Page 29 of Danger Close
“I ain’t scared of you, Cobra,” Greg snarled. “You are on the wrong fucking side of this.”
Chapter 13
VD
Cobra
The kid walked away, back to his beat-up old truck. The engine rumbled, and he turned on his headlights. I had no doubt that he’d do exactly what he’d said. He’d be right up on my ass the entire way back to the farmhouse.
I should just take her back to the Vasiliev mansion…
Then she’d be away from the prying eyes of some love-struck pup, and all this family drama. Then we could sit. We could talk. We could share a drink, and just look each other in the eye and figure out where the fuck we went wrong.
I sighed, annoyed. I’d decided to bring her to the farmhouse instead of our reclusive mansion because the boy acted like I would ever,ever, harm Teri. When I looked into her rich, blueeyes, I knew that she had the same fear. So off to the fucking farmhouse, and it’s many, many occupants, we would go so that I had witnesses.
At least I’d be able to say goodnight to my kid.
I walked around the front to the driver’s side, swiping at a pamphlet that had been left under the windshield wiper along the way. Not being used to having a passenger, I tossed the flyer onto the passenger’s seat before I remembered she was there, and the junk mail landed on her lap.
When Teri shivered, tugging my leather jacket tightly around her, I blasted the heater, before I pulled the car out into the sparse rural traffic.
“I’m sorry I hit you,” she whispered.
I blinked, confused, before I remembered that she had slapped me not once, but twice.
Maybe my warped brain had gotten so used to violence over the past three years that it had slid off me like water on a duck.
I wasn’t ready to let her off the hook, though.
“Do you know how worried I was?” I asked, my fist tightening on the steering wheel. “When I stepped outside and couldn’t find you? Do you know how terrifying that feeling was?”
The sparse streetlights whisked past us, the light and shadow dancing over her features.
The fear that had enraged me was gone, and now… all that was left was the deep-seated longing and worry that made me want to reach out and take her hand.
“I didn’t think you’d care,” she said, so quietly I almost didn’t hear her.
“Of course, I care!” I yelled, restraining the urge to hit my fist on the steering wheel, because I knew that even though she had slapped me, any display of temper and violence would trigger her into recoiling from me.
I reigned myself in, took a deep breath, and tried again.
“Of course, I care, Princess. ” I was still mad. Fucking livid. But I reached one hand over the center console, and put my hand on her thigh, giving it a squeeze. “You’re the mother of my child. I have always cared.”
It was disturbing how easilyMissus Guerrohad slipped from my lips. Was she technically still a Guerro? Yes. As far as I could tell. But she wasn’tmyMissus, and that fact felt wrong.
“Then why did you never try to contact us? Why haven’t you tried to find us in all these years?” Real, and absolute pain bled from her voice. My heart clenched, and my breath hitched.
I fought the urge to swerve the car to pull over to the side of the road because those words out ofhermouth didn’t make sense, unless we lived in alternate realities.
“The fuck are you talking about?” I was losing a grip on my temper. “I wrote to you every day for months. Postcards. Letters.When those went unanswered, I went to every week, then every month because I assumed that you were exhausted from being a single mother.”
She turned in her chair, but the night was too dark for me to take my eyes off the road when kamikaze deer were likely to jump out onto the street at any point. If I were in a truck, I’d care less. But I was in an Audi, and deer are notoriously uninsured.
“Imagine my surprise when I received divorce papers. Reason?Abandonment.” There was no worse Dear John letter in the world.
“I never got any letters.” She was as surprised as I was. She wasn’t lying. I could tell.
“I sent them. They got to the post office in Barstow. I checked.” I had hacked into their scans, which was quite a feat thirty years ago, before the internet was truly a thing. Getting into databases often meant sending a person to physically look at documents—which was exactly what I did. I wanted to ensure that if I was, indeed, being snubbed, it was because she had fallen out of love with me.
