Chapter Twenty-Five
Harley
Five minutes later, after the pithiest of updates, Dom was even angrier.
“So he kidnapped you, tortured you, and threatened to send you to prison for the rest of your life, and you decided it would be a good idea to bring him home to meet the kid.” Dom shook his head as he shouldered past her, heading toward Jasper’s room. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
Harley grabbed his arm and dug her heels in. “I didn’t have a choice!” she whisper-shouted. “And keep your voice down. I don’t want Jasper to hear. There’s no point in scaring him. Clay is a fact of our lives now, like it or not.”
“Not. Definitely not.” Dom shrugged her off but thankfully stayed where he was and lowered his voice. “This is crazy, Harley. You can’t trust a man like that. Especially one who’s with the CIA. He has the power to make you drop off the face of the earth. You get that right?”
“I do,” she said. “But that’s why I have his confession stored in a safe place and I’m going to give you and Louisa the log-in details in case something happens to me. If he crosses me, I can cross him right back. I didn’t go into this blind, Dom. I know better than to trust someone I barely know.”
“You’re trusting him with your son.” Dom shot a worried look over his shoulder. “What’s to keep him from hurting Jasper the way he hurt you?”
“Jasper is an innocent child. His child,” she said. “I’m the woman who turned him against his best friend and framed Jackson for rape. Clay has every reason to be angry with me, he has no—”
“Angry, yes,” Dom interrupted, brows drawing tighter together. “He can be angry all he wants. That doesn’t give him the right to kidnap you or hurt you.”
He stepped closer, lifting his hand to her face, tracing her cheekbone with a gentle thumb. “You look like hell, H. I knew you’d been through something the second you walked through the door. I thought the Bangkok deal had gone wrong or something, I never—”
“The Bangkok deal never happened.” She eased away, her stomach clenching into a hard knot in response to Dom’s touch. Leave it to her sick libido to be repulsed by a decent man while craving the psycho in the other room like a breath underwater.
“And I didn’t have the chance to clean out the house before Marlowe showed up,” she continued, running a hand through her hair and fisting the strands away from her face. “He was on Ko Tao two days after Clay took me away. That’s why I posted the warning blog. I’m pretty sure Marlowe knows about Jasper and that’s he’s looking for both of us.”
“Then we find a place to hide,” Dom said, a hard look in his eyes. “You, me, and Jasper. We’ll go so deep underground only the moles and the worms will have a clue where we are.”
“I can’t.” She bit her bottom lip, knowing Dom wasn’t going to like what she had to say next. “I promised Clay that we’d stay together until his leave is over in a month or so.”
Dom’s eyebrows crept higher on his forehead. “Together? What the fuck does that mean?”
“Just that he can stay with us wherever we go next,” she said with a shrug. “So he can get to know Jasper. That’s all.”
“Okay,” Dom said, studying her with those dark eyes that didn’t miss a beat. “Because for a moment I thought maybe you were sleeping with him.”
She felt her face flush and hated Dom a little for that sharp gaze of his. “Who I sleep with is my own business.”
He reared back, her words evidently enough to send him rocking on his heels before he regained his equilibrium. “You have got to be fucking kidding me,” he said in a rough, raw voice. “You fucked him? Please tell me you didn’t fuck him, Harley. Please tell me you have more self-respect left in you than that.”
“We both knew it was over between us when you left the island,” Harley said, anger making her cheeks burn even hotter. “I appreciate your help with Jasper, I really do, but your feedback on who I do or don’t fuck isn’t solicited. Or appreciated.”
“I don’t give a shit if it’s appreciated,” he said, shaking his head back and forth as his lip curled. “Someone has to tell you that you’re out of your goddamned mind. Just like your sister.”
He laughed an ugly laugh that made her regret letting things get more than friendly between them. “I wish I’d known the only way to win a Mason girl’s heart was to beat her and lock her in a cage. I could have kept you on a leash and spanked your pretty ass before bed every night. Then you would have stayed with me and been safe from men like this psycho you’re so excited to play house with.”
“I’m not playing house with him,” she snapped, fighting to keep her volume under control. “I’m doing what I have to do to keep my son. It’s called compromise, Dom. It’s what adults do instead of throwing a fit when they don’t get what they want.”
Dom’s eyes flashed. “Compromise? Sounds more like a deal with the devil to me,” he said, his words hitting too close to home. “But that’s what you do, isn’t it? You bounce from one bad idea to the next, somehow expecting the next monster you trust to be different than the last one.”
He stepped closer, leaning down to whisper his next words into her face. “You realize that’s the definition of insanity, right? Repeating the same behavior while expecting a different outcome?”
“Maybe you’re right,” she said, a hard smile curving her lips as the urge to hurt him the way he was hurting her grew too strong to resist. “I mean, you’re certainly not the nice guy you pretend to be. But then I always figured your ‘love’ for Jasper would go out the window the second I stopped fucking you.”
His next breath huffed out from deep in his chest. “You’re such a bitch.”
“You say that like it’s news,” she said, ignoring the pain and regret swirling through her.
“I love that kid,” Dom said, his forehead wrinkling. “And I would do almost anything to keep him safe, but I can’t do this. I can’t stay here and watch you make this kind of stupid, dangerous decision.”
He swallowed, his throat working. “And I won’t watch you with another man. No matter how angry I am right now, I still care about you. And I know without a doubt that I’m the better choice.” He shook his head, hurt flashing in his eyes. “It should be me, Harley, and you know it.”
Harley pressed her lips together, fighting a wave of regret and self-loathing strong enough to bring her to her knees. “I know,” she finally said, voice cracking. “But it’s not. It’s always been him, Dom. I can’t help it. If the past two weeks haven’t changed that, nothing ever will.”
Dom cursed as his chin dropped to his chest. “You tear me apart, H. You really do. You and your sister.” He took a step back, his gaze still glued to the floor. “Say goodbye to Jasper for me.”
“Dom, no,” she said. “Don’t leave without saying goodbye to him. I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s better this way,” he said, still backing away. “And don’t worry, I’ll take care of the other business we talked about. Even if the girl is as hopeless as the rest of her family, she deserves a get out of hell free card.”
“Just give me a month or two and I’ll be able to help you,” she said, though she felt terrible for consigning the little half-sister she’d never met to even another sixty days of captivity. “Dom, please. The CIA is closing in on Marlowe and the rest of the cartel. I could be free to move around like a normal person by the end of the summer.”
“You’ll never be free,” he said, reaching for the door. “I think you’ve made that pretty fucking clear.”
Harley lifted her hand, but let it fall back to her side without saying a word. She couldn’t reach out to him, not when she had nothing to offer him. At least nothing that he wanted.
Instead, she watched Dom walk out the door with nothing but the clothes on his back. He hadn’t even taken the time to pack his bags. That’s how desperate he was to get away from her. She had pushed another perfectly good person out of her life and now she was alone, without a single friend in the world, or anyone by her side except a man who had nearly killed her less than three weeks ago and a little boy who needed all the friends he could get.
She was about to go after Dom, to beg him to stay for just a few more days for Jasper’s sake, when Clay’s voice sounded behind her.
“I’m sorry about your friend.”
She turned to find him standing near the island in the kitchen, watching her with a shuttered expression. Jasper, thankfully, was nowhere in sight.
“How long have you been there?” she asked, sniffing as she swiped tears from her cheeks. She hadn’t even realized that she’d been crying, that’s how emotionally sound and capable of making good decisions she was right now.
“Long enough to hear more than I should,” he said, his forehead furrowing. “And I’m sorry about that, too.”
Inside, Harley cringed, but she tried to smile anyway. “Yeah. Well, it is what it is, right?”
She crossed her arms and stared down at the floor, willing herself to pull it together. She was so focused on squashing the waves of emotion rising up to drown her alive that she didn’t realize Clay had crossed the room until his fingers wrapped gently around her upper arms.
She glanced up, seeing the same longing and regret in his eyes that rushed inside of her, making it hard to breathe.
“It’s like that for me, too,” he said softly. “It was always you, ever since that summer. I know the situation is too fucked up now for that to make a difference, but…you’re not alone.”
Her eyes filled again. “Then why do I feel like my last friend just walked out the door?”
Clay’s lips parted, but before he could speak, Jasper called out from the other side of the room. “Come on, Clay, I’m ready. You come too, Mom. I’m going to do a puppet show. I just needed a few minutes to practice.”
Harley leaned around Clay to grin at Jasper, blinking her tears away. “I can’t wait. We’ll be right in.” She kept her grin plastered in place until Jasper disappeared around the corner again. Then it fell away, leaving her and Clay alone with the hopeless, heartbreaking things they’d said still lingering in the air between them.
“I won’t hurt him,” Clay said. “You don’t have to worry about that. Not now, not ever. He’s such a sweet kid.”
“He is pretty great, isn’t he?” Her chest loosened as she thought of Jasper.
She still had her son. As long as that was true, she could get through anything. She had to get through it. Get through it and thrive on the other side. She wasn’t going to let Jasper down now, not when they were so close to having their freedom and a shot at a normal life.
“He is,” Clay agreed before adding in an almost shy voice, “Do all parents fall in love at first sight?”
She smiled up at him, a real one this time though it still felt sad on her lips. “I don’t know, but I did. The moment I saw his face.”
Kind of like the moment I saw yours. But she knew better than to say that aloud.
Clay was right. Things were too fucked up now for any amount of emotion—past or present—to make a difference. She would simply have to move on, and pretend she was fine until that unreachable place inside of her froze over again.
It would, sooner or later, and then it wouldn’t hurt that she and Clay would never be anything but strangers who had missed their shot at forever.