Cruz (Dark and Dirty Sinners' MC #5) - Serena Akeroyd Page 0,61
never seemed to be sexually attracted to me. If anything, he looked at me with yearning. Like I was a favorite treat he wanted to savor but had been denied it by his mother.
I wasn’t sure what got his rocks off, and to be frank, I didn’t want to know.
I figured I’d been kind by letting him hang around me, but if he thought I was going to let him lay down the law, then he was wrong.
No one did that to me. Not even Cruz. He might think he did, but only because I let him. Only because I trusted him and let him inside.
In more ways than one.
And that only happened when we were upstairs. Outside of my quarters, I didn’t need someone taking charge of my life. I was a successful businesswoman, and I didn’t need a man for anything other than orgasms.
“I’m more than a friend,” he rasped. “I do more for you than anyone else around you.”
“You do,” I agreed. “And I’m grateful.”
“You never show me that,” was his petulant retort.
I narrowed my eyes at that, not appreciating his words or his tone. Hitching my hip against the desk, I folded my arms against my chest and decided to call his bluff. “How would you like me to show you that, David? Would you like me to sink to my knees and—”
A mixture of horror and disgust flashed over his face. “No!” He even backed up a step.
“Then what do you want from me?” I replied, trying to puzzle what on earth he got out of this arrangement if the thought of sex with me was that repugnant.
“I just want to love you. I want to look after you. Is that so wrong?” The step with which he’d retreated, he surged past, taking four more to get closer to the desk. The beseeching look did nothing for me, because I hadn’t asked for any of this.
Never had. Never would.
I hadn’t asked for Cruz’s attention either, even if, now, I was grateful to be in the epicenter of his focus.
I wanted no man to look at me the way David did. In my opinion, it wasn’t right, to be the air someone breathed, to be the reason they got up on a morning. And definitely not with someone like me. Not when I was who I was.
Because the truth hurt, I rasped, “You deserve someone better than me, David.”
My candor had his mouth gaping. “There is no one better than you.”
Tilting my head to the side, I murmured, “You know what my family has been through, and how it changed me.”
His face turned puce with rage. “I’m just glad he only hurt Carly and didn’t touch you.”
My eyes flared wide at his remark, a remark that felt like a slap to the face.
“Carly’s suffering was okay then, was it?” I snapped, straightening up, my hands furling into fists.
“N-No, I didn’t mean that!” he denied, retreating once more. “I just meant I-I’d kill your uncle if I could.”
So many men willing to kill Kevin, it was just a shame no one had been around when it was happening.
What use was all this after the fact?
They were just words.
Not a promise.
If Nyx knew what I’d gone through, he’d want to kill Kevin all over again, and would probably go on the rampage a thousand times more until his soul bled black.
David uttered those words like they could help me, like they meant something. When they meant nothing. They were just letters that were scrambled together to form his emotional reaction to something I’d gone through.
It was the same with Nyx. Of course, if I told him that, he’d shout me down. Tell me that everything he did, he did for Carly, our elder sister. But that was bullshit. She was dead. A bag of bones that had rotted away a long time ago… Me, I was alive. Living. Breathing. Somehow getting through what that bastard had done to me. Maybe not always achieving it, but I considered it a win that I hadn’t tried to hurt myself for a very long time.
I couldn’t say how grateful I was that Cruz, though he knew the full story, had never said anything like that to me, had never made me feel lesser for what I’d gone through.
“The threat has long since gone, but the stain inside me hasn’t, David.”
His brow puckered. “You’re not stained. C-Carly—”
“I am.” I shot him a dead-eyed stare. “I’m dirty.”