I was moving inside you, but I sure as hell haven’t. I’ll call you anything I damn well please and yes we are …” He waved his fingers in the air just as she had done. “You aren’t leaving when we find Zane.”
She regarded him as if he’d grown two heads. He realized she’d never really seen him lose his temper. In all the time he’d been with her, he hadn’t raised his voice. They weren’t that kind of couple. He’d always led, and she’d always followed. Breezy didn’t do things to upset him. Clearly, that had changed.
“You can’t tell me what I can and can’t do anymore, Steele,” she said quietly. “You threw me away and made it very clear what you thought of me—”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it. You had to leave. I told you that you had to leave, and you wouldn’t. You refused. I knew war was coming. It was too damned dangerous for you to stick around. I had to get you out of there.”
“You could have come with me.”
“I had to back Czar up.”
She shook her head. “Czar had everyone else to back him up, Steele. I had no one. You chose to stay with your club, and you threw me out knowing I didn’t have a clue how to take care of myself.”
He wished she yelled back or cried. She did neither. More, there was truth in what she said. It hadn’t occurred to him to leave the others. They were whole together. Safe. Had he tried to point out that logic she would simply counter that she hadn’t been safe or whole without him. Now she was. Now she was complete without him.
“There are eighteen of us, Bree.” He made an effort to drop his voice down to the level of hers. Quiet. Calm. “We were outnumbered and didn’t expect to walk away from that battle.”
Her eyes were on his face, moving over it, focusing completely on him in the way he remembered. He’d always loved that look, yet at the same time he had always found it disconcerting. He’d often turned away from her, afraid she’d see into him. Afraid she’d see what a fuckup he was. How damaged. Still, he had liked that she nearly always gave him her complete attention.
“You went against how many Swords with eighteen men?”
Steele wanted to curse, and he did—in his own language so she wouldn’t know what he was saying. Yeah, there were eighteen members of Torpedo Ink, but they hadn’t fought that fight alone. There had been others working with them, including Jackson Deveau, the deputy sheriff. If he told her that, came clean and was honest, it would negate everything he said.
He took a breath. It was important to tell her the truth no matter the cost. He wanted a relationship. A partnership. He had to treat Breezy with the respect he gave his club, even if the price was that he looked bad to her. “It wasn’t just Torpedo Ink. There were others, men and women Evan Shackler and the Swords had done things to. We were still very much outnumbered, but there were others with us.” She would never know just how hard it was to tell her the truth.
Those green eyes hadn’t moved from his face. He felt a little bit like she was seeing inside, into those dark, ugly places he didn’t want her to know about. The tip of her tongue darted out to moisten her lower lip reminding him of all the times that tongue had moved over his body, taking him straight to paradise.
“You chose the club, Steele,” she said quietly. “Don’t lie to yourself or me. That isn’t going to do us any good.”
There was something about the new version of Breezy that appealed to him even more than before. In that moment, he realized his woman had lived the same life he had. Not, obviously, with sexual predators when she was a child, but as a teenager. She’d still been beaten while she’d been young. She’d learned survival skills, just as he had. She knew when to go silent. She knew when to keep her head down. She knew how to make a drug deal and keep from getting killed.
She had done all that, but she’d never learned social skills or how to survive in the outside world—in a completely different environment. But Breezy had adapted because she was a survivor, and she’d done it on her own, needing to provide for