Page 41 of The Fixer

This man, this vicious, brutal man, was the same one who had cooked for me, cleaned my apartment, saved me twice from falling straight to the floor. And the agony he’d felt the one time he didn’t catch me was clear in the way he’d prodded my head with gentle fingers before pulling me close to him. Before lowering his face toward mine.

There was a moment, out in the hall, when I thought he was going to kiss me. It both frightened me and thrilled me. I hadn’t been kissed since…

Since Nathan.

Well over two years ago.

Cruel memories overtook me, and I fought against them with everything I had. All my training, all the things I knew I should do to keep him from tearing me down. But a different kind of brutality lived in those memories, and it ripped into me, exposing scars and opening old wounds that festered and oozed with a pain that had never fully healed.

Jet turned to me as if he’d heard my painful thoughts. Those strange silver eyes glinted with darkness, narrowing on me as his chest heaved.

“You’re here.” It was a breath. A whisper. Full of awe and a sad disbelief.

Rising from the floor, I took a single step toward him. “I told you I would be.”

He closed the distance between us, his big body towering over me, somehow making me feel safe even as I wanted to shrink away. He grabbed me, hands gentle yet fierce in their grip, and pulled me into his sweaty chest.

“I wasn’t sure you would stay.”

“Oh, goodness.” My hands slid across the wide expanse of him, gathering wetness as they slipped toward his hips. “Jet, you’re soaked.”

He let go with a single hand, still holding me close. And that hand went to what I was beginning to believe was his favorite spot: my throat. His fingers tightened and pressed but didn’t stop my breath. Instead, he stole it straight from my chest.

My body reacted to him in ways that were downright embarrassing. Here he was, fingers wrapped around my throat, one wrong twitch away from ending my life. And there I was, nipples tightening beneath my shirt as warmth and wetness pooled between my legs.

Never in my life had that happened. Never had a man evoked such a strange mix of emotions. Fear and desire. Anxiety and my own kind of awe. Fire lit my skin as his thumb slid toward my jaw, forcing me to look up at him even though I already was.

His tongue traced his bottom lip before his teeth clamped down on his flesh. My eyes fluttered, my fingers gripping his hips.

“Did you eat?” Jet’s voice was gravel and grit. He loosened his grip at my throat without letting go.

“Yes,” I managed, though I didn’t know how. My head swam with the need for oxygen, and I pulled in a shaky breath.

And in that breath, Jet let me go, so slowly it hurt. His silver eyes widened slightly before he stepped back. His hand smoothed over his sweaty chest and he gave me a tight smile.

“I should go shower.”

Jet raced around me to the door. Left me there, blinking into the empty room. I wanted to hang my head, to give into the voices from the past.

“You think you can leave me? No one else will want you, you little bitch. No one’s gonna want to fuck a little whore like you. You’re nothing without me. Nothing at all.”

I wasn’t nothing. I knew that. I knew I was more than what my ex told me I was.

Sometimes I just needed a reminder.

Needed someone to look at me the way Jet did. To touch me the way Jet did. To hold me, take care of me. To remind me I wasn’t the horrible things I’d come to believe during the years that Nathan tore me down.

But when Jet ran from me like that…

Something in my heart wanted to pick him apart. I needed to understand the man who pulled reactions from my body I barely knew how to contain.

Nathan never made me feel like that.

Though I hated to compare the two, it was hard not to. I was woefully inexperienced. Brooke had tried to set me up a couple of times, both before and after Nathan, but they never made it past dinner.

Nathan was the only man I’d ever been with. I met him at the beginning of my second semester in college, and he’d wound his way into my life until he was the only thing there. He’d taken everything I was and tore it away until I was only a fragile, broken shell.

Maybe I wasn’t enough.