“Start talking,” Magnum says gruffly, after giving me all of five minutes to collect myself. The man is all muscle, zero patience. He can’t expect me to speak words to a situation that I’ve never spoken about out loud.
“Did you know anything about me before we woke up on that pool table together?” I ask Magnum. “Like from the club?”
“I knew you had pink hair and a big butt.”
Sigh. I should have known something unserious like that would come from a biker’s mouth, but that doesn’t make it less annoying. I can’t confess the darkest parts of my past to Magnum if he keeps everything so light. This isn’t light.
“Great. I’m not a good girl, Magnum. I’m not like… the type of woman who men want to keep as a trophy.”
Magnum laughs. “Why the fuck would I want a trophy? I want you. But I also need you to be honest.”
“I have three warrants.”
“Excellent. Must be pretty fucking bad if you’re all caged up about it.”
Pretty fucking bad doesn’t begin to describe it.
“I’ve been in a lot of complicated situations.”
“You’re in your forties. I know that. People our age don’t need to dwell on the past.”
“In this case, the federal government might disagree. They think that I was aiding and abetting human trafficking. It’s a warrant from when I was about nineteen years old.”
“If this is a trap to get me to comment on your age, it won’t work.”
“This is serious, Magnum.”
It’s a charge with potentially federal consequences. I’ve been able to lay low thus far in my life and staying away from Texas has been easy for me since I never really liked it down there anyway. I love Texas barbecue, but that’s about it and a lot of places have decent enough barbecue.
“Fine. It’s serious. You aided and abetted human trafficking. Mind telling me why you did it?”
“Don’t you find it upsetting?”
“Depends on the situation.”
“What situation would make human trafficking okay?”
I have no right to put him on trial here. I’m the one with the warrants. But I’m not trying to justify what I did. Looking back, I should have questioned Nathaniel. I should have questioned everything about faking documents, carrying suitcases and forging signatures. I shouldn’t have “held onto” money. I shouldn’t have done everything in my power to prove to this white boy that I was a good woman.
Different from all the others. Men who want you to prove to them that you’re different from all other women usually have a pretty low opinion of women. It didn’t take me long to learn that. But I’m not proud of how far I fell from my moral center byallowing an abusive man to coerce and control me into doing his will.
“Everybody makes mistakes,” Magnum says gently with compassion for my past that I’ve never heard from another person before. I never asked for anyone to feel sorry for me but somehow, this feels different. “You’re different, Damara. But if you keep lying about shit and covering up–”
“What about you? I don’t want to be the only one confessing to my crimes. I could end up in prison away from my baby and… I don’t know.”
I don’t know exactly, but I know that what often follows mindless vulnerability is deep regret.
“I’ve done wrong,” Magnum admits so freely that it scares me. “I helped bury a body to protect Tanner Hollingsworth’s wife. She’s a nice woman named Quin who is a little on the young side for him but… No woman deserves abuse.”
He means it and I can feel it so strongly that the shiver that runs through me makes me want to run away. That’s the problem with my feelings for Magnum. They’re all way too intense for me to make sense of and just when I have some grasp of how I feel, he wants me to put it all into words. He gets so close to me that I can smell what must be a minty nicotine pouch stuck in his upper lip.
My heart skips a beat as he touches my face and forces my gaze to his.
“What did you do?”
“I helped my ex-boyfriend bring girls back and forth across the border to Mexico for a while from Utah. We had to go through Texas and… We got arrested after a gun fight in Eagle Pass. My ex pissed off this border patrol agent and he threw the book at us.”
“The other two charges?” Magnum asks without missing a beat. No judgment. He doesn’t ask more questions or try tofind out more details about what went down. I don’t want to remember all the stupid shit I did when I was nineteen years old and head over heels in love with a man who promised me that he had the true understanding of scripture, of life, of everything.
