I have no good options.
I couldn’t stop thinking about what Sadie had said. I was actively and with great effort ignoring the stab I felt in my chest that she didn’t consider me a good option. But more, I was ignoring why I felt that stab. Why when she was close, I felt the need to touch her. Why I couldn’t stop thinking about her. And lastly, why it had taken ungodly restraint not to go to her in the last two days.
“I thought you wanted to go sit?”
Sadie’s question drew my attention back to her.
I’m tired of having no control.
Fuck.
I was treading on thin ice trying to navigate through a field of landmines. One misstep and I’d be swimming in the frigid water, but worse, I’d set Sadie off. She’d sold more stuff in the last two days and I couldn’t help wondering what else she’d sold that I couldn’t see. Did the woman still have a bed to sleep on? Did she have food in the fridge to eat? And this was where the road got dicey, and I didn’t know how to proceed. My first instinct was to demand we go to dinner so I could get a proper meal into her. My second was to disregard her protests and order five pizzas so she’d have leftovers. Neither of those options would win me any favors. She’d be pissed I was forcing something on her she didn’t want, taking away more of her control. Even if what she was controlling was the food she ate.
Totally fucked.
And did I care if she was pissed as long as her belly was full?
Nope.
I didn’t care. My need to take care of her won out. But I picked the option with less chance of an argument.
“I’m fuckin’ starved. Is there anything you don’t like on pizza?”
“Why would it matter what I like on my pizza?”
She sounded outraged, but even if she didn’t, her hand going to her hip and her eyes getting squinty would’ve been a dead giveaway I’d failed in my endeavor.
“Because I’m not gonna eat in front of you; it’s rude.”
“So leave.”
That wasn’t going to happen. I hadn’t seen her in two days, not even a glimpse of her. I’d avoided going to Letty’s bookstore precisely so I wouldn’t pop into Treats for a fix.
“We got stuff to talk about,” I reminded her.
“The story about how Nate screwed me over won’t take that long. By the time your food arrives, I’ll be done. As a matter of fact, we don’t even need to sit. He stole all my money. The end.”
I might’ve blinked a few times. I definitely felt my blood boil, and I most certainly should’ve curbed my reaction.
“He stole your fucking money!” I roared.
I watched Sadie flinch away from me for the second time, which only fueled my anger.
“I don’t wanna tell you again, Sadie, I would never hurt you. No matter how mad I get, you’re safe with me. Always.”
“You don’t look mad. You’re back to looking homicidal.”
I reckoned I did. Though premeditated murder would’ve been a more accurate description of what I was feeling.
“And yet you’re safe.”
“You didn’t look into me?” she asked.
I hadn’t. For some reason I wanted the story to come from her. I wanted her to trust me enough to tell me. That was a bad call made worse by Grinder sharing details with Zeus I didn’t have.
“I wanted you to tell me.”
Sadie blew out a stuttered breath, prompting me to drop my hands before I did something stupid like close the distance between us and kiss her. There was more I needed to know but we weren’t going to have the conversation standing. I wanted Sadie comfortable, or as comfortable as she could be sharing something she didn’t want to share. There was a sliver of my conscience that wanted to give her the privacy she wanted. A small part of me that felt like an asshole for demanding something of her she didn’t want to give. I would’ve given in and left the topic of her ex off the table if the Horsemen weren’t involved. But Zeus knowing about Sadie’s troubles was a game-changer. There was no telling what that asshole would do and with the new knowledge of what he’d done to Sadie’s friend—and I didn’t believe that was a one-time occurrence, though once was fucking bad enough—I needed the whole story.
It was with that in mind, I tagged Sadie’s hand and tugged her toward the couch while at the same time pulling my phone out to order dinner.
“Sit. I’ll order—”
“Should I bark for you, too? Or do you prefer yes, master?”
It was perverse the way her attitude turned me on.
“Yes, master works for me. But just to say, you wanna go down that road and play, be prepared to go all in.”
Her mouth dropped open. Maybe in shock. Maybe she was plotting to castrate me. Maybe the thought of me tying her up and fucking her silly turned her on as much as it did me.
“Red!”
Interesting.
“Red?” I asked. “Is there a reason you know what a safe word is?”
“I read a lot.”
I knew she did. When I’d first met her, she’d go into Smutties and leave with an armful of books, something I hadn’t seen her do in quite a while. I also knew what kinds of books Letty sold. It was called Smutties for a reason. The store was filled with romance books. Or as Brooklyn described them—steamy, sexy, smut romance.
I called them genius.
Any man not reading these books was missing out—big time. And the part they were missing out on was the front row look into the way a woman’s mind worked. And if you read enough of these books, by enough authors, you gained important knowledge about the kind of intimacy women craved. And newsflash: most of the time it wasn’t sexual but emotional. Which would be helpful for a man who wanted to win a woman but was having a hard time keeping one. It was interesting to read from a woman’s point of view how she viewed the opposite sex. However, the more I read the more I noticed a theme. Book after book, across genres, written by a variety of authors, seemed to put heavy emphasis on foreplay. So much so it made me wonder if there were men out there who either didn’t know how or didn’t put in the effort. This was mind-boggling to me. And there was one sex act in particular that got a lot of page time. Which to me was a clear indication men all over the world were falling down on the job and not eating pussy. At least not correctly.
Shameful.
“Right.”
“What? I do.”
“I know, I’ve seen you in Smutties buying books. So I knew what kind of books you read. I just didn’t take you for kink. Small town I could see, or cowboys, maybe even PNR, or—”
“How do you know what PNR is?”
“Who doesn’t know what paranormal romance is?” I teased.
Once again, her mouth gaped open.
This time, I knew it was from shock.
I took advantage of her bewilderment and gently suggested, “Take a load off and I’ll call in a pizza. After that, I’ll tell you what I know about romance.”
“You read romance?” she inquired.
However, she did this while taking a seat, so I threw her a bone.
“I’m partial to romantic suspense. Small town is okay. PNR’s not my style. But I just started a new rom-com and I have to say, it’s better than I thought.”
Sadie’s eyes went as wide as saucers.
It was cute.
It also made me want to kiss the fuck out of her.
What I wouldn’t tell her was, my teammate Davis Wright suggested the book.
I pulled my phone out and called in three large pizzas while Sadie’s eyes went from wide and bewildered to narrow and knowing.
She knew my game but didn’t call me on it when I sat next to her on the couch.
“Good thing you’re selling this couch, baby, it sucks,” I told her, trying to find a section of the cushion that didn’t collapse under my weight.
Unfortunately, while I was doing this I missed her smile, but I didn’t miss her burst of laughter.
Christ, I missed that sound.
She used to laugh all the time. Same with smiling. Both came quick and frequently. But both were a rare occurrence now.
“I know. I bought it because I liked the way it looked. But three months into owning it I hated it.”
“Why didn’t you get rid of it and buy something new?”
“Because it was three months old and that would’ve been wasteful.”
“It wouldn’t have been if you sold it.”
“Then what? The new owner keeps it for three months and decides they don’t like it and throws it away? Our landfills are overflowing. I didn’t want to contribute a six-month-old couch to the problem just because I thought it was uncomfortable.”
“A Greenpeacer,” I mumbled.
“An environmentalist,” she corrected. “And you live on this planet, too, Reese, I hope you recycle.”
I did recycle, but if I owned a shit couch that was uncomfortable and lumpy, I would’ve tossed that shit out immediately and bought something new.
Since the couch in question was currently listed for sale, the conversation was moot. And since the pizza was ordered I wanted the topic of Nate to be done by the time it arrived so she could relax and enjoy dinner.
“How’d you meet Nate?”
Sadie’s face registered surprise, her head jerked, and she hesitated before she asked, “Why?”
“I just wanna know how you met him.”
I understood her hesitation when she told me, “He targeted me, if that’s what you’re really asking.”
That was exactly what I was asking.
“How do you know?”
“Well, my first clue was the PI I hired told me Nate’s driver’s license was fake. The second clue was Nathan Mallard came into existence a month before I met him. The next big, huge glaring clue was that Nathan Mallard ceased to exist a week after he cleaned me out.”
What the hell, she’d hired a PI?
“Did the police make an arrest?”
“Nope. I made a report but the police can’t find him. I paid for a PI for as long as I could but he wasn’t getting anywhere and it was costing me a fortune.”
Sadie had paid for a PI when two doors down from her bakery a team of investigators hung out on a regular basis.
What the fuck?
“Why didn’t you ask one of us to run him?”
Sadie’s shoulders slowly lifted, and her eyes slid away.
I knew why; she was embarrassed.
“You know the saying, everyone’s one paycheck away from bankruptcy?” she asked instead of answering me.
“Yeah.”
“Well, that was not me. I had five months of padding in the business account at all times. That was five months of rent, payroll, insurance, and loan payments. My bakery does well, so even after Nate cleaned out the account, I would’ve been able to pay my monthly bills. But the two months before he left, he stopped paying the rent, the insurance, and my business loan. It was a struggle to get those current. But I did it.”
Five months of operating funds in the bank was a lot of money to steal.
“How much did he take?”
“A little over eighty-five K.”
Fucking hell.
“If you got caught up, how are you behind now?”
“One of my ovens went out.” Sadie huffed a laugh that held no humor and continued, “Of course, it was a year out of warranty, and I stupidly declined the extended warranty thinking if it ever broke, I’d pay out of pocket instead of paying monthly for something I might never use. Well, it turns out, out of pocket was over ten thousand dollars. I looked for a used one in good working condition instead of fixing mine but, good working condition on a sixty-thousand-dollar oven is more than ten thousand. So, I had no choice but to fix it. And that cut deep. That’s a month’s rent and half my payroll. Since I had to pay my employees and the bank threatened to call my business loan if I missed another payment, I couldn’t pay my rent. And it spiraled from there.”
Bad fucking luck.
And she’d wasted money on a PI.
And now she was selling her belongings.
“What’s the name of the PI you used?”
“Why? He didn’t find anything.”
“I need any information he did find.”
That was half the reason. The bigger reason was I wanted to make sure the PI hadn’t taken Sadie for a ride the same way Nate had.
“Wait, you’re not gonna waste your time trying to find Nate, are you?”
Waste my time? The fucktard stole eighty-five K from her, and she thought me looking for the tool was a waste of time?
“Can’t imagine why you’d think me finding the asshole who stole your money would be a waste of my time, except if you’re back to thinking what you’d owe me if I did. So, I’m gonna put that shit to bed right now. Nothing. Hear me, Sadie, I want nothing from you in return for getting your money back. And while we’re on this topic, it’s important you get this, so I’ll be thorough. The loan I offered you is still on the table. Tracking down Nate, taking your back with your brother and the Horsemen has fuckall to do with me fucking you. The two things are aside and separate from each other. I’m gonna repeat that, baby. I was clear in your office, I enjoyed what we shared, I want more, and I’m hoping we can come to a mutually pleasurable arrangement. But if we don’t, I’m taking your back. If we do, I’m taking your back. So, the only question is, will I be doing that while at the same time spending time in your bed? But one has nothing to do with the other.”
“A mutually pleasurable arrangement?”
“Straight up, yes, an arrangement. I’m not asking you for anything more than I can give. A really fucking good time. I don’t want to be tied down and I’m not looking to tie you up.” I paused to reconsider my last statement. “Second thought, I’m thinking tying you up would fall under the mutually pleasurable arrangement. But I think you feel me. I don’t do relationships.”
“I don’t want a relationship,” Sadie told me hotly.
“Good. Then it seems we’re on the same page.”
Before she could confirm or deny my assertion her doorbell rang.
Neither of us made a move to answer it.
And the longer I held her gaze, the deeper I was pulled in.
Then I started wondering for whose benefit I gave my no relationship speech. Me or her?