Page 10 of Guarded By Atlas

“Okay, alright,” I mutter with a smile, already reaching for the cat food. The familiar crinkle of the bag is enough to have him crying up a storm that would make anyone living on my floor think I starve the darn feline. “I heard you the first time, Rusty. Jesus Christ!”

I curse out when he swats my hand as I fill his bowl with the salmon-flavored kibble before attacking it hungrily. I fill up his water and put away the cat food before returning to my coffee.

I try not to think about her. Not to obsess over the could be and would be. Unsurprisingly, I fail, and she’s still on my mind when I pour the coffee and take it with me to the shower. She stays even as I clean up and get dressed.

An hour later, as I head downstairs, I find myself wondering how to react if I see her in the communal kitchen for breakfast. Will I be able to hide my affection for her? The deep animalistic need to shove her against the wall and rail her like an animal, to fuck her so hard she’ll be feeling me for days.

The thought gives me pause, and I wonder if it’s even a good idea to see her at all, but a stronger part of me is concerned. I need to know that she slept well and see for myself if the dark circles I spied last night are gone.

The scent of pancakes and syrup is heavy in the air when I step into the kitchen. Everyone who lives in the clubhouse has an apartment with a full kitchen, but barely anyone uses theirs to do more than make coffee. We all gather here for breakfast, like a club family tradition, and it seems most everyone is already up and about, grabbing coffee and breakfast, but none of them are the woman I’m desperate to see.

I try to hide the disappointment I feel when I don’t spot her, grabbing my breakfast and settling at a table with Hound. Neither of us says a word as we dig in, and I’m just about finished polishing off the eggs on my plate when she finally walks in.

She appears well-rested, I note. The dark circles under her eyes are gone, but I also notice something else. The unhappy lines around her mouth and the sharp edge in her eyes. She stops in the entrance, and I watch as her gaze sweeps the room before landing on mine, and if possible, the fury in her eyes deepens.

“Marie!” a voice calls, before I can speculate what might be wrong, and she turns around to face Chelsea, who’s waving her over to the kitchen island where she and Jade are taking their turn at making breakfast this week, aided by one of our younger prospects, Kyle. I watch with surprise as a forced smile graces Marie’s lips.

“I’ll be right there,” she tells Chelsea before moving to the counter where she starts to fix herself a plate.

Something’s wrong.

Her face shows rest, but her body tells another story as she moves sluggishly, stacking her plate with pancakes before settling on one of the island’s bar stools where she can chat with her friends as she eats and they cook. She sits with her back to me, ramrod straight and tense. No one else seems to notice her dark mood.

Not one of her friends seems aware of the tension in her shoulders or the clench of her fist next to her plate. Not even the way her eyes dart around the room, avoiding eye contact. A smile is there, plastered on, but it doesn’t seem to reach her eyes.

“You know it’s creepy, right?”

Hound's voice draws my attention to him. “What?”

“The way you’ve been watching her since you brought her here.”

I shrug. “I just feel a little protective of her. You’d feel the same if you saw the way those fuckers left her.”

“Maybe,” he hums, waving his fork around. “Or maybe it goes beyond that. I don’t see Blaze stalking her with his eyes, and he was there too.”

“Blaze has a woman.”

“Exactly,” Hound says with a self-satisfied smirk.

I don’t respond. It does go beyond that, but I haven’t made sense of it myself yet, so I stay silent, turning back to watch her. The women are chatting animatedly all around her, and despite the smile on her face, she doesn’t seem to engage them. She sits, playing with her breakfast, and then without warning, turns her head and looks directly at me, and the smile falls away completely.

“Ouch.” Hound chuckles beside me, and Marie must notice she has more than just my attention because she quicklyturns away. If there was any doubt before that I am the cause of the sour look on her face, then it’s all gone now. “What the hell did you do to her?”

“Beats me,” I mutter, feeling my own temper surface and simmer.

“You must have done something terrible. From what I heard from Chelsea, Marie is an even-tempered woman and very likable,” he says, leaning back in his seat with a smug look on his face. “I mean, considering where she comes from.”

Now he has me intrigued. “What do you mean?”

“You don’t know, do you?” he asks, laughing when I scowl impatiently. “Fine, she’s the second child to a very wealthy couple. Think…expensive private schools, multiple vacation homes in and out of the country, and a very fat trust fund she got from her grandfather. The work she does at the nursing home, I imagine, is more of a passion than for money.”

An entirely different life from the one I lived in West Odessa for the first thirty years of my life. I remember the dust and waking up most nights as a teen from the wind howling through the cracked window of the trailer I lived in. I left the trailer park when I got my first paycheck, but there was no escaping the barren landscape or the endless sun.

Marie could have easily had her parents ferry her away, but she mentioned not wanting to worry them or do anything that could put their lives in danger. Money doesn’t always provide absolute protection, not from men like the Chrome Vipers.

Fuck, this only complicates matters. No sensible parent, wealthy or not, would want their daughter to be seen with a fucking beast like me. One look, and they’d be running to shield their daughter, tossing about all kinds of threats to keep meaway. That is, if I could actually get someone like Marie to want me back for more than a night.

I ought to stay away from her. Watch her from a distance like I have been doing, but goddamnit! I can’t shake the look she tossed me earlier, so when she leaves the kitchen, I’m right behind her. She barely has time to notice me before my hand is on her arm, and I’m pulling her down the hall to a quiet corner.

---