Total pages in book: 105
Estimated words: 99191 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 496(@200wpm)___ 397(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 99191 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 496(@200wpm)___ 397(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
She tensed. “That’s ridiculous.”
What the hell? He couldn’t see her face to gauge where her head was at, but her response didn’t make a damn bit of sense. “There’s nothing ridiculous about it. You knew it was a bad call. I didn’t listen to you, and we almost got into a conflict we might not have walked out of.”
“That was just common sense. You can’t trust my gut. I can’t trust my gut.”
Ah. Aiden forced his body to relax and waited for the tension to bleed out of his tone. “You couldn’t have known the other cops would turn on you.”
She jerked back from him. “I do not want to talk about it.”
“Charlie.” He let her go, because the alternative was to wrestle her to a standstill, but it made his chest ache to watch the distance between them open up. “You have to face it at some point. You couldn’t have known.”
“One, I don’t need the therapy session. Two, stop trying to distract yourself from your mistake by focusing on me. Three, fuck off.” She scrubbed a hand over her face. “Shit. Fuck. Goddamn it. Now I’m sorry. That was out of line. But the point stands—my past is off-limits. Respect it or this ends now.”
Her obvious pain made him want to press her, but there was shit he didn’t want ripped open. And she was right—he’d latched on to her past to avoid thinking too hard about his present.
Aiden held out a hand. “Come back to me.”
“Not until you agree.”
He sighed. “I won’t talk about it tonight.”
“That’s a shitty-ass promise.” But she still crawled back into his arms. He barely had time to relax when she spoke again. “Keira is going to start taking Krav Maga lessons.”
“I’ll arrange to have an instructor brought to the house.” His little sister knew how to shoot—he and Teague had made sure all their sisters did, even if Carrigan and Keira took to it better than Sloan. They had men whose whole job was to keep them safe, but it was always possible that the time would come when they’d have to defend themselves.
He’d never considered some kind of martial arts. Aiden knew how to fight, but there was nothing formal about it. He was a goddamn brawler.
“Wrong. You’ll arrange to have Mark—or whoever—escort her to her classes several times a week.”
As much as he didn’t like the idea of his sister traipsing out into Boston with any regularity, Charlie’s tone said that she’d go to the mat for this. He wanted to know why. “You took her there today.”
“Yes, I did.” She hesitated, and he found himself holding his breath to see what she’d say next. She rewarded his patience by shifting away enough to meet his gaze. Her expression was as frank as he’d ever seen, stripped of the artifice she’d been wearing like a second skin since agreeing to pose as his fiancée. “I’m prefacing this by saying that it’s not an invitation to delve into my past—it’s just to give you some context. Understand?”
“Yes.” He agreed too readily, but Aiden was hungry for more of her. He knew what he’d read, but reports failed to do Charlie justice. He wanted to know every part of her mind the same way he was beginning to know her body.
She gave him a suspicious look but finally said, “I had plenty of training—as you can imagine—but after my attack…I’d never felt so helpless as I did in those first few months while I was recovering. I was helpless and terrified that someone would decide to finish the job, and I spent too much time hiding away.”
The actions sounded familiar, even if the cause wasn’t the same. She could have been describing Keira. “I’m with you so far.” He deliberately didn’t think about what he’d like to do to the men who’d hurt Charlie badly enough to instill that fear in the first place.
“Eventually, I started training again out of spite. I hated that I’d been weak, and wanted to do anything to combat the chance of that happening again. It was about control, which I’m sure you can appreciate.” She traced the vein that ran along his forearm. “Keira feels helpless and scared, even if she would rather cut you than admit it. The partying is just an escape, but she’s always going to wake up and find herself sober and have to start the whole process over again. Krav Maga isn’t going to magically fix everything that is wrong in her life, but it will give her an outlet that she desperately needs.”
She snuggled into him again. “You should have seen her going after that punching bag. She needs this. I know it’s dangerous to have a schedule that requires her to leave the house, but that’s what your security people are for. They can figure it out. Dmitri Romanov”—she choked a little on his name—“doesn’t seem to want to hurt her at this point, so the danger is as low as it’s ever likely to be.”