“This isn’t a damn sign Roman, this is my entire fucking shop,” I snap, whirling around and only narrowly side stepping a splintered chair leg.
“For fuck’s sake.” Roman demolishes the space between us and then I’m in the air.
“What are you doing?” I squeal, clinging to the forearm anchored around my waist as Roman strides across the shop and dumps my ass on the counter. “Roman, I’m serious?—”
“Yeah, well so am I, so shut up and stop walking on the damn broken bits of wood in bare fucking feet.”
I gape at him.
Roman brackets his hands on either side of my thighs, caging me in as his glare blazes through me. “I’ll give you tonight,” he says, his breath warm against my face. “But for the record, what everyone else calls reckless, I call brave. What they call stubborn, I call knowing your own mind. You don’t ruin anything, Lola, you breathe the world around you to life. So I’ll give you tonight, but when I tell you tomorrow that the only thing I need in this world is you, you damn well better believe me.”
“Roman…” his name falls from my lips like an oath. “I don’t want you giving up your life for me.”
He hangs his head before looking back up at me, emotions flicking through his eyes like an old film. “How can I possibly be giving up my life, when youaremy entire life?”
His words hollow my heart. I know how he feels because I feel it too. My love for Roman is all encompassing. I would do anything for him and maybe that’s just what love is but if that’s the case then loving me is dangerous.
My fingers cling to Roman’s pristine white shirt. It’s all wrong on him. He should be in a checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Reading his book in his house filled with plants. I don’t want to ruin that.
I storm through life like a tornado, the eye of the storm while everything around me gets destroyed. It takes all I have to let go of Roman, to not claw my fingers into his chest and hold him close, but I refuse to let him take the fall for my mistakes.
A growl rumbles in his chest as my hands fall away. He spears his fingers through my hair and stamps his lips on minein an angry kiss. “We’re not done, Lola. Not by a long shot,” he swears, but then he lets me go and strides out of the broken shop.
My eyes shutter, exhaustion tugging at my mind. I slip off the counter and sink to the floor. The dust sheet is rough under my bare feet, debris from the trashed furniture stabbing at my skin. The tears I’ve been holding back all evening fall and my breaths come in sharp gasps. I feel like I did the night they pumped my stomach, my skin cracking, my insides hollowed out.
I made the biggest mistake of my life that night and I can’t help thinking I’ve just done it again.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Roman
Yes, Roman! That’s my boy.
- Shaun Ford, as Roman received his high school diploma
Somehow,I force myself to leave Lola’s shop, but I don’t get far. She may want space but there’s not a chance in hell I’m leaving her alone tonight. So, I sit parked up in my truck outside her shop, one hand gripping the wheel, trying to decide who I want to murder more: Rob Carson or my own damn father.
The suit I’m wearing feels like a straight jacket, a reminder of everything Lola’s using to push me away.
I’m used to people looking at me and seeing money. It happened throughout most of my childhood, but it never happenedhere. It never happened with Lola. And it fucking hurts that she used that as an excuse.
My father may not believe I belong here, hell, Lola may not believe I belong here, but the only place that feels more like home than Pine Rock is when I’m buried deep inside of Lola.
She’s panicking right now and maybe I should have told her a long time ago that I knew about the drugs, but she ran so far away, so fast, I never found the right time.
She looked so scared when she confessed, and it kills me that she thinks the trouble she got into as a kid makes her somehowless.Lola’s wildness has always been a part of who she is, and I don’t want to fix that part of her, I want to protect it.
Knuckles rap against the passenger window and my heart trips in hope but it’s not Lola. I press the button to unlock the truck and Lola’s dad climbs in.
“How’d you hear?” I ask.
“Beli called. Is it bad?”
I run a palm over my trimmed beard and gaze out at the trashed shop. Lola’s turned the light off, but the streetlamp shows the damage well enough. The shattered glass and the dark, misshapen shadows of the wrecked furniture dark inside. “Pretty bad.”
“Want to tell me why you’re sitting out here, instead of in there with my daughter?”
“My dad tried to blackmail her tonight.” I should have known it wasn’t me he had his PI following, should have realized he’d go after Lola.
