Lumberjacked (A Holiday Lumberjack Mountain Man Romance) - K.C. Crowne Page 0,70

relax. Everything that had happened was crashing down on me. My life had gone from simple and boring to complicated and dangerous in record time. It sounded like a damn novel.

I was breathing harder and harder, hyperventilating. I clawed at Aleks’s arm. “Let me out!”

He shoved me away from him, and I hit the door hard. “I said calm the fuck down,” he growled through gritted teeth, fighting with the wheel to keep the truck steady on the uneven terrain. “I’m going to run us into a tree if you don’t sit tight and shut up.”

I wasn’t thinking straight. My vision was starting to go dark around the edges. My ears were ringing. I had to get out of there. I would not allow myself to become a victim.

“Let me out!” I shouted and turned around, trying to bash the window behind us that looked out over the truck bed. I hit it with my elbow until bursts of pain shot into my arm. Next to me, Aleks was shouting, but I didn’t hear what he was saying. I’d gone into fight-or-flight, or a strange combo of the two.

Something hit me hard over the head, and I fell away and against the door. My vision blurred. The last thing I saw was Aleks, muttering to himself, before the world went black.

Viktor

I’d never been the sort of man who needed to clean up a mess. I didn’t make mistakes. The few times I’d had to step in, I’d taken care of whatever someone else had fucked up without difficulty.

That was who I was. Viktor. The Bullet. A nickname someone had called me once. Or the Butcher. The Reaper. The Shadow. Death.

I’d had so many names over the years, I’d stopped thinking about them too hard. I hadn’t worn them as a badge of honor or a compliment. I saw them as insults, now. I wished I could have been someone else so Angela would have wanted to stay.

It would be best to move on. I was out here for a reason, and Maksim was looking for me. It wasn’t safe for Angela to be anywhere near me, and I’d known that from the start.

But God, she’d come to mean so much in such a short time, I had no idea how I was supposed to just forget about her. Angela wasn’t like other women. I’d had my fair share of lovers, but none of them had been like her. She was elegant and graceful with a quick mind and a sharp tongue.

And she wasn’t mine. Not anymore. Dammit, had she ever been? I hadn’t done enough to keep her. I hadn’t done enough to show her a life she might want.

What the fuck was I talking about? How could this life be something she’d want? I was an ex-assassin. A killer. Sure, the guys I’d taken out hadn’t exactly been innocent – there were people darker than sin out in the world. That didn’t mean that I’d done the right thing, though. I’d still ripped families apart. I’d still exacted judgment when it wasn’t my place to do so.

Just because I’d decided it wasn’t who I wanted to be anymore didn’t mean that I didn’t still have blood on my hands. Why would Angela want to love a monster like me?

I had to stop thinking about her, get my head back into the game. I had to be careful, I had to look after myself. I had to watch my own back, because no one else was going to watch it for me. I was alone in this world.

It was better this way.

I started tidying up. I worked with a fevered frenzy, scrubbing and sweeping, working my fingers to the bone. I’d already tired out my arms, and they were numb as I cleaned. I just couldn’t seem to stop working. The moment I stopped working, I started thinking.

And fuck that shit.

In the room, I pulled off the sheets and made the bed with new ones. I would have to wash these, get her scent out of them or I would lose my mind at night when I lay there, the smell of her reminding of me everything I’d lost. I flipped the mattress too, for good measure.

And found her phone. I turned it on. It was wrong of me to snoop, but it was a force of habit to look at any information I could find. I prepared myself to hack into her system, getting past her facial recognition software