Better When He's Bad (Welcome to the Point #1)(72)

“Jesus, Dovie, are you serious right now?”

I was confused. I didn’t understand what his choice to suffer at one of Nassir’s rigged fights had to do with me. I wanted him to spell it out for me, to let me inside that complicated mind that had too many twists and turns for the average person to follow. He made it simple for me. He let loose a flurry of nasty swearwords and then closed the sparse distance between the two of us.

His hands slid into my hair at my temples and his mouth crashed down on mine with the force of everything that made him so dark and dangerous to begin with. I wrapped my fingers around those chains inked on his wrists and kissed him back. He was scary, he was overwhelming, and he was everything about this life that I wanted to get away from, but when he rubbed his tongue along the seam of my lips asking for entrance, it felt more like welcoming him home than it did like kissing him back. I groaned against the pressure and the bite of teeth on my lower lip. He was trying to eat me up and I had no desire to stop him. I missed him so much.

I felt his fingers curl around the back of my skull as he tried to pull me closer, but the front door swung open and Reeve’s heavy footsteps thudded behind us. I reluctantly pulled away and glanced at her over my shoulder. She looked mad.

“I put the girls in our room and looked at the alarm in their room. They cut the wires.”

I nodded and felt Bax try and untangle himself from my hair. I refused to let go of his tattooed wrists.

“Give me a couple minutes, Reeve. I’ll be in shortly.”

“He shouldn’t be here, Dovie, and he shouldn’t be here with you.”

“Just give me a minute.”

I heard her sigh and the door close behind her. Bax pulled at his hands but I still didn’t let him go. I could feel his pulse fluttering under the gentle pressure of my fingertips.

“I gotta go, Copper-Top, while I still can.”

I bit my bottom lip and looked up at him with beseeching eyes. “Did you miss me at all this week, Bax? Did you roll over and reach for me at night? Did you wake up and wonder why you were alone? Did you think about me at all when you went to see Nassir? Do you even care that it’ll break my heart if something happens to you in one of those dirty fights?”

My voice broke and I could feel a veil of moisture slide over my eyes.

“Do you want the truth, or do you want me to lie to you?”

I sort of hated and loved how he liked to throw all our earlier conversations back in my face.

“Lie to me.” I whispered it and he yanked me against his chest and buried his nose in the top of my head. I felt his chest expand and fall against my cheek.

“Not one time. I didn’t think about you one single time this entire week. Is that what you want me to say? Will that make you realize this isn’t what you want and most definitely not what you need?”

What it did was fill that hollow part inside of me that had been gaping and yawning open since he had sent me off with Race. I let go of his wrists and reached up to wrap my arms as tightly as I could around his neck. I saw his Adam’s apple slide up and down in his throat in response.

“Take me somewhere?”

“What? You can’t leave, you’ll get in trouble. The babe with the black hair clearly hates my guts and she’ll turn you in for ditching the kids.”

I blinked at him. As much as I loved the kids and appreciated my job here at the home, the time I had with him was fleeting and precious and I wasn’t going to be foolish and squander it.

“Don’t care. I want to be with you.”

I did, so bad. I felt like I had a fever. My skin was too tight, my breath was coming in short, hard pants, and all I wanted to do was melt into his dark gaze. For a second, I thought he was going to argue, to once again try and push me away from him for my own good, but he didn’t. He ran his hand from the back of my neck to the curve of my ass and gave the rounded flesh a smart smack with the flat of his hand.

“All right, rule breaker, let’s go.”

He gave me a quick, one-armed hug and hauled me off to the Runner. I slid into the passenger seat just in time to see Reeve shaking her head at me in the reflection of the front window. I would regret it later. Right now all I had was this moment and this man who was so hard to hold on to.

We drove in silence for a solid ten minutes, leaving the city behind. I didn’t want to ruin the mood, didn’t want to make him question his choice to take me away, but my curiosity got the better of me and I had to know. “Where exactly are we going?”

I thought he would’ve just taken me to the apartment in the city since it was the closest to the group home, but he was winding the noisy car up into the mountains well past the Hill and a world away from the Point.

“I know this place. When I was younger and people still thought they could beat me in a street race, we used to come up here and let the cars run full-out. It’s quiet and the ride up there is quiet, peaceful even. I figure since neither one of us knows what life is going to look like in the next few days, I can give us one nice memory to take away from it all.”

I wanted to tell him how sad that was, how depressing it sounded, but I knew coming from him, he was telling me that I mattered. For him, that was as close to an admission that I mattered as much to him as he did to me as I was likely to get. I just kept my mouth shut, put a hand on his hard thigh, and let him take me up somewhere in the night.