“Oh, God.” The look of horror in her eyes would deter any man, but not me. “I was right. You like me, and this is some weird courting ritual.” She slides both hands in her hair and pulls. “I can’t do this. I’m trying to get my life back together after another man blew it up. I’m so fucking sick of men.” She paces the small room. “I told Cori I didn’t want to go out that night. I wanted to stay home, but you know what happened? I let her bully me into going to your club, and I nearly got date raped, got scared to death in a dark alley, and now I have a ten-foot man giant asking me to the movies and stalking me.”
She stomps back to me and swats my chest a few times before she tries to push me. I stand there, enjoying the feel of her handson my chest. While she shoves against me, I wrap my hands around her wrist.
Freezing, she looks into my eyes. “I’ll shoot you.”
That takes me by such surprise, I laugh.
“My dad has lots of guns, and if you break in here again, I’ll put a bullet in you. And I won’t get in trouble for it. Everyone knows you’re a criminal. I’ll say you broke in, and I shot you in self-defense.”
She sounds so confident, and for a moment, I’m proud of her bravado, even though it’s false. I’ll bet every dollar I have that this Rose princess has never held a gun.
After gently dropping her wrist, I pull the gun I keep in my waistband out and put it on the table. Next, I retrieve the revolver I have holstered around my ankle, followed by the one I keep under my shirt.
“Go ahead,” I challenge. “Shoot me.”
Instead of taking a gun, she takes two steps away from the table.
“Use the Glock. It has no safety.” This girl doesn’t know a Glock from a revolver. I’m certain the only gun she knows is a water gun. “You can tell the world you shot me with my own gun.”
She backs away until she hits the wall. “I don’t want guns in my house.”
“Then how are you supposed to shoot me?” I chuckle. Crowding her, I peer down. “You know what they say,” I whisper. “If you come for your king, you’d better not miss.”
“The king,” she corrects me. “Not your king. If you come fortheking, you'd better not miss.”
With her pinned against the wall, I lower my head close to her ear. “Yourking.”
Those big, brown eyes look into mine. There’s fear and confusion in her gaze, but there’s also lust.
“Do something for me, Thorny?”
“What?” she whispers.
“Accept this,” I say as calmly as possible.
I’ve never been a patient man, but I’ve always been one to accept my fate. Fate took away my parents and dumped me into another abusive home. Fate put me in foster care until I became an adult, but fate hasn’t always done me wrong. It led me to Dax, who saw something in me beyond just my size and ability to intimidate others. Fate brought me to Shadow Cove, and despite the judgmental people in this town, it’s the only place that’s felt like home. Fate has made me a rich man. Far richer than I ever could have dreamed of. And best of all, fate has brought Eden to me.
“I can’t,” she whispers after looking into my eyes. “I can’t do this with you.”
I won’t ask her why she thinks she can’t. It doesn’t matter. “You can.”
Her phone rings again, breaking our spell. She steps away and picks it up, but it doesn’t work. I eye the phone I sent her, sticking out of her purse. I take it and put it in her hand.
“Use it,” I order. “You need it.”
She eyes it before she nods as if she’s made a decision.
“So, does this phone have any weird tracking devices on it? Will you be able to read my texts and listen to my phone calls? You seem to already know where the hell I am all the time.” The false bravado is back in her voice. She even stands straight as if she’s steeling her spine.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say. “And if you’re talking about the phone you showed me last week, it was wrapped.”
“I’m going to use it, but I’m going to have someone look into it to make sure there are no hidden spying apps.”
“It’s your time to waste,” I say as I wash the dishes.
By the time I’m done, she has the phone open and is focused on it. I get to see her from a different angle. It would be perfect if she were ugly or had bad hygiene, but I learned tonight that she’s messy and has a big appetite.. I can clean, and I have enough money to feed her. When I sit next to her, the couch dips under my weight. She jolts and moves several inches away.
She’s typing something on the new phone when someone knocks on her door. She looks up at me and freezes.
