“You can’t hide the MC in a man.” The distaste had deepened to revulsion.
He couldn’t blame her for disliking clubs. She’d been born into the Swords club, and they hadn’t treated any of their women with respect. They saw them as assets to be used. Even the old ladies. “Not all clubs are alike, Breezy.”
“It doesn’t matter as long as you get Zane back. I swear to you, Steele, he’s your son. I wouldn’t lie about that.”
“I know that. I wasn’t the one asking.” He hadn’t been. It hadn’t occurred to him that Breezy would lie to him about the child. Apparently, it had occurred to the others and they’d made certain the boy was his by using Absinthe, their own lie detector. “It wouldn’t have mattered though, Bree. We would have gone after him no matter what.”
She rubbed her chin on top of her knees. There was a scant four inches between his fingers and her ankle. He was acutely aware of that short distance. He could touch her, she was that close. Feel her skin. Feel what had always belonged to him.
“As soon as we get him back, I’ll be gone. You won’t have to worry that I’ll ask you for anything. I’m working now, and I’ve been able to support us. I have most of the money you gave me, and I’ve been saving a little bit here and there in order to pay it back. To get started, I needed some of it, but I was careful. I’ll have all of it.”
He heard the pride in her voice, but it didn’t matter. Anger swept through him. “I gave you that money to give you a good start, Bree. That was me taking care of you.”
She drew back. He felt that withdrawal, although she had nowhere to go. Their conversation was so careful, so stilted, when they’d always laughed together and talked so easily about everything. Or had they? He tried to think back to the nights they lay in bed together chatting. They’d been comfortable, but he’d done most of the talking, not Breezy. If she spoke, it was to tell him about her day, about some of the children she supervised. Sometimes it was her worries for the girls. They hadn’t felt distant from each other, not like this.
She laughed easily, that was one of the things he remembered most. Her laughter. The sound of it. The way she turned everything bad into something good. It didn’t matter how he was feeling, and often it wasn’t good. He had nightmares and woke up dripping in sweat. He’d sit on the edge of the bed and she’d wrap her arms around him and the next thing he wasn’t thinking, only feeling. She could drive away every one of his demons so easily.
“It’s important to me to pay you back, Steele,” she said. “I never want to feel like that again, the way I did when you set me straight. It was hard to hear, but I know I had to learn to stand on my own two feet.”
He shook his head. “I was full of shit, baby. I wanted you safe and I said whatever I could to drive you away.”
She sent him a false smile when there had never been anything false about Breezy. “I appreciate you saying that, Steele, but you had plenty of time to look for me. If that’s what you do, find people, you could have found me. You didn’t. And that’s okay,” she added hastily. “I’m fine now. I needed to learn about myself and my own strength. I knew Zane was coming and I figured it out.”
“Baby …”
She winced. Visibly. “Please, don’t call me that. We’re not …” She trailed off, waving her fingers in the air as if that said everything. “It’s best if we keep this as impersonal as possible. Once we find Zane, I’ll leave, but if you want to stay in touch with him, of course that’s all right.”
His temper kicked in. He’d thought he’d mastered that long ago, but his woman had forgotten who she belonged to. If nothing else, she should have remembered who he belonged to. It was written on her skin, right where he’d had Ink tatt it.
“Impersonal?” He nearly roared the word at her. He leapt up and paced across the room to keep from hitting the wall just beside her head. “There’s nothing impersonal about us. You may have forgotten what it was like when