I held out a hand to pull her up, but she looked away from me, embarrassment flashing across her face. Jesus, I’d made everything worse for her when all I’d wanted to do was make it better.
“I’m sorry,” I said, sitting up. “I just don’t think this is what you want. Not like this.”
She lay on the floor, looking away from me. “It’s fine.”
I dragged a hand through my hair. “I’m just trying to do right by you, Hope. I don’t want you regretting it tomorrow. You feel me?”
She sniffled but didn’t say anything.
“Hope?”
“It’s fine, Dillon. It’s like she said—I’m just a little girl caught up in a world I don’t understand. It’s for the best, right?”
My cock was still rock-hard and I wanted to do nothing more than fuck her until she screamed my name loud enough that my brothers came over to see if I was murdering someone, and then I’d fuck her even harder. Yet I took a step away from her, before I changed my mind.
“Yeah, it’s for the best.” And I believed it too. Woman like her was way too good for me anyway. It wasn’t fair to drag her into my darkness. “You need some help getting home?”
“No, I’ll be fine on my own.”
“You sure? I can get you a lift or something.”
“If you’re not going to have sex with me, then just go,” she snapped, taking me by surprise.
Jesus, I was trying to do the right thing, and this was the thanks I was getting. I shook my head and stormed toward the door, pulling it open and letting the noise of the party back into my world. Whoops and cheers and the heavy beat of music hit me like a fist to the gut, and I glanced back at her.
She’d turned on her side and I thought that maybe she was starting to fall asleep. Hopefully, she’d wake up in the morning with a hangover from hell and realize that I’d done the right thing. That I’d protected her from me. That was definitely the best thing for her. Because if I knew nothing else in this world, it was this: she deserved better than a man whose soul was as dirty as mine.
I nodded in agreement with my own thoughts, and the darkness that I carried with me pulled itself back around me, tighter than previously, like it knew I had tasted something beautiful and pure and it wanted to ruin that taste forever.
“It’s okay,” she whispered as I stepped outside. “I know my place.”
I looked back in at her, but she wasn’t moving and I wondered if I had imagined her speaking or if she had really said it.
“Get some rest, Hope. Everything will seem better in the morning, you’ll see,” I replied.
If I could go back to that night, I would have stayed with her in that dark garage all night long. I would have held her in my arms and made love to her all night long. Then when the morning came, I would have put her on the back of my bike and rode her home. Maybe she would have introduced me to her father and he would have shaken my hand and called me son, and her mom would have hugged me. Maybe they would have seen something good in me just like she did. Something my own family never did.
I would have taught her how to brush the bad shit off in life, because we just gotta deal with it the best we can and move on, because bad shit fucking happened every single day and we can’t just let that shit get on top of us. That was just the way life was and we had to make sure it didn’t get under our skin.
And then I would have told her that she was worth way more than this life.
More than me.
And way more than any of the bitches that had laughed at her.
I should have told her that I inexplicably felt more for her—a woman I had barely known for an hour, than I had felt for any other person in a long long
But I didn’t say any of those things to her. Instead, I closed the door to the garage with a soft click and I turned and left.
It was the second biggest mistake of my life.
~ 8 ~
I dragged a hand through my hair and rolled my shoulders as I stepped away from the garage. I wasn’t sure if I was stupid or broken—maybe both. Ha, definitely both. Because walking away from sex wasn’t something I ever did. Did any man? Not unless they were dead from the waist down, they didn’t.
But it didn’t feel right. I didn’t know her and she didn’t know me, but I knew she deserved better than that—better than me. Though I doubted I’d be the one to show how it should be done. Not after the way she had turned her back on me when I’d pulled away from her.
I pulled out the small hip flask of whiskey I always carried with me and took a swig of it before shoving it into the back of my jeans again. I didn’t get more than four steps when a throaty female voice broke the silence.
