He nodded, his eyes boring into mine. “Anything, sunshine.”
“Make them all pay,” I whispered, a tear running down my cheek. Grit leaned in and kissed it away. “Make sure the rest of them can’t do this to someone else.” The justice system would just let them out in a few years, if they even got convicted of anything, which meant they could turn around and hurt someone else. I didn’t want that chance.
He nodded. “I’ll mop the floors of their clubhouse with their own fucking blood,” he swore.
7
Nicole
Ijerked awake, my heart hammering in my chest. The room was dark, almost pitch-black. The TV had been turned off sometime after I fell asleep, and only the red glow of the clock on the nightstand offered some kind of light into the room.
“You good?” Grit called, his voice rough but quiet in the dead of the night.
Fumbling around on the nightstand, I finally found the switch for the lamp and clicked it on, flooding the room with a soft, muted, golden glow. Grit was perched in the chair at his desk, his eyes on me. If he’d been anyone else watching me as intently as he was, I’d have thought he was a predator. But I knew better now. He was a protector, not a predator—at least, not to me.
Reaching up, I rubbed my tired eyes, wishing I could sleep without reliving what the fuck happened to me. I was sotired. But what happened just kept playing on repeat in my head and wouldn’tfucking go away.
“Want to talk about it?” Grit spoke up again when I didn’t answer his first question. “It might help. At least, that’s what my therapist told me before I was discharged.” He shrugged one shoulder, falling silent and leaving the decision to open up about what happened to me before he got there in my hands.
Did I want to talk about it? He clearly knew what happened. He’d walked in on it. But he didn’t knoweverything. How I’d been trying to climb out my bathroom window so I could get to safety when they’d broken into my home. How I’d been dragged down by my hair and into the living room…
“I…” I swallowed and licked my lips, hating how chapped they felt. I always took such pride in my appearance. My lips were always either coated in chapstick or lip-gloss, and I had a whole ass skin care routine I went through each morning and night. I hated to see what my hair looked like right then. My curls were probably frizzy and damn near unmanageable.
“If you don’t want to talk about it, you don’t have to,” Grit quietly assured me. “I just thought I’d offer so you’re not bottling it all up inside.”
I shook my head. “I want to,” I said quietly. “I just… don’t know how to begin.”
“Just start,” he said. “There’s no eloquent way to start telling me what you endured, sunshine.”God, I loved that nickname, even if I didn’t feel much like his sunshine right then. “You just talk about it. State the facts.”
I nodded and tucked my hands beneath my thighs. Staring straight ahead at the blank, black TV screen, I said, “I tried to get somewhere safe like you told me. My bathroom window faces the backyard, so I tried climbing out of it, but they brokein before I could get out. Dragged me down by my hair and pulled me into the living room by my wrists because I wouldn’t stop fighting them.” My voice was monotonous as I relayed what I’d endured, something akin to emptiness inside me as I spoke. “One bound my hands while the other pried my mouth open and forced me to suck his cock. Then, the other one went searching for something. I don’t know what.”
“Probably anything to tie you to us,” Grit said, and when his voice came out normal and unaffected, I found I could breathe a little easier. I didn’t need him to rage. I didn’t need him to coddle me. I just needed him to continue acting like I was normal. That I wasn’t somehow changed by what’d happened to me.
“I… thank you,” I finally murmured, looking at him now. He arched a questioning brow at me. “For not treating me differently just because I was assaulted.”
His lips quirked. “You’re not a different person because of it, sunshine. You might be down right now, but you’ll make a comeback and still be my ray of sunshine.”
“Yours?” I croaked, my heart beating a little faster. I hoped like hell I wasn’t reading too much into what he’d said.
He sighed. “I didn’t want to give in to what I feel for you, Nicole,” he confessed, and my heart flipped over in my chest. “Because I knew something like this would happen to you if I did. But it happened regardless, all because we held two fucking conversations.” Venom laced his last sentence, and he drew in a deep breath, forcing a calm over himself once more that I knew he didn’t truly feel. “But yeah, sunshine. If you’ll allow it, I want you to be mine. I’ll protect you until my last, dying breath, and I won’t ever allow something like this to ever happen to you again,” he swore.
Fuck, my heart couldn’t take something like this. Grit was hot as hell in that grunge, outlaw, fuck-the-world way that I found myself oddly attracted to. But beneath all that was a strength I wanted to cling to. He made me feel safe, and when those bikers had ridden into my yard, my first thought hadn’t been to call the police.
It’d been to call him, even though we’d barely spoken before. Because I knew he’d be there faster than the cops ever could be.
“I don’t think I can ever get on my knees or give a blowjob ever again,” I blurted. Shame swept over me, and I groaned, covering my face with my hands. Whythe fuckhad I blurted that? We weren’t even talking about sex!
Grit’s surprised bark of laughter met my ears, and a moment later, the bed dipped beside me. His bulky arm came around me, and he tugged me to lean against his side before dropping a kiss to the top of my head. “Even if you decide you can’t ever have sex again, Nicole, that won’t change anything,” he promised. “My hand works just fine, as does the mental image of you.”
I groaned. “You’re making this worse.”
His laugh was deep and husky and warmed me from the inside out. “I think you need more sleep, sunshine.”
I sank into him, my fingers curling into his worn, soft t-shirt. “Stay with me?” I quietly asked.
He nodded and leaned back against the headboard, pulling me with him. “Yeah, sunshine. I’ll stay.”
8
