“Are you okay, grumpy?”
“Don’t I look okay?”
“Don’t get obtuse with me right now. I can dig out four kidneys as well as two, you know?”
Smirking, he sat on the edge of the bed, easing Angela across his lap, and he cupped the side of her face.
“Did you find them? Kill them?”
How simply she posed a violent question without a flicker of disgust.
No wonder she was perfect for him.
“Yes, and yes.”
“Good. Now can we go home?”
She pressed their noses together like she’d trained him to tolerate physical touch. He didn’t mind at all, and he squeezed her hips.
He’d once itched from the way she looked at him. All that hero-worshipping shining out of her dark eyes.
Now it was his drug of choice.
She’d always given him such blind trust, which he thought was foolish, even now. He could crush her bones with only his hands and destroy her little feelings with a word.
He held such power, and yet, he’d slit his throat with a blunt nail if he thought he’d deliberately harm her.
Lawless had fallen so far down the rabbit hole. He was crunching on carrots with the little hopping bastard.
He’d never lived for anyone before.
Now Angela was his entire life.
The reason he breathed.
The man of little patience had waited for his angel, so he couldn’t be held accountable if he wanted to gulp her down in slobbering bites.
She was so fucking tangible. He tasted her in every part of his body. And so when he was making two very dumb shitheads very dead for shooting up his truck, he hadn’t been thinking about how they were trying to kill him. No, he’d thought about how they nearly could have killed her.
It made their deaths all the sweeter to know it was in her name.
“Are you really okay?” She repeated, and when he didn’t answer, she sighed, “you’re getting old now, grumpy, you don’t move as fast as you once did. What if they got the surprise on you, huh?”
“You don’t eat, you won’t sleep, you try to escape from the only place I knew you’d be safe, andnowyou insult me?”
She gave him a whisper of a smile. “That hurts your massive ego, huh?”
Still bristling below his skin, two kills hadn’t been enough, and if not for Rider having to play diplomat with Ruiz, Lawless would have hunted that motherfucker down too and made Swiss cheese out of him. His men acted alone, he said. Nothing to do with him, he said. He wanted to play nice with theSouls, he said.
If it smelled like bullshit and looked like bullshit.
Lawless was pissed off.
“You’re about to find out, open your mouth.” Her kiss tasted sweet, and it proved what she meant to Lawless when it took some of his anger away with only a few tongue flicks.
Was it her heartbeat or his ripping the flesh from his bones?
In any case, he was about to prove how much of a prick he was by dealing with her fear in the only way he knew how.