Breaking Hammer (Motorcycle Club Romance) (Inferno Motorcycle Club Book 3) (21 page)

It wasn't that I was becoming obsessive.

I only wanted to make sure she was safe.

I started following her, watching her.
 I noted the men who tailed her, not every day, but sometimes, from a safe distance.  The one who sometimes sat outside her apartment in a car.  I started tracking their schedule.

I wasn't becoming obsessive.

I was still in control.

He called that night, the person to whom I'd already become too attached.
 Tayza had a point about letting go, not becoming too attached to some things- attachments to people were dangerous.  This - whatever this was with Hammer - these phone calls that I'd begun to look forward to, were dangerous for him.  He didn't need to become involved with this.

I was home alone, sitting on the floor, trying to calm the storm that raged on in my mind.
 Meditating only seemed to make it worse, to give more freedom to the thoughts that swirled around like whirlpools in the water, threatening to pull me down into their depths.

When Hammer called, I was grateful for the interruption.
 And not only because it gave me a reason to get out of my head.  But because it was him.  I’d been talking to him, stolen phone calls at night.  I knew it was stupid, foolish, even if I was taking precautions, walks late at night, using my disposable phone.  I had only taken that unnecessary risk the first time.  I was being smart.

I swore to myself that I would stop whatever was happening with Hammer.

I would quell the little flutter of anticipation I felt when he called on the phone.  I would not think about the way my heart started to beat wildly in my chest, or the way I was beginning to draw comfort from the sound of his voice.

I would let go, before anything went any farther with him.
 This I could do.

I had to do it.

I pulled the top off the beer and dialed the number, all the time wondering what the hell I was thinking.  I'd talked with Meia three times on the phone this week.  I followed her a few times, told myself it was okay, that I was just making sure she was not being hurt.  Of course, who the hell knew what was happening once she went into Aston's penthouse?

I couldn't know, and it was starting to eat at me, the knowledge that she wasn't safe.

I kept telling myself to let it go.

The conversations were mostly one-sided, me talking and her listening, and I wondered what she must think of me.
 Pathetic, that's what she must think.  She had to see me as a pathetic excuse for a man, some broken man whose life ended with his wife’s death.  Part of me felt I should be over this by now.  Other people got past death.  Other men lost their wives.  I wasn't the first person in the history of the universe to have lost someone.

Yet here I was, on the phone pouring my guts to someone I didn't know in the slightest.

And then I asked the question.  "Can I meet you in person?"

My usual self-assured attitude was suddenly gone.
 Suddenly I was nervous.  

Then the nervous feeling was replaced by something else.
 And before I could take back my question, she said, "Yes."

When I opened the door of the hotel room, she smiled at me, the expression brightening her face.
 I hadn't seen her smile before.  It made her look suddenly younger, lighter.  Less burdened somehow.  Then it was gone, as quickly as it had appeared.

"Meia," I said.

"I don't know what I'm doing here," she said.  But she stepped closer to me, and I stood there in the doorway for a moment, with her inches away from me, looking down at her.  I had the sudden impulse to kiss her, as she looked up at me, uncertainty and apprehension etched on her face.

"I don't know what I'm doing here either," I admitted.

But I stepped back and she walked inside anyway, her eyes surveying the room before she peeled off her coat and laid it over a chair.  She looked exquisite, despite being in a simple dress, one that skimmed her body, barely giving a hint of what was underneath.

I didn't know what the protocol was for this.
 I didn't know why the fuck I was so nervous.  I'd never been nervous about anything in my life, and I felt my heart race as I stood there.  "Why did you agree to meet me?"

"Why did you ask?" She sat on an overstuffed chair, crossed one leg over the other, looking around the room and then back at me.
 She picked at something on the arm of the chair, her eyes focused away from me.

"I don't know," I said.
 "I don't know what I'm doing anymore.   I'm lost lately."

She looked at me, her gaze direct.
 "We're all lost."

"I didn't used to think I was," I said.
 "I used to think I knew where I was going."

"Death changes things," she said.
 "It alters our course."  She looked up, tucked her hair behind her ear.  The gesture was tentative, nervous, at odds with the in control version of her that I kept seeing glimpses of.

"Is that what happened to you?" I asked.
 "Is that what altered your course?"  I wanted to scream,
why are you with Aston?

It was cagey, the way she avoided saying anything about herself.
 She had this way of making me feel comfortable talking about myself and before I knew it, I was the one who had done all the talking.  Each time I hung up the phone, I wondered where the time had gone.  But I wondered if it was deliberate, if she deflected everything with me.  It gnawed at me, that I couldn't find anything about her.

She shrugged.
 "You can't control your destiny," she said.  "For better or worse, sometimes it chooses you."

"I felt that way once," I said.
 I sat across from her, my elbows on my knees, leaning forward, looking at the ground.  Why the fuck did I feel compelled to talk to her like this, like she was a goddamned priest and I was a parishioner at confession?  "After April was killed.  The things I did, I thought they were my destiny.  I thought killing the men who murdered her would give me peace."

"And now?" she asked.

How did I feel now?  Like something was still missing.  Like I no longer had a rudder.  "Empty," I said.  "It feels empty."

"A man without a home," she said.

Yes.  That is what I had been missing since April died.  It was the thing that Mackenzie must have sensed was missing as well, the reason that she felt so displaced.  I just didn't know how to change it, how to feel that way again.  Not with April gone.

I felt naked under Meia’s gaze, suddenly vulnerable.
 She seemed to have the ability to see right through me.  It was how I'd felt before when she looked at me, only a hundred times more so right now.

"It is difficult," she said "To feel like you don't have a home -when you lose someone, and your family is taken away from you."

"You know how it feels to have your family taken from you," I said.  It wasn't a question.  I somehow knew she understood that loss.  There was a reason she had no history that I could find.  There was something terribly wrong that she wouldn't tell me.

She nodded.
 "You think I'm weak, being with Aston," she said.  "You don't understand the story.  I can't leave.  I have to stay with him."

"Men like that don't stop hurting you," I said.

"No," she said.  "I don't think he will.  He may end up killing me."  She said it casually.  A statement of fact.

I rose to my feet, my breath short in my chest, the same as it was when I was gearing up for a fight, blood pumping loudly in my ears.
 "Then let me help you," I said.  "Let me get you away from him.  Why stay?"

She smiled, her expression sad.
 "He has taken something from me.  Something very precious that I need to get back."

"I can help you," I said.
 I stood inches away from her, this intense feeling of possessiveness taking over me.  Since April died, I hadn't had that feeling about anyone else, the need to have someone be mine.  April had always been it for me, my refuge from all of the bullshit that inevitably came as part of the club.  And from the storms that raged in my soul.  I had told myself that there would never be anyone else who could make me feel the same way again, and the fact that I was feeling this way about Meia, a girl full of secrets, terrified me.

"No," she said quickly.
 "I said something I shouldn't have.  I misspoke."

"You didn't," I said.
 "What does he have over you?"

"No," she said.
 "I'm beyond helping now."

There was something in the way that she said it that gripped me.
 I grabbed her by the arm, pulled her to me, my hand on the small of her back so that she was tight against me.  Bringing my mouth down on hers, I felt her lips part.  I kissed her gently, holding back even as I felt my cock swell in response to her tiny body pressed up against me.

And just like that, I felt an overpowering sense of guilt and shame at the thought of kissing someone other than April.
 At the thought of taking advantage of this girl who was in a bad situation.  What the hell kind of man was I?

I must have hesitated, pulled back for a moment, and she felt it.
 "Hammer," she said.  "I can't do this.  Even if I wanted to."

She put her hand on my chest, pushed me gently away, and turned, walking toward the door.

"No one is beyond helping, Meia."  I spoke the words to her back as she gathered her things.  She paused in the doorway, not turning to look at me before she left.