years to conquer swelled up and took me off guard.
My back arched, my jaw clenched and I hissed as if he’d struck me with a branding iron. Air fought to get into my lungs, panic choked my throat, and I forced myself to do what Candle had taught me to do. I mentally reached for an anchor.
But Cuban Boy didn’t understand.
His eyes wide, his hands out, he didn’t fucking understand.
He didn’t do what he was supposed to. He didn’t step closer. He didn’t level me with a warning look. He didn’t put his hand firmly back and tip my chin as he forced me to look at him. He didn’t hold me in his gaze, and he didn’t make me breathe through the fear until I calmed down…. He didn’t do any of it.
He did the worst thing he could’ve done. He apologized. “I’m sorry, chica.”
Biting the inside of my cheek to keep from losing it, I forced the only word out I could. “Candle.”
Cuban Boy moved. He threw my bag in the back of my Jetta, and in two strides, he’d pounded on the door to the house, then was back in front of me with his hands out. “I’m not gonna hurt you.”
The door to the house swung open, and Candle’s gaze met mine.
“Jesus fuck,” Candle muttered, before glancing at Cuban Boy. “You fucking touched her back again.” He shook his head.
“Oversight,” Cuban Boy stated, the soft tone to his voice gone.
Candle threw his bloodied T-shirt down and took me in his good arm in three seconds flat. He cupped the back of my head, forced my face into his chest, and his lips landed on my head. “Breathe it out, baby. Come on, you’re stronger than this.”
I inhaled, and his familiar scent filled my head, but right along with it came the bitterness of the past six months. Candle had left me without a safety net, and now he was hurt. “You’re shot,” I accused, but I knew where the real blame lay.
I’d been drinking because Candle was gone, then I was drinking because he was coming home, but all of it was just an excuse. I was pissed at myself. Life had been shit for six months, but it’d been quiet. No LCs, or booze or fights. Just six months of my own damn thoughts festering about the fucking life I didn’t want anymore.
I dangerously slid into a fantasy where a sexy-as-sin Cuban could be mine, and hope wasn’t a four-letter word. But reality surfaced three days ago when I’d gotten a text from Candle, and I’d been drinking ever since. Now there was a dead body in the living room, shoving the truth of my past in my face, and I was panicking like I hadn’t done in three goddamn years.
Candle’s chest moved with an inhale as he softly stroked my hair.
“I’m okay.”
I turned my head and my gaze landed on Cuban Boy. His jaw locked, his stare intent, his expression gave nothing away. For the first time in my life, I gave a shit what someone thought of me. It bothered me that the six-foot-two, muscled ex-marine with warm brown eyes could be thinking less of me.
I pushed away from Candle and focused on his shoulder. “You need to stop the bleeding.”
“You need to get out of here,” he countered.
I opened my mouth to refuse, but Candle moved. He stepped in to my space, blocked Cuban Boy from my view and grasped my chin so hard, my spine went straight and my eyes trained over his shoulder like I’d been taught.
Then he did what he hadn’t done in years.
“Decima.” My whispered birth name passed his lips in a violent storm of regret. “Heed my warning. Take his shelter.”
My name, the old familiar pattern of speech, his dominant grip on me, it all swirled together with the shock of a life I’d desperately tried to forget.
Fear crawled up my spine. “Tarquin,” I pleaded, using his real name.
“He’ll protect you better than I ever could.” Tarquin’s hand dropped, and with it, the past. The unflappable Army-Ranger-turned-motorcycle-club-sergeant-at-arms exterior slid back into place like a well-worn pair of jeans wrapping around every hard muscle. “Leave. I’m dead to you.” The man I knew, the Tarquin I’d grown up with, he disappeared, and Candle walked back into his house.
“Passenger side, chica.”
I turned and looked up at Cuban Boy. Except he didn’t look like the sexy Cuban I’d first met. He looked exactly like what he was. An impenetrable Marine who could just as easily kill me as protect me.
I got in the passenger seat of my car.
He waited until I closed the door, then he slid behind the wheel and pushed the seat all the way back. With precise, calculated movements, he threw the car in reverse, put his arm behind my seat and backed halfway down the driveway.
My head filled with his scent—soap, deodorant, sweat, musk, I crossed my arms. “Don’t fuck my car up.”
He braked and threw it in park. “Wait here.”
The first rays of the rising sun caught his golden skin and cut across his huge biceps as he got out of the car. Striding purposely toward a black SUV, he scanned the front hedge and the street. His eyes everywhere and nowhere, he took in his surroundings as he retrieved gloves from the SUV, then he pushed two motorcycles around my Jetta and into Candle’s garage.
I stared intently at every flex and bunch of his muscles. His body was so conditioned, I forgot about what he was doing and why until he yanked a tarp off a shelf in the garage and cut toward the bushes fronting the house.
Without an ounce of emotion on his face, he rolled a body into the tarp and hefted it over his shoulder. Five strides and he dumped the plastic-wrapped body onto the garage floor. The thud sounded in the idling quiet of the Jetta, and I flinched.
André shut the garage, then pulling his gloves off inside out and tucking one into the other, he walked back to my car. The soiled leather gloves were shoved into a pocket on his cargo pants before he got back behind the wheel and threw the engine in reverse.
I stared at the veins in his forearms. “Why did you do that?” He didn’t have to help Candle, let alone make himself an accessory. I knew how the law worked.
“Efficiency,” he stated, as if that explained it.
“What does that mean?”
He threw the car in drive and gunned it down the street. “I only got one goal right now, chica, and that’s getting you out of here.”
A relentless pounding started between my eyes. I shielded a hand over my forehead to block the rising sun. “Not very efficient to waste five minutes on cleanup duty.”
“Candle’s only got one good arm. Dead bodies and LC Harleys in the front yard of a middle-class neighborhood draw attention. The three minutes and twenty-eight seconds I took to clean up ensured a less conspicuous exit plan and gave me a leg up on getting you out of here.” He took a corner with more speed than I would have before sparing me a quick glance. “Who are you?”
“No one,” I muttered.
“That LC recognized you.”
“There’s nothing to recognize.” I’d lied so long, it almost felt like the truth.
André exhaled. “Listen up.”
I turned toward the window. I didn’t have to listen to shit.
“Hey,” he barked.
I ignored him.
“Look at me,” he demanded.
He had no clue who he was dealing with. My world crumbling or not, barked orders had zero effect on me. “Go fuck yourself.” I didn’t care how spiteful I was being. My anxiety had morphed into anger, the anger I held on to day in and day out. The bitter, familiar taste fueling my every breath kept me sane.
The car jerked to the side of the road and abruptly stopped as angry male tension filled the small interior.
“Turn around or I’m going to put my hands on you,” he warned.
My heart threw itself against the inside of my ribs and my mouth went dry, but not from fear. Confused, angry, I turned and bit a single word out. “What?”
Warm brown eyes measured every inch of my face before he dropped his voice to a low cadence. “I’m not going to hurt you, but I can’t protect you if I don’t know who I’m supposed to be protecting you from.”
“I don’t need protection.” Candle had changed my name, my hair color and my location. I’d taken care of the rest. I didn’t need a misguided ex-marine to barrel into my life and take control.
“Who are you?” he asked with quiet desperation.
From the second I lost my old life, I’d never looked back. I couldn’t. I’d embraced Kendall Reed. I became her.
But in that moment, with a hard-edged, soft-spoken, muscled giant looking at me like he cared about who I really was, I wanted to utter my real name. Just once, I wanted to hear it cross his lips like it’d crossed Candle’s not ten minutes ago.
And that was the trigger to my shot of reality.
Decima was dead.
I was Kendall Reed.
And she was no one.