I stiffen.
He doesn’t care.Fang isn’t interested in how a goddamn medical check went. He wants dirt. To evaluate how much trouble I’ll be. Wants to know what to expect.
“Nothing.” I eye his open wardrobe. The shelf with the packaging and the stashed phone.Damn it.
His gaze follows mine. “Is it really that much of a surprise to you?”
“A surprise?” My pulse hammers in my neck.
“The mess it is,” he says, gesturing to the crammed shelves and rail after shrugging the shirt on. “Dolly vacuums and clears the trash, but everything else is up to us.”
“Dolly,” I mimic like some half-wit parrot.
“Our cleaner.” His brow dives as he slowly lifts his cut.
I hate that he looks even more devastating when he’s serious. The guy is a jerk.They’re always the ones who get the looks, though.
“I’m gonna ask again,” Fang says slowly as he turns toward me, sliding his arms through the leather. “What happened?”
Nothing I want to talk about.“You look as though you’re on the way out,” I say. “I’ll get out of your way.” My feet blessedly remember how to move.
“Uh-uh.” The asshole reaches me in four long strides, shooting his arm over my shoulder to slam the door shut and thwart my escape. The sudden puff of air as it seals closed gusts my nose. “You came up here looking like you’re seconds away from detonation, Freckles. What gives?”
Breath quickening, I will the building tension in my hands and arms to ease as I slowly turn to face him. “Nothing.” He’s entirely too close. The word comes out short and brash. “I just need some alone time after being poked, probed, and fucking questioned for the past two hours. Is that too much to ask for?”
“No,” he states, “It’s not.” Fang regards me with eyes that drag over my mouth before lifting to meet mine again. “But I don’t think that’s the whole problem here, is it?”
What does he want from me?I stare into those fucking hypnotic pools of his, my brow pinched. “My problems are my own, Fang.” He leans back a touch at my defensive tone. “You don’t know me. You know nothing about where I’ve come from or what I’ve faced, so why the hell do you need to know what makes me how I am now?”
He sighs. “You’re right: I know fuck all about you. But is it so hard to believe that I want to know more?”
Yes. Yes, it is.I want to believe him. I want so badly for there to be somebody who sees me as more than a means to an end. But…
“Yeah.” I lift a hand between us and tap my finger to his chest. Right over the patch that states who he is. What he does. “It is hard to believe. You’re asking a girl who was taken by bikers to trust a biker. Can you see the issue with that?”
“I can.” His gaze hardens. “But you’re choosing to judge me by my cover, Freckles. Not making a single effort to understand the man beneath. Not even giving me a chance.”
“So what?” I sass. “You’rethe victim here now?”
“No.” He snaps the word through gritted teeth. “But the way I see it, you’re the one making life harder on yourself by deciding everyone’s the enemy before they’ve had the opportunity to prove to you otherwise.”
“Maybe everyonehasbeen the enemy up to this point,” I half-whisper. “Ever thought of that?”
He sighs, and the warm gust against my throat tells me just how close he’s gotten during our little back-and-forth.
The door makes indents in my back, nothing but the sound of our breaths between us when Fang slowly lifts his right arm to lean his weight against the hard surface. There’s a questionin his hooded eyes, an uncertainty that I find echoed in the flutter across my breastbone. Something unnamable dances the current between us, and I can’t reason why, after a single fucking day, he occupies so much of my time.
What makes him different to the rest? Why, since the moment he drew that door wide, have I felt an inexplicable pull toward him? As though he holds the key. Occupies the space I need to figure out what the fuck I do from here.
“What are you doing?” His words are a mere whisper against my heated skin.
“Nothing,” I murmur back, noting the graze of his thigh against my hip. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
The world hesitates for a breath, suspense thick in the air between us, unsure where we intend to take this.
I lick my lips, their texture far too dry for my liking.
