Creed (Unfinished Hero #2)(9)

“Are you shitting me?” I asked.

His face changed and his mouth moved.

“We gotta talk.”

We had to talk?

Sixteen years, out-of-the-blue he’s in my bedroom and he tells me I have a pretty cat and we had to talk.

Oh yeah, he was totally f**king shitting me.

I studied him.

The last time I saw him he was twenty-three. Now, he was thirty-nine. One look and I saw either life had not been kind or it had been full of adventure of the dangerous variety.

He’d always been tall, even as a little kid. Back in the day, when he was mine, or I thought he was mine, I’d loved that. He grew to be six foot one. He towered over me. He had broad shoulders, a wide chest, narrow hips, thick thighs. I loved that too. The power of his body. Growing up with him, watching him hone it and learn how to use it.

He’d had a rough life, like I did, since he was born. So rough, we used to discuss in a way that was a joke but also wasn’t but it was a release which one of us had it rougher. We never came to a conclusion. He’d learned to take care of himself. I’d got him early so I learned he’d take care of me. Being big, learning fast, he was good at both, taking care of himself and me.

Or, I thought that too.

In the end, I’d been wrong.

Now, he was still tall but he was broader, wider, he’d bulked out and not a little bit. He wasn’t a behemoth but one look at him, simply his size would make some men ill-at-ease and most would leave a wide berth.

But there was more.

His skin was tanned, leathery, creases fanned from the sides of his eyes worn there not through smiling. There were more at the sides of his mouth, along his forehead.

He had a scar that scored through his upper lip, mid right side. He had another one that slashed over his cheekbone, up his temple and disappeared into his hair but you could see it didn’t end there. This was because his brown hair was white in a thin stripe along the side of his head leading from the scar at his temple and stopping where his skull curved to the back. It wasn’t gray with age. In fact, he had no gray in his hair even at his age. Someone had got him good with a knife, meant harm and got interrupted in their endeavor of attempting to kill him.

No, life had not been kind to Tucker Creed.

I didn’t know what to think of this. The only thought that came to mind was good.

He had on a plaid shirt in light blues, grays and greens mixed with white over a white t-shirt, faded jeans and light brown boots that had an almost yellowish tinge to the suede. His clothes were clean, they hung on him well but they were not new or fashionable. He bought them for the purposes of covering his body, comfort and nothing else.

His hair was a mess and I felt a sting looking at it because it always was a mess, even back in the day. He rarely got it cut, it hung well past his collar and was always flopping in his eyes. That was no different now, except it wasn’t flopping in his eyes. Though I knew, if he bent his neck forward even a fraction of an inch, it would.

Although he wore the years that passed from top to toe, his eyes had not changed. Sky blue, bright, the color so stark in his tan, rugged face that it seemed to glimmer.

Eyes I saw in my dreams, even now, if I admitted it to myself.

Eyes I saw in my head on the rare occasion I let my mind wander and it went there, to the glory days tarnished with betrayal.

Eyes that I remembered trusting as he looked down at me and moved inside me. The first man I took and when I did I was sure he’d be the last.

He was not.

Not by a long shot.

“Were they going for the eye?” I asked, dipping my head toward his, my eyes on the scar on his cheekbone and I noted his entire body gave a weird jolt.

Then he answered, “Brain but their path was through the eye.”

My gaze moved from his scar to his. “You jerked.”

“I like my brain as it is.”

“Good call,” I noted.

He began to push from the wall. “Sylvie –”

Oh no. I didn’t know why he was here. What I did know was that we were not going to do this.

The time to do this was sixteen years ago.

The time we would never f**king do this was now.

I began to move around the bed. “Got a cat to feed, a shower to take and shit to do. What I don’t got is time to talk.”

Especially not with you, I finished but only in my head.

“Sebring’s meeting is at two and before that, we gotta talk.”

Fuck.

Fuck!

I stopped dead and looked at him. “What?”

I asked the question even though I knew the answer.

Last night, Knight had told Rhash and me he’d heard rumblings of trouble. A takeover.

The work I did for Knight was rarely trouble. It was legwork, checks on clients and girls. Providing security, presence, escorting girls to and from appointments. Sometimes stuff went down in his club and he needed a team to take care of. Shit happened and did, if someone was stupid enough to try it or thought they could pay or bully the girls into keeping their mouths shut after they’d misused them. But usually work for Knight was a mundane payday.

The meeting that included the boys had mostly been Knight wanting to know how the shit with Serena got so f**ked. Live had reported he’d done the routine and didn’t cut corners. Knight had interrogated the rest of the team about all new clients and their background checks.