King's Reign (Sydney Storm MC #6)(62)

Devil was the only brother who knew this story of mine. He’d caught me in a bad moment one night, and after some whisky loosened my tongue, I’d shared some shit about that with him.

I nodded and jerked my chin towards the door. “Go. We’ve got a lot of shit to get through today.”

My phone rang as he exited the room.

Ivy.

“Don’t tell me you’re calling for me to fucking take you somewhere today. I’m busy,” I said as I answered it.

“I really need you to swing by, King. There’s something wrong with the tap in the shower, and I can’t get it to turn off. Brian’s out taking one of the girls to an appointment, and I’m worried about the amount of water we’re wasting.”

“Jesus,” I muttered. “I’ll send one of the boys over. Sit tight.”

She turned silent before saying, “Oh, okay. I thought if you came, we could talk over some more of that stuff you helped me with the other day.”

She’d made me sit and listen to her plans for getting back on her feet. She hadn’t asked my opinion on anything, and I hadn’t given it, but it had felt like she’d expected me to make offers to be by her side while she got to work on it all. That had thrown me, but I hadn’t brought it up. I figured I was reading too much into shit, because surely she realised we didn’t have a shot at ever being a couple again. But here we were again, and I knew I had to deal with this before it got out of hand.

“I’ll be there in about half an hour,” I said and ended the call.

I didn’t have the time for this today, but it was something I had to make the time for. I’d meant it when I told Lily that Ivy was in the past. Now I had to make Ivy understand that, too.



“Thank you,” Ivy said when I entered the kitchen after fixing the shower. “Brian would have been super stressed about the cost of all that water if he’d come back to a running shower. He seems worried all the time over money.”

I dumped my tools on the table. “It’s why I like working with him. He runs a tight ship.”

“I wasn’t saying it was a bad thing, King. He seems like a good guy.”

“That’s because he is a good fucking guy.”

She frowned, coming towards me. “Why are you so short with me today?”

I raked my fingers through my hair. I’d been in a mood from the minute I’d stepped foot inside the place. Knowing I needed to discuss shit with her had me on edge. I was a bastard for what I was about to do. I’d fucked Ivy up in the past, and now I was about to cut her loose again, and that shit didn’t sit right in my gut. But I couldn’t figure out another way through this.

“We need to talk about some stuff,” I said, holding her gaze, trying to get a feel for her mental state. So far, she’d been happy to see me and had jabbered on the whole time I’d worked on the shower. But fuck knew, Ivy could switch gears as fast as I could, so I needed to tread carefully.

“What stuff?”

“You and I stuff.”

Her face lit up and she came to me, moving in closer than necessary. “I’m all for that.”

Jesus, she thought I meant something I didn’t.

I shook my head and took a step back. “No, that’s not what this is about. This won’t ever be about that.”

Her face clouded over with disappointment. “Really? You expect me to believe you would protect me from my husband and then from Brant, bring me to Sydney, set me up here, come whenever I call you over, fix stuff for me, drive me to job interviews, and yet not want to be with me? I don’t buy that bullshit for one minute, King. You want us to be together again.”

Fucking hell.

I could see where she was coming from, but what the fuck happened to people just fucking looking out for each other because they cared about their safety and happiness? Why the fuck did there have to be conditions and expectations around stuff like this?

“I don’t want us to be together again so you need to get that out of your head now. I did all that shit because even after all these years and after everything we’ve been together, I care about you. Just not in the way you think.”

The disappointment on her face morphed to anger. “That is such utter crap and you know it. Men don’t do stuff for women they don’t wanna fuck.”

“That’s some twisted fucking thinking, Ivy. Of course they fucking do. And trust me when I say I don’t wanna fuck you.” I hadn’t intended to be hurtful, but I saw that reaction in her eyes.

Before I could stop her, she closed the distance between us, grabbed my face, and kissed me.

It was a hard, desperate kiss, and I felt nothing.

Nothing but the realisation we really had reached the end of the line.

I’d already come to that understanding, but this absolutely and undeniably confirmed it. Where her touch had once sparked the kind of passion that would consume me for days, it now left me empty.

I took hold of her arms and forced her away from me. Staring down at her, I bit out, “Don’t ever do that again. When I tell you something, I fucking mean it. And I mean it when I say I don’t want to be with you.”

She stared at me through tears. Hot, angry tears. Not sad ones. And then the rage came, and I knew this was repressed anger by the violence of it. It was also what she needed to get out of her, so I allowed it all to spew out without interruption. That, I would give her. That, she deserved from me. “I fucking hate you! And I fucking love you! And all I wanna do is forget you, but you are un-fucking-forgettable, King. That”—she jabbed her finger at me—“is the worst part of all this. I’ve tried for years to put you out of my mind, and I fucking failed. I didn’t want to come to you about Tony, because I knew seeing you would kill me, but I did. I fucking came, and I helped you, and this is what I get for that? I even told Brant not to hurt your friend, and I thought he’d listened to me—”