Chapter Twenty-Four
Ryker
Willow turns her screen my way, and I frown, sure that I’m not seeing what my brain tells me I’m seeing.
“What is this?” she asks again, her voice full of hurt. Not anger. Hurt.
And that sets me on edge, because someone has hurt my girl.
“May I?” I hold my hand out for her phone, and she gives it to me. I don’t hide what I’m doing from her. I zoom in on the image.
It’s a photo of me with a girl named Darcy, the same one from that night in Seattle when Wills and Aiden were at my retirement party. The one that Willow said had been eyeing me all night. But this photo was taken a different night, months ago.
We’re in the same place, Darcy is in my lap, and my lips are on her neck.
“Who sent you this?”
“It’s an unknown number,” she says. I can hear the hurt growing in her voice, and it both pisses me off and makes my heart ache because Ineverwant my girl to feel insecure. The fact that my past was thrown in her face like this makes me fucking feral. “Talk to me, Ry.”
“Obviously, it’s what it looks like. This was probably close to a year ago, or more, and I was partying with the guys.”
“And you hooked up with her.”
I tap her screen, send the photo to myself, and then delete it off her phone. She doesn’t try to stop me.
“First of all, I sent that to myself so I can have Gideon look into it, not so I can save it. And I probably did hook up with her, yeah. We already said that we aren’t going to bring up who we fucked in the past.”
“If someone sent you a picture of me all over one of the men I’d had sex with before you, you’d be cool about it and not get your feelings hurt?”
“Fuck no, I’d want to find him, cut off his hands, and bring them to you in a box.”
She blinks and then blows out a breath. “This is fucked up.”
“I havenottouched another woman since you and I—”
“I know.” She shakes her head and stands to pace. “I know that. So what was the point of that text? Someone just wanted to piss me off?”
“Probably.” I stand with her and pull her to me, wrap my arms around her and rock her back and forth. “I didn’t delete the number from your phone. I’ll see if Gid can find out where it came from.”
Suddenly, her phone blows up again, and she reaches for it, and her eyes widen as she scrolls on her screen. I have a bad feeling about this.
“Jesus.”
She closes her baby blues and swallows hard and simply passes the phone to me.
When I look down, the fire of a thousand suns streams through my veins.
So many photos.
Of me, with plenty of different women. Some in bars, some at the arena after games. But some are inside my motherfucking penthouse.
Naked.
I’m fucking them in my bed.
Willow lets out a shaky breath and brushes a tear off her cheek, and I immediately call Gideon.
“Miss me already?”
