Page 102 of King
I shook my head angrily. “No, Dante. You’re protecting your club. I’m just the boring, saggy, old woman you’ve been stuck fucking, who managed to get caught in the crossfire.”
“No,”he roared, then grabbed my arm and pulled me to him. He stared down at me, nostrils flared. “I didn’t mean a fucking word I said that day, Ella. I told you I was trying to throw him off track so he wouldn’t go after you. I didn’t touch DD. I made up an excuse and I got her out of my room, and nothing happened. It was all a lie.” By the time he stopped speaking, his voice was almost a whisper. He raised his hand and cupped my cheek gently, and I was shocked when I realized his hand was trembling.
“I didn’t mean any of it, sugar.”
“Then how did you manage to hit on every single insecurity I have? I’ve just managed to heal from the damage Clayton inflicted on my self-confidence, and you shot it all to hell again in mere seconds.” I looked at him then and decided to let him off the hook. I knew what he was really worried about. “You don’t have to lie to me, Dante. I’ll still take care of Pop.”
“This isn’t about my dad, for Christ’s sake. I know you won’t let my fuckup end your relationship with him. You’re a better woman than that. You’re a better woman than I deserve,” he said bitterly, “but I’m going to keep fighting for you – for us – because I love you.”
I stiffened in his arms and pulled away. “Don’t. Just…don’t.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“You never said it before, so why should I believe you now?”
He reached for me again, refusing to let me pull away a second time. “I think I started falling in love with you the moment you pulled that knife on me. I knew it for sure the first time I was inside you. I rode home that night, and I knew my life had changed but by the time I was ready to tell you, you mentioned that you had broken things off with that insuranceguy you dated because he was moving too fast. I didn’t want you to do that shit with me, so I kept my mouth shut.”
“I started falling in love with you when you brought me flowers to apologize that first time. I knew it for sure by the time you sent me the forget-me-nots for my Gran.” He started to smile, but it faded when I shook my head sadly. My heart aching as I realized we were at an impasse.
“Love isn’t enough, Dante. I can’t trust my heart to a man who doesn’t trust me enough to tell me the truth about something that jeopardized my safety. You want me to trust you after the awful things you said, when you don’t trust me to keep your secrets safe. I’m not asking you to tell me everything…just the things that directly affect me, my kids, or you.”
He nodded and took a step back, and I thought that was it. I thought he was going to turn around and walk out the door and it would be over.
Then, he sat down on the couch and pulled me down next to him.
“A former member of our club left town a few months ago. He stole money from one of the business accounts and his joint account with his wife, too. Then he took off with a stripper he’d been fucking on the side. We’ve been trying to track him down, and finally got a lead on them a few weeks ago. When I disappeared for a few days right after we met, that’s what I was doing.”
He paused, as if waiting for a reaction, but I wasn’t willing to give him one. Not yet anyway. I needed to keep a tight hold on my emotions for the moment.
“It turns out, he’d gotten hooked on meth. He’d beaten his girlfriend, and I gave her a bus ticket to go back home to New York, and some money to start over. We couldn’t find him, andthat’s when I came back home. Thursday, she called me. Told me that the fucker had tracked her down and had beaten the shit out of her again. He ran when her neighbors called the cops. Then, the next morning, his ex-wife called me.”
He stopped and swallowed hard, then continued speaking. “She said Pic was in town and going off the rails. He wasn’t making much sense but told her that he blamed me because he was alone now. We had suspended him for fucking an Ol’ Lady from another club, and that’s how she first found out he’d been cheating. When she found about the stripper a little while later, she left him for good. Somehow in his mind, that’s my fault. When he realized that I’d helped the stripper get away from him, that sent him over the edge. He…” Dante clenched his fists as they rested on his thighs, then relaxed his hands as he finished his story.
“He told her that he’d heard about you, that I had a special lady now, and then told her he was going to kill you so I would know how it feels to lose the woman I love.”
He closed his eyes, and I saw the pain etched on his face. “I immediately sent Trick and Linc to your office to pick you up. I called to tell you, but you didn’t answer.”
I nodded as I remembered that first message.
“I sent them to your house, but you weren’t there either. We kept trying to reach you, but you weren’t answering any of us, dammit,” his voice rose, and he thrust his fingers through his hair again.
“While all this was going on, Bull was checking the clubhouse for bugs, because Pic mentioned something to his ex-wife that I’d said the night before when I was standing in the clubhouse kitchen.” My mouth fell open in shock at that news. The very idea of a listening device seemed like something outof a spy movie. “He found one on top of the refrigerator, which explained how Pic knew about you, and how he’d stayed one step ahead of us while he was on the run.”
“So how does that explain the things you said to Cowboy?”
Dante reached for my hands before I could pull them away.
“I panicked Ella. I fuckin’ panicked because I didn’t know where you were or how to reach you. I didn’t know if he’d already found you. I didn’t know, and I panicked. I needed to buy us some time to find you, or to find him. I thought…” Dante’s voice trailed off as he closed his eyes and breathed deeply, then met my gaze. He looked tortured by his memories.
“I thought that maybe if he believed you weren’t important to me after all, that I could divert his attention away from you, and you’d be safe until we could find you. So, I told Cowboy to follow me to the kitchen, that I had a plan, and for him to go along with whatever I said.”
“And it was just a coincidence that you mentioned the very things that Clayton complained about when I caught him cheating?”
Dante looked ashamed. “I’m so sorry, sugar. Maybe, somewhere in my brain I remembered you telling me those things, and that’s why I said them. I don’t know, but I do know that there wasn’t an ounce of truth to it. I’m begging you to let me spend my life proving that to you.”
I wiped away a tear as I pulled my hands from his and stood up. “Thank you for trusting me with the truth about what happened. I think…I think I need a little time to think things through. I’ve survived one failed relationship that I thought wasgoing to be my forever. I’m not sure I could survive another one, not if I’ve allowed myself to plan a forever withyou.”
“Ella,” Dante implored, “we won’t fail. I won’t let that happen. We’ll get our forever, sugar.”
“I need time to wrap my head around things. Please, just go home. We can talk again in a few days.”
He swallowed hard and looked away as he nodded.
“OK, sugar, but I’m warning you now. I’m not giving up on us…even if you do.”
