Page 532 of The Tempted

“No, of course not. This coming from a man with three sons. I wonder if you had a defiant little girl, what you would say?”

That last part was definitely a dig toward me.

Riggs was a shit head.

Wolf laughed as I peeked over the magazine and watched him get onto the elevator. Riggs waved goodbye to him and once the doors shut he turned his eyes back to mine.

“Come on little Miss Defiant,” he called.

I knew it!

I dropped the magazine, rose to my feet and hurried the doors, ringing the buzzer before I turned back to him.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re not welcome,” he grunted. “I never helped you.”

“Of course you didn’t,” I winked, remembering the last time he caught me and Blackie.

“Hurry up, I have a refrigerator I need to pick up,” he mumbled.

The nurse buzzed me in and I ran through the glass doors, leaving my accomplice to his pity party. I went over to the nurse’s station and after I found out which room he was in, I started for him.

I was driven by my need to see him, to make sure he really was alive and that he didn’t leave me. I wanted to hold his hand, lace my fingers with his, and thank him. Not just for switching places with me but for every single time he’s been there for me, choosing my life over his.

I should’ve given his condition more thought, if I would’ve prepared myself maybe then my heart wouldn’t have stopped for the split second it did when I laid eyes on him. He looked so different lying there, powerless and at the mercy of the machines keeping him alive, so fragile. He didn’t look like the badass biker most men feared and woman tried to conquer, he wasn’t the hero sent to rescue me, or the poor widow who didn’t know how to grieve.

He was just a man.

A man who had been knocked off his chrome pedestal, a man flawed and fractured by the shitty hand dealt to him. He was Dominic Petra, not Blackie, not one of Satan’s Knights, not even the man I call Leather but, simply Dominic.

We weren’t Leather and Lace.

We were strangers.

It was that moment, with the steady hymn of his heart rate playing in the background, Dominic Petra and Lacey Parrish first met.

We were both stripped of everything we’ve come to know about each other.

We were the flawed characters of a story.

He was the addict who chose the wrong path.

And I was the mentally ill girl who loved him.

I’ve never admitted that to anyone.

That I think I’m ill.

Or that I love him.

I don’t know when it happened, if it was something that grew over time or what but, it felt as if I had been doing it my whole life…like I was born to love both Dominic Petra and the fractured soul of Blackie.

I walked to the side of his bed as my eyes swept over in him, taking in every machine, wire and tube attached to him, the one that breathed for him, the one that monitored his heart rate and the other half a dozen—I had no idea what their purpose was. I leaned over, gently I brought my fingertips to his cheek.

“Leather,” I whispered, as a tear escaped the corner of my eye.

As much as I wanted to know the man Blackie was before all the pain, the man in the photograph he kept in his room, I never wanted it to be like this.

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