He stared at his door for the longest time before he finally looked back at me. “No one said it was in the past, Dakota.”
Then he opened the door and shut himself in his room.
TWENTY-THREE
RYDER
I was a fucking bastard.
I had gone to sleep knowing it, the scent of her still all over me. On my fingers and on my tongue, my body painted in her ecstasy.
A fantasy that had come to life.
But Dakota was a whole lot more than a fuck.
She was everything, and I didn’t know if giving into the greed had ruined that.
I didn’t know where we were going to stand, or how the fuck I was going to be able to keep my hands to myself.
Not when all those fantasies had proven to be so much better than I ever could have imagined.
Her mouth was a fucking dream.
Her cunt perfection.
My dick throbbed in my jeans.
I’d been hard the whole goddamn day, since the second I’d woken up long before dawn and knew I had to get out of that house before I went stalking to her room and made good on the threat that she needed to lock her door.
Coming here to the shop hadn’t changed it.
Instead, I was swamped with the memories. With the possibilities.
But how the hell did I consider any one of those with what I still had sitting on my shoulders? How could I even think about taking more of what I never should have taken in the first place? How could I drag her into what I was?
A deviant with a dark, ugly secret while she’d looked at me from her doorway like she’d believed in me. Accepted me as a whole.
But she couldn’t. Not when she didn’t have a clue.
I never should have touched her until I’d gotten free. Until I was sure.
But I hadn’t known how to stop myself when she’d come through the door looking like that last night.
A fucking goddess dressed in pink.
Not when I had been so twisted up thinking about her out with that douchebag, losing my goddamned mind as I’d imagined every way Brad might be taking what was supposed to have been mine.
I scoffed at myself as I focused on trying to draw the line to make the cut on a piece of metal.
I’d spent so many years ignoring what I felt for her. Pretending it didn’t exist. Had planned on doing it forever, but something inside me had snapped on Monday night when she’d walked in on me, and I’d spiraled into a deviancy that knew no bounds.
The barriers I’d erected had been demolished the second she’d stumbled into my room like an apparition of every warped, greedy fantasy I’d ever had.
Girl panting, eyes wide, standing there salivating over my dick.
So, I’d given into the depravity because I was exactly that.
A selfish bastard.
I had pushed into the space I shouldn’t have gone.
She was good and right and fucking deserved the world laid at her feet, and she had no fucking clue who I really was or what I really did.
And until I fixed that shit? I had no right.
Putting on my facemask, I turned on the cutter. The motor whirred to life, sparks flying as I guided the sheet through the machine. The high-pitched screech of the diamond blade grinding against metal was deafening, and I struggled to focus on the task at hand rather than all the thoughts that kept charging through my brain.
I made the cut and turned off the blade, tossing off my mask so I could inspect the result. Satisfied, I set it aside, then stilled when I heard the rumble of a truck riding up to the side of the shop.
That was all it took to send agitation blistering through my blood.
I’d known he was coming, had gotten the text right after I’d arrived here.
I tossed my gloves to the worktable and weaved through the organized mess to the far bay. I pushed the button to raise the garage door.
Welcoming the wickedness.
The chains clanked as the door rolled up and Dare immediately started to back the trailer into the spot.
Hostility spiked, and I was still having the hardest time deciphering if it was directed at him or at myself. If this hate emerged from the days when I’d been so empty and lost that I’d wandered off course. So far out of line that I’d tumbled over the side.
Fallen straight to the bottom of the deep end.
Squandered away any goodness.
But how could I regret the last? The choice I’d made for her?
It was the consequences of it that left this bitterness writhing so deep that I could barely stand there and watch the fucker slip out of his truck.
Dare sauntered out, tossing out his burly intimidation while the rage steadily built inside.
“Look at you, being here when I expect you to.” He sneered it like he was talking to an unruly teenager.