“And I’ll tell him your pussy is wider than a sink hole in Texas,” I shot back. “Isn’t my fault I slipped and fell in.”
Her nostrils flared as her smile faltered. “You don’t want her,” she snarled. “That little girl doesn’t have a clue what you need.”
“And you do?” I laughed in her face. “Is this what I think it is? Are you fucking jealous? ’Causedamn,woman, if you’re jealous, then you’re the little girl, not her.”
Liv sucked in a sharp breath and a tremor rippled through her arms, shaking the gun. “Fuck you,” she spat out. “Fuck you!”
Keeping one hand on her gun, she dropped the other, latching onto the front of my jeans and cupping me. She stared up at me with her eyes shining with hate as she roughly groped and squeezed. “This is you,” she said. “This is me. We’re the fucking same.”
There was a twinge, an instinctive response, a sick and depraved familiarity that had my body responding to her. This, her, the whores in Purgatory, the self-loathing, the violence—all of it was who I was, and what I did.
But I hadn’t always been that man. I just needed to keep reminding myself of that.
“You have a man,” I said, and in a maneuver too quick for her to thwart, I grabbed her wrist and bent it backward. She yelped and stumbled, and the gun fell from her grip. Snatching up her other wrist, I took a step forward and forced her backward.
“You have a man,” I repeated. “A good man. You need to go back to your man.”
“We can take this place!” she cried. “Me and you!”
Still forcing her backward, I shoved her hard, using my grip on her wrists to keep her standing when she would have fallen over. “You can keep this shithole.”
“Eagle!” she gasped. “The gate! Stop!”
Lifting my brow, I grinned down at her. We were closing in on the gate, close enough now to hear the crackle of electricity coursing through the metal.
“You’re going to stay the fuck away from me,” I told her. “You’re going to stay away from Autumn too. Do you hear me?”
Looking back and forth between me and the gate looming behind her, her eyes wild with fear and anger, Liv pressed her lips together and nodded. I bent my head, bringing our faces together.
“Say it!” I shouted, and her eyes squeezed shut. “I want to hear you say it!”
Her eyelids flew open and her gaze latched onto mine. “I’ll stay away from you!” she screamed.
I yanked her up against me. “What else?”
Staring up at me, her features twisted with hate, she opened her mouth and let out a bloodcurdling scream. Momentarily closing my eyes, I inhaled slowly. And when I opened my eyes, I released her. She started to shrink away, but I was quicker. After sending the back of my hand across the side of her face, I latched onto her throat as her head whipped to the side and before she could fall.
“Say it,” I growled. “Or I will snap your neck right the fuck now and deal with the consequences.”
She clutched my biceps, her pointed fingernails digging into my skin. Her anger didn’t surprise me. Liv was one of those people you knew didn’t just come screaming into the world, she came into it swinging. I didn’t know what kind of life she had before everything went to shit, but I knew it wasn’t a pretty one.
“You’re going to regret this,” she cried out. “I’m going to make you regret it!”
My jaw locked, the urge to strangle her stronger than the urge to breathe, I shook my head slowly. “I’ve never not regretted it. Every damn time I touched you,I regretted it. I was just too fucked in the head to care.”
“And now you’re not?” She scoffed. “You get a taste of a little girl, and what? You’re a changed man?”
I released her with a shove, watching with satisfaction as she landed hard on her side. Shoving her hair out of her eyes, she stared up at me, her gaze gleaming with pure fury.
“No, Liv.” I laughed harshly. “I just found a better place to stick my dick.”
It was a lie, and it wasn’t. But Liv didn’t need to know jack shit. She’d only use it to destroy what was left of me. And for the first time in a hell of a long time, I didn’t feel like destroying myself.
Storming past her, I headed for home to finish locking up. After that, I was going straight to the doctor’s office. I wasn’t letting Autumn out of my sight; at least, not until I figured out what the fuck to do about Liv.
That bitch wasn’t going to let this stand, me rejecting her. I knew she wouldn’t let go, because I wouldn’t have. What I’d done to Wildcat was proof enough of that.
Chapter Thirty-Four
