Wild and Free (The Three #3)(113)

“I had to get out of here, bao bei. I had to do something and I wasn’t alone,” he told her.

“You knew I knew you were going stir-crazy,” she reminded him.

He nodded and replied, “I knew you knew. I also knew you wouldn’t be fired up about what we were planning and it was something we had to do, all of us.”

“I actually don’t even know what you were planning to do, but if it was taking you out of safety and into harm’s way, you’re right. I wouldn’t be fired up about it. But I wouldn’t hand you shit about it either.”

Suddenly, she threw an arm straight up in the air, apparently indicating herself by what she said next.

“Clue in, Abel, I am not your normal bitch. I grew up with bikers. Bikers do what they want when they want because they got something inside them that makes them have to do that. And nothing can stand in their way. Not a job. Not a law. Not a woman. So if you love them, you don’t stand in their way. Ever. I’ve also learned if you give them that, it’ll be worth it. It’ll come around with them giving you what you need because they get it.”

She shook her head, sucked a huge breath, and kept at him.

“But even with that, I’m of a mind that a woman should never stand in her man’s way when there’s something he has to do. Doing something to end what’s eating at him, crushing him, suffocating him, stopping him from being who he is, or whatever the f*ck. So regardless if I didn’t like it, if I was a biker bitch or just a normal one, I still wouldn’t stand in your way.”

He stared at her, unblinking, her words coursing through him in a way that far from sucked.

“Uh, me bein’ this pissed, baby, is not the time for you to lapse into silent brooding,” she warned, slamming a hand on her hip.

“I have nothing to say,” he told her and watched the hurt slice through her face. “Except that I’m sorry.”

Her expression blanked as she blinked.

“Really, f*cking, seriously sorry,” he went on. “If I thought that you’d feel that kind of pain, no way in f*ck I would have gone without telling you where I was going. And this doesn’t help, but I felt shit just knowin’ I was gonna lie to you and that got worse when I did it. Doesn’t make it better, I get that, but you gotta know I didn’t do it easy and I didn’t like doin’ it. And I can tell you now, how I felt thinking of doin’ it, then doin’ it and what it caused, that shit won’t ever happen again. You have my word. You believe in that or not, it’s still solid, Lilah. As a rock.”

She studied him for a few beats before she looked to the fireplace, took a deep breath, and looked back at him.

“I thought you were dead,” she whispered.

Fuck, he wanted to go to her, but her body language was screaming for him to keep a distance, so he controlled that impulse.

“Wish I could take that back,” he whispered in return. “Wish like f*ck I could turn back time and make it so that didn’t happen. I can’t. The only thing I can do is tell you I hate that you felt that, I hate it more that I did somethin’ to make you feel it, and repeat how f*ckin’ sorry I am.”

She held his eyes before she again looked the fireplace. He watched her and he sensed her. She was pissed, there was fear, and last, there was hurt.

His jaw tightened.

Her throat convulsed and he put all his energy into fighting the urge to go to her and, instead, gave her time.

He won the fight not to go to her, but he had shit to share and he was forced to stop giving her time.

“You seem okay now,” he observed, and she gave him back her gaze.

“The pain went away,” she shared. The words were hard but at least they were relatively calm.

“When I was out of danger,” he surmised.

She stared at him in a new unhappy way at getting the knowledge he was in danger, then she shook her head.

But she said nothing.

“We had a meeting with one of Lucien’s men,” he informed her. “Callum and Lucien planned the whole thing. Gregor got his people involved, so we were actually safe the whole time. The goal was to draw them out or ascertain if they’re watching. They are. They had cameras at the meeting place, which is way the f*ck in the middle of nowhere so no way they could know where we were to meet unless someone on the inside told them.”

“Fabulous,” she hissed. “More shit to worry about.”

She was right, but he couldn’t get into that just yet.

“You gotta know all that because you deserve me comin’ clean, but it’s more important you know something else,” he continued.

She took her hand from her hip to flick it out. “That would be…?”

“We didn’t know about the cameras until a flash of blue light fried ’em.”

She stared again, this time not angry, astonished.

“Say what?’ she asked.

“I got a pain in my head that was so bad it took me down to a knee. Then a flash of blue light lit up the place and fried the cameras. If that hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t have known they were there. We were being watched and probably listened to.”

“What the f*ck?” she whispered, her brows inching together. “You were in pain?”

“Yep.” He nodded, not dwelling on that. “And, *cat, I’ve seen that blue light before.”