Page 39 of Beautiful Killer

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Zeke

I lay in the dark, staring up at the stars through the sky window. Sunny was curled in beside me, soft curves pressed in nice and tight. My arm was curled around her shoulders, holding her to me—and my fucking head was spinning like I’d downed half a bottle of Jack straight.

Because she felt perfect.

She felt like she belonged, right where she was. She’d given me more of herself tonight, let me get a little deeper. It just made me want more.

This was all so damn wrong.

What the hell was I doing?”

I’d fooled myself. I’d been fooling myself. I hadn’t wanted just one more night with her, I wanted a lot fucking more than that.

Shit.

Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. I quickly and gently released her, and slid out of bed. Tugging on some sweatpants, I took the stairs to the ground floor on shaky legs. My heart was racing. My right hand started trembling, images flashing through my head, blood, screaming, pain. Death. I was about to lose my shit and I didn’t want Sunny to see it. I made it across the floor and through the door to the garage. I was in the throes of full body shivers, sweat coating my skin, sliding down my spine, by the time I dropped down onto one of the weight benches.

Jesus. Fuck. Fuck.

Reaching under, I grabbed the tin I had stashed under there, pulled out the joint and lighter I kept inside, and lit up. Usually, I rode it out, the panic would pass eventually. But on rare occasions, like this, when I knew it was going to be bad, the only way I’d found of calming my shit down, of stopping the freight train of panic and derailing it, was to smoke. I wasn’t some stoner, it wasn’t a regular thing, but I’d occasionally smoked before I enlisted, and I knew it mellowed me out, so gave it a try in desperation. It’d helped. I took a deep drag and held it, then finally let it go, thankful for the tension that dropped a notch with that first hit.

I was fucked up, as fucked up as I was when I came home. The only reprieve I had was working out until I passed out, and occasionally getting stoned. I took another drag and shook my head. No, that was a lie. I had one other very effective cure, a way to take my mind off my own fucking cursed life—and she was asleep in my bed.

I slumped back against the wall and took another drag. I had no idea what I was doing, why I couldn’t stay away from her, if I even wanted to anymore. Nah, that was a lie as well—I knew that all right. I wanted her. I wanted her so bad I couldn’t think straight. I didn’t want to let her go back to her own life without me. And right then, sitting in the dark, I didn’t know if I could. I was the shittiest human being on the face of the earth for even contemplating keeping her in my life. I didn’t deserve her time, and I sure as hell didn’t deserve happiness, but I wanted both. The guilt that made me feel was immense, so big it was like a heavy boulder on my chest. Because the truth was, I didn’t have a life, nothing to offer a woman like Sunny.

I’d been living off guilt and anger and a driving need to somehow balance the scales—to take down as many lowlife pieces of shit as I could—like that would somehow make up for the good ones I’d watched die in front of me. Jesus, sometimes I felt like I wasn’t human anymore, that I’d forgotten how to be human.

Sunny made me feel like flesh and blood again, not some . . . thing.

I didn’t know how I felt about that.

Shit, it fucking frightened me.

I took another deep drag. I couldn’t let go of my pain, my guilt, and honestly, I didn’t want it to lessen, I didn’t want my life to be bearable. If that happened, my men, they’d start to fade, and I owed them more than that. I owed them my life.

What the hell was I going to do?

Somehow, I drifted off, sitting there, head at a fucked angle against the wall. I woke with a start, neck tight and sore as hell. I checked my watch. I’d been there all night. I dragged myself to my feet and headed back through the door. Like it always was in the mornings, the apartment side of the warehouse was bright, lit up from all the uncovered windows and the sky window above the mezzanine. I took in the room, my gaze immediately drawn to the sun goddess standing in my kitchen.

Sunny was cooking something, her back to me. Her wavy blond hair was down, falling free down her back, sun glinting off it. My gaze dropped lower. Jesus. She was wearing one of my shirts. It swamped her smaller body, finishing just above her knees. My immediate dirty thought was: what was she wearing underneath? Something about seeing her standing there, in my kitchen, wearing my shirt, remembering the way she’d come apart beneath me last night, the sounds of her cries when I’d brought her to orgasm, made me feel ten-fucking-feet tall.

Maybe that made me a cave man, but that’s how I felt around her.

I wanted to take care of her.

Protect her.

You can’t have her,my mind screamed at me.

She turned and her sexy mouth curled up on one side, giving me her crooked smile. Her lips were still puffy from sucking my dick, from taking my punishing kisses, and something about that, all of it, hit me like a ton of bricks, made my goddamn chest ache.

“There you are,” she said, gaze moving over my bare chest. She started twisting the ring on her thumb. “I thought you might be working out, so decided to make you breakfast.”

Her smile widened and the oxygen was punched from my lungs. Speech wasn’t an option right then. So I nodded and somehow managed to choke out a “thanks.”

I was so fucked it wasn’t even funny.