Price of Angels (36 page)

              Michael struggled against Mercy’s grip. “Let go of me,” he said through his teeth.

              “Why? So you can finish him off?”

              It seemed the whole party was emptying out of the clubhouse, men and women. The questions they passed back and forth became a low, insistent humming of sound.

              “Let go,” Michael repeated, and his eyes came to Holly.

              She didn’t want to imagine the pitiable state of her composure, what she must look like to him. But when his eyes landed on her, the rigid tension left his jaw. His lips parted as he pulled in a deep breath through his mouth, and his always-narrowed, carefully hooded eyes were wide and wild and hot with fear. It was fear that he turned toward her. Fear that he was held captive, and couldn’t get to her.

             
Oh, Michael
.

              Mercy followed Michael’s gaze, glancing over at her, too. His lips pressed together, a fast look of understanding. He leaned forward and whispered something in Michael’s ear, to which he responded with a fast, jerky nod.

              Mercy released him.

              People were still talking, asking questions, some demanding answers, speculating. RJ had been laid on a picnic table and many were hovering around him. Many more were shooting Michael dark looks.

              Holly ignored all of it. She allowed him, as he walked toward her, to fill up every corner of her awareness, everything and everyone else fading to the black edges beyond her periphery. She wrapped all her sight around him, let him push back against her panic.

              She fell into step beside him as he caught her around the waist and kept walking. A protest formed and died in her throat when they entered the clubhouse; she was with him, she would not worry.

              Through the common room, now mostly empty, he towed her, down the hallway Ava had mentioned before. Both sides were flanked with dark wooden doors, and he pounded on three with the side of his fist before he found one that someone didn’t shout “Occupied!” from the other side of.

              He pulled her inside, shut and locked the door behind them, and only then did his arm leave her.

              The room reminded her of a one of those two-story, side of the highway motels. A double bed with a dark comforter pulled up over the pillows, orange carpet, paneling on the walls. There was a Dog pennant above the bed. Light issued from two lamps, one on the nightstand, the other on a wide dressing table with a mirror, the light reflecting off it and back into the room. There was an open door on the other side of the bed, and she could see a vanity and sink beyond it: en suite bathroom.

              She turned to Michael, and there were deep lines pressed around his mouth, his expression grim. Holly wanted to trace them with her fingertips, smooth them away.

              “What did he do to you?” His voice was low and furious. “Did he touch you?”

              She shook her head. “He was just being friendly. All he did was put his arm around me. I overreacted. I was too nervous, and…” She shook her head, feeling the burn of tears at the backs of her eyes. She hated that she was like this, that the night had taken this turn.

              “Don’t cover for him. Tell me the truth, Hol. Because I need to know right now if I’m going to have to go back out there and bounce his head off the asphalt.”

              Her eyes flew wide with shock. “Why would you do that?”

              Without flinching, his gaze unwavering, he said, “Because he scared you.”

              The breath went out of her. Exhausted from nerves, strung-out on spent adrenaline, she took a step back and sank down onto the edge of the bed. She swallowed. “It’s not RJ’s fault. It’s mine. All of this” – she gestured to the walls, the clubhouse around them – “scared me. I…” She didn’t know what to tell him. How could she explain how crushing it felt to realize that she might never be normal?

              He stood by the door a long moment, studying her. “Do you not trust me?” he asked. “You don’t think I can keep you safe?”

              “No! No, that’s not it at all.”

              “Then why did you leave?” He scowled at her, and something about the tension in his brows made her think he was trying desperately to understand. “I went back to the table, and you were gone.”

              “I wanted some air.” She glanced away from him, ashamed. “I just wanted to be alone for a little bit, and then those girls…and then RJ…I don’t know why they couldn’t leave me alone.”

              Soft sound of him snorting through his nostrils. Light tread of his boots across the carpet. Then he was crouched in front of her, and his hands were on her thighs, warm against the chilled skin of her legs through the denim.

              “Hol.”

              She lifted her head, and saw, to her absolute shock, that he was smiling at her. A small, but true smile, his lips curved, little lines gathering at the corners of his eyes. “You don’t know why they couldn’t leave you alone?”

              She didn’t answer.

              “There’s gotta be lots of people who look at you and don’t want to leave you alone,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean they want to hurt you.”

              “They just want to sleep with me,” she said in a small, miserable voice.

              “Yeah. Not tie you up, not hurt you. Just be with you. Because they want you.”

              “And that’s not supposed to scare me?”

              “No.”

              “Then why did you try to kill RJ just now?”

              His frown was black with anger, harsh lines pressing between his brows, around his mouth. “Because he shouldn’t have touched you.”

              Faintly amused by his flip-flop logic, she said, “Why not?”

              “Because it frightened you,” he snapped, getting to his feet, pacing at the foot of the bed.

              “But I thought I wasn’t supposed to be frightened.”

              “I lied. You should be. The world’s full of bastards.”

              “Michael.”

              He halted, his hands on his hips, aggression shimmering off him in invisible heat currents. “What?”

              “Thank you.”

              “For what?”

              She swallowed against the rising lump in her throat. “Well, if we’re talking just in general, that would be a long list. But right now – thank you for coming to my rescue. I thought the best way to get past some of the old fears would be to face them…” She bowed her head again, blinking. “But I was wrong.”

              It was silent a beat, and then he came to her again, kneeling once more on the carpet, his arms folded over her legs this time, so even with her head down, she could see his face. She loved his face, every unforgiving angle of it.

              “Mirrors, right?” he asked, and his voice was the low, velvet sound of midnight under the covers.

              She was startled. “What?”

              “Sometimes…it was in front of a mirror, wasn’t it? So you had to watch.” The gentlest, gentlest voice, his breath warm and smelling of whiskey where it stirred against her face.

              Mirrors, yes, she’d told him about the mirrors. About her father, and the cruel bite of his fingers against her cheeks as he turned her head and forced her to watch. She shuddered hard at the memory, and nodded.

              His arms shifted, so his hands were on her hips, thumbs pressing at the points of bone. “Stand up,” he said, softly. “Come face one of those fears.”

              Her throat tightened at the prospect. She lived now in a constant state of wanting him, a low-level energy that cycled through her. But here, now, as rattled as she was…she could muster no heat or desire. All she wanted was to fold herself against his chest and sleep.

              “Here?”

              He stood, pulling her up to her feet with him. “Here.”

              “Michael…” She pushed lightly at his chest as he walked them to the dressing table, resisting, but still compliant. Caught between abject terror and the familiar warm strength of his arms. “Michael, please, I don’t think I can…”

              There they were, in the mirror, and as always, she was surprised by how small she looked. He seemed tall and stern by contrast, even if his face was at its gentlest and sweetest – somewhere in the neighborhood of terrifying for a regular man who made regular faces. She’d seen the lines, the weathering of his face so many times, but never alongside her own smooth complexion like this. Suddenly, she realized that she’d never asked his age, but that he must be ten, fifteen years older than her.

              One of his arms was around her middle in front, the other across her shoulders. He raked his hand through her hair; it rippled and shimmered in the lamplight.

              “It’s just us, see?” His eyes touched hers through the mirror. The lamp turned the colors to vivid jewel tones – hers bright emerald, his tiger’s-eye amber. “Just you and me.”

              She watched their reflections as he brushed her hair back, exposing the pale line of her throat, and kissed her there, his mouth opening against her skipping pulse. It transfixed her: to feel the warmth of his lips, the hot wet stroke of his tongue, and see it too. They were separate things: the sight and the feel.

              His lips skimmed up her jaw and then his hand cupped the back of her head and he turned her, so he could kiss her mouth. Then she could see nothing, and closed her eyes, sighing through her nose and opening to him, letting the warm stroke of his lips and tongue begin to thaw the cold tremors running beneath her skin.

              He kissed her with languid thoroughness, until she felt the warming in the pit of her stomach, and everything had faded save the continuous, slick mating of their mouths.

              When his hands eased her jacket off her shoulders, she helped him. She lifted her sweater off, let it fall, and then stepped into his arms, sliding her own around his neck, pressing herself to him. She liked the smooth leather against her skin, but she liked his skin better.

              She ran down the zipper, and he shrugged out of jacket and cut, let them hit the floor. His shirt was black, with little white buttons, and she broke the kiss so she could see to slip all of them free.

              She slid her hands between the parted halves, over the smooth stretch of his chest, fingertips sliding through the crinkly dusting of hair. His muscles tensed beneath her touch, excited and stimulated. Much like the man himself, who ditched the shirt with an impatient move and gathered her against him again.

              He kissed her…and then he turned her, and there was the dreaded mirror again.

              She’d worn the red bra, because it was the only one she owned that wasn’t threadbare and plain. It shaped her breasts so they were high and round. Above the waistband of her jeans, she could just see the red ribbon at the waist of the matching panties.

              Michael stood behind her, the lamplight gilding his skin, highlighting a faint silver scar at the top of his shoulder, carving hollows in the grooves between muscles.

              The skin of his hands was dull with accumulated roughness – calluses, old scars, the split knuckles of a mechanic and a biker. The contrast between them and the smooth flat of her stomach was stark, as he touched her.

              “Watch,” he urged, against her ear.

              Then his hands were at her back, at her bra clasp, and then the band was slackening, the cups falling away.

              She saw herself every day in the shower, in her own mirror, in her bathroom, and never had she looked like this. The girl in the mirror seemed a different creature entirely as Michael’s hands covered her naked breasts, thumbs finding the straining rosy nipples.

              She inhaled, lifting her chest on instinct into the subtle rasping of his calluses against her soft pale skin. And in the mirror she watched him cup her, weigh her, pet her in an artful, deliberate flexing of his strong fingers that reminded her nothing of all those other times in front of a mirror. He traced her budded nipples, pinched them lightly.

              One of his hands slid down her belly, fingertips sliding just inside the waistband of her jeans. Her spine flexed in helpless reaction, her hips thrusting forward, searching for greater contact with his hand.

              “Are you afraid?” he asked. His hand shoved down, diving inside her jeans, cupping her through the warm satin of her panties.

              “No.” Her neck was weakening, and she let her head fall back against his shoulder as his fingers worked against her, and with his other hand he molded her breasts, one and then the other.

              “Look at you,” he said. “No wonder they want you.”

              It was shocking to her, to see the low-lidded, arching creature in his arms, shamelessly moving her hips as he stroked her, lifting into the hand at her breasts. The sight of his arm lying against her belly, his hand disappearing down into her jeans, was doing relentless things to her pulse. She was gasping. Her skin was superheated, feverish, hyper sensitive to every brush of his body against it.