Page 72 of Riding Dirty

And that’s when my embarrassment instantly fades to shame, rage, and anger. That asshole. Coast shifts closer, and his lips touch the center of my forehead. He reaches beneath my arms and drags me up the bed. I rest my back against the headboard begrudgingly.

“I don’t,” I whisper. “But I need to.”

“No, you don’t,” Coast murmurs.

I feel his hand against the center of my chest. My heart races, slamming against my chest as my gaze searches his. He knows more than I care to admit about my past, about my childhood.

They’re all things I wish I could forget ever happened, and Alex knows that. He also knows that I would do just about anything to ensure that I never, not ever, turn into my mother.

That was the biggest insult he could ever sling at me, and he did it.

“I should.”

“Baby,” he murmurs.

I like it when he calls me baby. I love it when he calls me Elodie, and my world explodes with fireworks when he calls me Haze. So I shut up, and I let him talk. Because he calls me baby, I let him talk.

“The past is fucked up. My sister lived a nightmare, and I couldn’t save her. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t save her. I wanted to, and I lived with that for a long time.”

“I don’t want to be my mother,” I whisper.

He hums. “Judging by what I’ve found out about her, you’re nothing like her.”

“I’m not,” I snap.

His lips twitch into a smirk. “And I’m not my sister. Our relatives’ lives do not mirror our lives. Even if we’re raised by them, or they’re raised with us, we make our own choices and decide our lives. They don’t make them for us anymore.”

His words flow through me. I don’t know if they should, but they do anyway. Pressing my lips together, I roll them a few times as my gaze searches his. I cup his cheek, my thumb sliding across his bottom lip.

“He knew what to say to make it hurt. He doesn’t want you with me.”

“He doesn’t want us involved in whatever that was on the news,” I murmur.

I can’t look away from him. He’s so damn beautiful, his light-brown eyes consume every fiber of my being. I don’t know how the hell he wants anything to do with me, but I’m not going to ask, either.

I don’t want to.

Because if I ask, then maybe he’ll realize he doesn’t actually want me.

“It’s too early for us to talk about weddings and shit,” he murmurs, “but I didn’t wait almost fifty years for you, Haze, to just let you walk away because of a fuckin’ fire.”

I almost laugh, because it’s not just a fucking fire, and he knows that. It’s so much more than just a fire. It’s an event center that I cleaned just a few days ago. It burned down, and I think I should get some answers to that.

“Just a fire?” I ask.

He arches a brow, his gaze searching mine. I watch as his lips twitch into a smirk. “Babe,” he murmurs. My nose scrunches at that. I don’t think I like babe so much. I like baby, Haze, and Elodie. I don’t care for babe.

“Just a fire,” he murmurs. “You’re committed?” he asks. “You’re my old lady.”

My nose scrunches up again at the sound of those two words—old lady. I don’t want to be that at all, but he doesn’t say it in a way where it’s a bad thing. In fact, it almost seems as if it’s some kind of endearment. That doesn’t mean I have to like it.

“Old lady?” I ask.

He chuckles. “It’s what we call our women. You would be like a wife to me as far as the club was concerned, more than a girlfriend.”

His hand wraps around the front of my throat, my eyes slide closed as his thumb makes firm circles there, and my belly dips at the touch. I want those circles from that thumb to circle my clit.

“Then I guess yes, I’m committed,” I exhale.