His tongue traces a line to my ear, his voice gravel. “A little over a month.”
“Too long.”
His hands release my hips, his thumb and forefinger gripping my chin while his palm wraps around the back of my neck, pulling me so we’re face to face. He traces my bottom lip, while I let my fingers ride the edge of his jaw, the prickleof his 5 o’clock shadow like the loving bite of a cat’s tongue against my fingertips. “I can’t say it enough, Clara. I’m sorry.”
Confused, I go to press my fingers over his lips, but he pulls them into the warm heat of his mouth, his tongue circling each before he lets me take them back with a shiver.
He continues his thought. “We could have had a year. We should have.”
I shake my head, finally understanding. I lean closer, knowing this conversation isn’t for the audience behind me. “You weren’t ready. We weren’t ready.”
“And now that I am, thatweare, we can’t.”
The kiss I press beneath his ear feels like a promise. “We have to fight for the life we want. It’s the only way to get it.”
The wet heat of an open-mouthed kiss against my neck leaves goosebumps pebbling my skin. “Fear and fury, Crash.”
“I’ve got a hell of a lot of the second one right now,” I whisper.
He laughs, the sound rich and bright, all the more precious for how rarely I get to hear it. “Took the words right out of my mouth,” he whispers back.
The car pulls into the garage, and before we can untangle our limbs, the door next to the coats opens, Trips’ brother’s smiling face taking us in.
“Well, isn’t this cozy?” he chirps, his gaze full of blanketed rage.
Trips sneers, his grip on my hips tightening to the point I’m probably going to bruise. “What the fuck are you doing here?” he growls.
Trevor claps the shoulder of the guard I keep scaring, who swallows, then tucks away his phone, answering twoquestions in one motion. “Can’t miss out on the fun, now can I?”
We might have won over Falk, but Trevor has his own guard in his pocket.
Falk opens the door beside us, giving us an out, Trips clicking the buckle so we can wriggle free. “This fun isn’t for you,” I say, trying to keep the persona I need for the guard while not being too different from the girl Trevor expects me to be. This shit is more complicated than I thought it would be.
I reach across to grab the coats, but Trevor leans forward, pinning them to the seat with his palm as he leers at me. Shit. If he moves his hand two inches, he’ll feel the packet of paper hiding in the lining. “Now, that’s where you’re wrong, sister. This fun is for anybody who goes into the control room. And I can say you’ve hardly put on a show. I know you can do better. I’veseenyou do better. Come on out and show the cameras what you can do. You know you want to.”
The tightly wound tension beneath me is my only warning before Trips lunges toward him, a roar of frustration erupting. But I’m still straddling him, so instead of grappling him, we end up as a tangle of limbs, both of us twisting awkwardly to avoid the coats.
Shit shit shit. This is going to hell faster than I thought it would. I roll into the footwell, then with a scramble, I dive for Trevor’s knees.
This wasn’t the plan, but it’ll have to do.
He yelps as he falls backwards onto the concrete, barely turning so his shoulder hits before his head, the guard stumbling back as half the weight of a state representative falls onhim. Then I’m on top of him, pinning his wrists against the garage floor, one knee jammed up into his groin, the other digging into his arm. Awkward, not what I was trained to do, but hopefully effective.
“I’m sick of your taunts,” I growl. “So you saw me at my worst. That doesn’t give you a right to my best.”
Trips follows me out of the car, getting a better hold on his brother so he can’t squirm away from the pressure of my knee. Trevor’s face grows a dangerous shade of purple as I inch my knee higher. A grin stretches across my face, the kind a snake wears before it strikes. “I know what kind of man you are. I know you like looking at pictures of little girls. Not just me, but others at their worst as well. I know you’re a sick fuck through and through. If any of your constituents knew about your disgusting ‘tastes,’ you’d be out of office before you could say they were mistaken. And you’d land in jail almost as fast. I know everything I need to know about you, Trevor James Westerhouse, and I don’t like a damn bit of it. So, no. This ‘show’ isn’t for you.”
“And here I was, planning to set you on my knee and let you enjoy the blessings of my little kingdom,” he chides despite his purple coloring.
“I’ll never sit on your knee, you sicko,” I proclaim. “Maybe you should sit on mine instead.” I slam my knee into his groin, the music of his keening scream better than the moving symphony we just attended. Falk yanks me off him, and as much as I want to keep fighting, I go limp in his hold, promising with my body language that I’m done. For now.
The other guard struggles to pull Trips away from Trevor, his own whispered threats for his brother impossible to hearover the slap of shoes against the garage floor, other guards rushing to break up the fight.
Falk hauls me away from the mass of men dressed in black diving at Trips, his voice dark against my ear. “Is what you said true?”
“He’s a pedophile. Plain and simple.”
The shift in Falk’s posture tells me everything I need to know about what he thinks of that bit of information. His words back it up. “I’m all the way in. Whatever you and Trips need, I’ll do what I can. Because there’s no way the boss doesn’t know that about his favorite son.”
