Rock Chick Reawakening (Rock Chick 0.5)(25)

Lord.

He was killing me.

“I’m not yours,” I whispered.

“Honey, please start paying attention.”

At that, I shut up.

Marcus didn’t do the same.

“That’s the man I am, Daisy,” he declared. “And that’s going to happen regardless of what I say next. Which is, right now, you have one chance. If what I just shared scares you. If it turns your stomach. If it’s something that you don’t want in your life, I’ll walk away. You can have all the bacon and you’ll never see me again. But if you don’t say…right now…that’s something you can’t take, then we’re sharing the bacon, the eggs I’m going to make, and a whole lot more when the time is right.”

At the thought of never seeing him again, I wrapped my arms around my stomach and kept my eyes glued to him.

Marcus didn’t move. He kept watching me. He did it silently.

And as he did it, something settled in him, in his frame and in his face.

It was a sight to see. A thing of beauty.

And it scared me spitless.

After a while, he spoke, his voice just as firm but a whole lot more gentle.

“In terms I hope you’ll understand, darling, in fairytales, the prince vanquishes the wicked queen. The evil stepmother. The malicious goblin. In real life, Daisy, to avenge wrong done to his princess, if the need arises, the prince puts a bullet in somebody’s brain.”

Yes.

Killing me.

Without me telling it to do it, my mouth whispered, “Why?”

“I just explained why.”

“No.” I shook my head. “Why me?”

I asked and Marcus didn’t hesitate even a second to answer.

“Because my mother left me when I was six. She wasn’t a loss. She left me with my father, who was a decent enough father, a good man, but a stupid one and very weak. We didn’t have much because he wasn’t capable of giving me much, but there were more reasons. We didn’t live in squalor. However, the little we had wasn’t much better. Then, when I was ten, he’d gotten himself under the weight of a debt he couldn’t repay since he made dick but he also liked to play the ponies. They busted out his knees first. Then they took his thumbs. After that, they took his life.”

“Oh my God,” I breathed.

“He had a daughter from another relationship, my half-sister. She grew up with her mother and she didn’t have much either. The good in my dad, he made sure my sister was in my life. As much as we could be, we were close. When Dad was killed, she was all I had left. And she had a choice. Take me on or let me go into the system. She took me on. She was twenty. And she put a roof over my head, food on the table, and a lot of love in my life. But the first two things she gave me, she did it stripping.”

Understanding dawned, I felt my body jolt and then I felt my face set.

Marcus didn’t miss it.

“Stop right now thinking what you’re thinking,” he clipped out.

“Hard not to, sugar,” I returned.

“She married a man twenty-five years older than her when I was sixteen. It was a love match. They haven’t slept a single night without each other since their wedding and they retired to Florida five years ago. He was definitely a good guy and definitely decent. But he didn’t have much either, though he did his best. They retired to a four-bedroom house with a pool that’s in a development that has three top-notch golf courses because I worked my ass off to make certain that would be the way they ended their years together.”

I ignored all this, no matter how hard that kind of beautiful generosity was to ignore, and I did it in order to ask cuttingly, “You savin’ your sister in this fairytale of yours that you’re corrallin’ me into, Marcus?”

“No,” he answered immediately.

But he wasn’t done.

“I had a mother I barely remember, a trail of women my father couldn’t keep, and a sister who loves me maybe more than the three kids she had with Doug because we toughed it out together. We had bad times. We had lean times. We had everyone around us treating us like shit because they thought they knew who we were by what she did and how my father was. We had interfering teachers telling themselves they were doing the honorable thing by trying to take me away from her. Most important in all that, we had a family. It was just the two of us but she loved me and I loved her and that was all we needed. She gave me a great deal. And right now, what you need to know that she gave me is the understanding of exactly the kind of woman I would eventually claim as mine.”

“And what kind is that?”

“One who’s beautiful. One who’s smart. One who’s kind. One who’s strong. One who doesn’t give a shit what people think about her. One who’d do what she could for anyone who asked no matter if it isn’t convenient or easy. One who knows what having nothing feels like so she knows what matters and to appreciate it when she gets it.”

“And you think that’s me?”

“No. I know it’s you.”

“You’re sure,” I scoffed.

He looked around the kitchen and then back at me, lifting up his hands at his sides, and sounding exasperated when he asked, “What do you think I’m doing here?”

I knew what he was doing there.