Page 48 of Tormented Bastard
One Step Up, Two Steps Back
Chase
The woman had only been back in my life for two days, and she already made me crazy. Between the incredible sex and her stubborn streak a mile wide, I didn’t know whether to fuck her or fight with her.
She’d been right. She could hold her own and damned if she didn’t.
We were both soaked to the bone in our clothes. She’d helped me by keeping Stewie calm and distracted while I hooked the winch up to his box car as Chance called it—and he wasn’t wrong—and pulled it out of the sand. I sent him along with a stern look and a growl that had him stammering he’d stay away from the beach until the storm was over.
The rain had slowed down considerably on our way back to the house, but wind gusts still blew sand across the road. “Help me keep an eye out for debris.”
“You got it.”
I glanced over at her as we drove down the road. She was looking out the side window, doing her best to see past the rain that pelted the glass. I looked back in front of me, shaking my head at myself. I needed to keep my head together and pay attention, not try to catch a glimpse of a nipple through her rain-soaked shirt. What the hell was wrong with me? I wasn’t that hard up.
In the back of my mind I knew it had nothing to do with being hard up and everything to do with who it was. Even if it was just sex.
But what if I were to take a chance? Contrary to the rules we’d set out, I wanted to spend more time with her. And our time was coming to an end. The storm was moving out and she’d be gone soon. I wasn’t ready to watch her leave again, even if I didn’t mind the view as she walked away. Every time she did, she left with a piece of my heart. A fact that I’d only just admitted to myself.
What if I were to do the speaking gig for her? Yeah, there’d be paparazzi, but if she were by my side, I bet I could handle it.
“When did you say that speaking gig was in New York?”
Out of the corner of my eye, her head whipped around to look at me. I glanced over to find her mouth had dropped open slightly. “Um, thirteen days, to be exact.”
“Has your assistant got any new leads?”
Her shoulders slumped, and she shook her head. “No. And she’s pretty resourceful, but no, nothing solid.”
I tapped my finger on the steering wheel as we rode down the nearly empty two lane road. Uneasiness still pushed in my chest, but the desire to be with Eden for a while longer was crowding that out.
“Do you have security set up? How much press will be there?”
Eden rolled her lips inward before answering. “There will be a lot of high rollers there that night. Several big names from the business world, as well as a few celebrities. I’ve hired one of the top security firms around that came recommended from one of the hosts. He’s pretty insistent on his privacy. As far as the press is concerned, there will be some there, but they will be restricted to the outside. There will be absolutely none inside.”
She shifted slightly in her seat to face me. “Chase, I promise you. I’ll do whatever you need to feel comfortable being there. I promise I’ll take care of you.” She paused and looked down. “But if the answer is still no, I’ll understand. Truly. After what you told me, I would never dream of asking you to put yourself in that position again.”
I glanced over at her and held her gaze for a moment before looking back to the road. “I know you wouldn’t. I appreciate that. When do you need to know my answer?”
“Well, the sooner the better because I have some marketing materials I need to finalize. But I have a backup plan for that. The biggest thing is I need to let the group who hired me know.”
I stopped the truck at a four-way stop and looked over at her. “Give me ’til tomorrow to think it over?” I asked.
A small smile played on her lips as she shifted back in her seat. “I can handle that.”
We both knew I was halfway gone to saying yes to her request. But I still needed time. Time to prepare myself for the inevitable questions I’d get, but that wasn’t the worst part. It was the ramifications after the event that I worried about the most. How much of the past would they dig up? Would they bring up my dead mother again? Would they find out about Eden and pry into her life as well? They had left her alone before, for whatever reason, but I wasn’t so sure they’d leave her be now.
With a sigh, I checked the crossroads and found it all clear. But just as I put my foot on the gas, I noticed something white moving fast toward the passenger side of the truck.
Eden reached over and laid a hand on my forearm that sat on the console. “You know, I was thinking. Maybe after the event we could spend some—”
For the second time in my life, I saw the world move in slow motion. And yet everything happened so fast. The turn of Eden’s head toward the blur of white, her scream, the crunch of metal colliding, the screech of tires. It seemed like an eternity passed for me to apply the brakes and for the truck to stop, then the impact of the crash. And then spinning until the back end of the truck hit a power pole and came to a stop.
Then it was quiet. Eerily quiet. It was as though I’d watched a crash on TV with the sound on mute. Then suddenly the sound came back on. All at once, I heard the hiss of the truck engine, the incessant thump of the windshield wiper blades against the glass, the pounding of the rain on the roof of the cab. The smell of rubber and antifreeze permeated the air.
I unclenched my hands from the wheel and looked over at Eden. She looked back at me, her chest heaving, her eyes wide. But she was alive and breathing.
I unhooked my seat belt and climbed across the seat, patting her body, checking for injuries. “Are you okay?”
