Black Dagger (Mad Jackals Brotherhood MC Book 1) (9 page)

“Always.” He smiles down at her and there’s a whole world in that one word: a world of promises, a world of opportunities and new adventures, a world of love. But that was all to come; that was the future.

For now, she had to go and break a good man’s heart. All she could hope is he would forgive her for never loving him the way he had deserved. She had never being able to give him a part of herself because she’d already given it away many years ago to someone else to someone with secrets, bad secrets she only hoped she could handle.

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Chapter One

Standing outside Eli’s front door, Mia tries to remind herself why she’d insisted to Ray that she do this alone. Lyrics of the song ‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do’ circle ‘round in her brain and she smiles ruefully to herself, thinking that
hard
doesn’t even begin to cover it. Mia was about to break things off with a man who had been sweet and kind to her, a man who wanted to marry her, a man who wanted to protect her and keep her safe, a good man, in favor of someone who could only be described as an unknown quantity.

That was Ray down to a T. He’d disappeared without a word and returned without any kind of an explanation. And, yet, she couldn’t stay away from him. It must be some kind of sickness or addiction; that’s the only way she can think of it. Being around him is like getting a fix of the best drug known to man and she’s no better than a junkie – the more time she spent with him, the deeper her addiction went. She’d had to wrench herself out of his arms at her office earlier. It would have been far too easy to let things go further than a not-so-innocent kiss. But she couldn’t do that to Eli, not again. He deserved to know what was going on, to know that she couldn’t be with him anymore. That doesn’t mean, however, that she’s relishing what she’s about to do.

Before she has time to change her mind, she lifts her hand and rings the doorbell. Her key for Eli’s house is sitting in her purse, but letting herself into his place after she’s spent the night with Ray just doesn’t seem right. In fact, it seems downright disrespectful. She takes a few deep breaths, summoning all her courage to do what she knows needs to be done.

“Mia!” Eli rushes through the open door to grab her hand and pull her towards him. “It’s so good to see you.” He whispers the words against her ear as he holds her close to him and Mia feels tears prick at the back of her eyes over what she’s about to do.

Eli tries to plant a kiss on her lips but she pulls back, going stiff as a board in his arms. “Let’s get inside, Eli.” The last thing she wants to do is to have this conversation standing on the font porch of his house in full view of his nosy neighbors.

She slips out of his reach and darts inside, heading straight to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee out of habit. She surveys the carnage of the wake of Eli’s poker night – beer bottles line the counter and the smell of cigarette ash is heavy in the air, making Mia wrinkle her nose and push open a window.

She doesn’t turn around to face Eli until he comes up behind her, slipping his hands around her waist. “What’s going on, Mia?”

She tries to slip out of his hold but he clearly has no intention of letting her go and, when it comes to brute force, there’s no competition between her and Eli. He looks at her with a searching gaze but she avoids his eyes, not wanting him to be able to read what she’s done all over her face.

She closes her eyes, trying to draw up the order she had tried to put the things she wanted to say to him in. It had been much easier coming up with a list to follow in the car over here. Now that she’s only a few inches away from him, it’s like trying to remember an algebra problem from the tenth grade – as good as impossible.

“Let’s sit down.” She motions towards the breakfast bar, relieved when Eli lets his arms drop from around her. He obeys silently, taking a seat on the stool opposite her. “Coffee?” She clatters around the kitchen, opening cabinet doors and pouring out two steaming mugs, automatically adding cream and sugar to Eli’s and leaving hers black. Her dad warned her she was going to get an ulcer one day from all the black coffee she drank. Her dad, she had to go see him, to see how he was doing, to tell him about Ray. He had been so upset when she’d broken the news to him about his death, or she should say, his supposed death.

“Mia.” Eli’s insistent voice behind her breaks her daydream, bringing her back to the here and now. “You’re stalling.” It’s a flat statement of fact, not an accusation and she feels her shoulders sag a little. Eli knew her better than most people, than almost anyone. He was one of her oldest friends and she was about to screw everything up.

Wordlessly, she hands over his coffee cup but doesn’t take the seat next to him, instead she leans against the counter, wondering where to start. “We need to talk.” She cringes at her own lameness.

“You said that already.” Eli’s eyes catch the light from the Californian midday sun, looking greener than the brown she knows they’re categorized as on his license. They were hazel, really, not quite one color and not quite another. “Mia.” Eli’s voice prompts her again; she can see he’s getting impatient.

The longer she tries to avoid the issue is the worse it’s going to be, so she does the only thing she can think of; she comes right out with the question that’s been burning a hole in her brain for the past seventy-two hours. “Why did you tell me Ray was dead?”

Eli’s eyebrows shoot up. “I told you over the phone. I was just trying to protect you. I didn’t want you to hurt anymore, to be waiting for him to come back. I hated seeing you in pain, Mia.” Eli moves as if to reach out to her but she puts a stop to it, holding up her hand and he freezes.

“So you thought the best thing for me was to lie to me?” Mia shakes her head at how little sense that makes.

“Dammit, Mia, it wasn’t like that! You don’t have any idea of what things were like then! You were a mess when Ray left and you wouldn’t let anyone get close to you afterwards, like you were holding out for him or maybe just too scared to let anyone in. It was like you’d given Ray everything you had.” Eli rakes his fingers through his dark hair, looking frustrated. “I wanted you to snap out of it, to get over him! Besides, I didn’t know for sure that the rumors about him being killed weren’t true! I had no way of knowing one way or the other.”

His tone is defensive and Mia wishes she knew what to believe. She had a pretty good bullshit radar generally, but that was only when it involved other people. She’s invested in this and lost her perspective. If she really wants to get to the bottom of what the hell was going on, she’s going to need to get it back. Easier said than done, she notes to herself.

“You know all this time, you haven’t once asked where Ray is. You don’t have the slightest desire to see him, do you? What the hell happened to the two of you? You were friends, best friends even!” She looks at Eli searchingly, trying to find some answer in his empty expression.

“He didn’t tell you?” Eli’s eyes widen in shock and Mia watches as his shoulders slump, almost imperceptibly in relief.

“Tell me what, Eli?” She looks at him cautiously, unable to keep a shiver of foreboding from running down her spine. “I feel like trying to talk to either of you is harder than getting freakin’ Jack Bauer to spill state secrets!”

Eli’s lips twitch at her reference to one of his favorite shows, but his features quickly spring back into their neutral position, his face a blank page. “What happened is between Ray and me. You don’t need to get involved. But let’s just say we won’t be meeting up for a beer anytime soon.”

Mia resists the urge to scream. She had never known it was possible to feel quite so frustrated. She had thought Ray was the unknown quantity but now it seemed Eli had secrets of his own that he had no intention of sharing with her. Whatever had happened between the two of them, it had ruined their friendship, ground it into dust under their feet. But whose fault had it been? Who was in the wrong? It was hard to ignore the look of relief on Eli’s face when he’d realized that Ray hadn’t spilled the beans to her. Had Eli done something he was terrified of her finding out about?

“If he didn’t tell you, then why the big ‘we need to talk’ conversation?” Eli relaxes in his seat, splaying his legs out and looking like a weight has just been lifted from his mind.

“So whatever Ray may have had to tell me might have made me feel differently about us, about you and me?” Mia gives voice to the fear in her head and she’s rewarded with a flicker of something in Eli’s eyes that’s gone as quickly as it’s come, leaving her to wonder if she’s seeing things that aren’t there.

“Ray will say whatever he thinks he needs to to get what he wants. I wouldn’t trust a damn thing that comes out of his lying mouth.” Eli’s own mouth twists with the bitterness of his words and Mia’s jaw drops in shock, unable to hide her surprise. “What?” He raises an eyebrow at her in a gesture that’s so reminiscent of Ray she has to shake her head to get the image out of her head.

“I don’t know what to say.” She leans against the counter, looking down at the floor, wondering how everything had got so messed up in so short a period of time. Eli had been her rock, her stability, the good guy, the one she could count on, the one who would never lie to her. The events of the last few days had thrown those assumptions out of the window.

But if Eli isn’t the man she thought he was, how could she trust anything she thought she knew? She pushes away the persistent voice in her brain that tells her the same about Ray. He’d been gone for a long time, how much can she really trust what he had told her? No, Mia, you can’t go down that road, she tells herself. It’s a slippery slope and once you’ve gone down it, there won’t be any going back. Her feelings for Ray had been a constant; she has to trust them, or what was she left with?

“What did you come here to say, Mia? Because from the look on your face I know you’re not here because you miss me.” Eli says, with sharpness in his eyes that Mia has never seen before.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Evelyn Glass is a native of northern California who currently lives in New England with her wonderful husband and their two rambunctious Corgis. 

Her favorite past times include hiking and reading near the fireplace.

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