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I shake my head. “No need to call him.”
She takes a step toward me. “So, you’ll be honest?”
“This is ridiculous. Give me the key, Alexandra.”
Another step. Another spicy-sweet smile.
“The only way you get this key is by giving me what I want. Though, I suppose you could try to take it. Just reach down my shirt and grab it. Of course, there’s no guarantee that I don’t snatch your wrist and make what I did to that drunk asshole look like two kids playing at recess. I’ll break your wrist so bad you’ll never ride again. Now, are you going to tell me the truth?”
I’d rather go another round, solo, naked, with both hands tied behind my back, against Reggie than tell Alexandra what I said. That’d be crossing a line that could put everything at risk. We’ve gotten close enough as it is. What happens if the search for the truth about Lucas’s killer leads back to me?
“You already know. Reggie told you, remember?”
“You don’t know what exactly he told me. He could’ve said anything. He could’ve said you love to get into bar fights because it is the closest you can get to primal intimacy and you’re addicted to the sensation of dominating another man, making him submit to the will of your body. Plus, that it’s a random man absolves you of any desire to commit or express how you truly feel.”
“Very specific. Also, accurate. I get off on getting intimately close with strange men, beating the shit out of them, and then never having to see them again.”
“Don’t fuck with me. He told me you said you’d take on the world for me,” she says. Something changes in her eyes. The fire softens, cools, becomes something warm and vulnerable. “Is it true?”
“That’s not—”
“No. Dixon, don’t even try it. Stop fighting. Give me the truth.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
I feel the heat of her gaze like a physical touch, stripping away layers of defenses I didn't even know I had. There’s a war raging in me, my heart and head at each other's throats like rabid dogs.
I throw my hands out, at a loss for words. “I don't know what you want me to say.”
She's close enough now that I can count the freckles dusting across her nose.
"The truth."
Truth.
That word is dangerous.
What if it turns out I’m still responsible for this entire nightmare? What kind of monster would I be to get close to her, only to make her choose between killing her brother’s murderer or accepting him as the man she has feelings for?
"I saw how that asshole treated you and something inside me snapped. There was no way I could stand there and watch you be disrespected like that. I had to act."
“Why?”
“Why what?”
She raises her hand and places a single finger on my chest, right above my heart.
“Why did you feel you had to defend me?”
A long moment passes. I’d like to think that I’m fighting to keep from falling off that precipice, but with the way she’s looking at me, there’s nothing I can do but fall.
"Seeing him treat you like you weren't worth a damn made my blood boil because... because you deserve better, Alexandra. Because you deserve so much more than life’s given you. And I would move heaven and hell to give you even a portion of that."
There it is — the truth.
But she doesn’t relent.
