It would help if she actually believed that.


♂♀


Zane didn’t make a sound as he stood by the front door, his hip propped against the wood, his arms crossed over his chest as he watched V. Since the moment he realized she was pacing back and forth on his front porch, he hadn’t been able to take his eyes off of her. He was doing pretty fucking well not touching her either.

Now that she was inside his house, there were a number of excessively appealing ideas penetrating his sex deprived body. Three months had passed since he’d last touched her... Tasted her... Felt the searing way her pussy enveloped his cock. The last thought had him stifling a groan.

This woman affected him in ways no other woman had ever come close. Before the assault, Zane had been pursuing V relentlessly, and she had been throwing him a curve ball at every attempt.

Never in all of his twenty four years had he expected to have long term thoughts about a woman, but when it came to V, he thought of little else. It was surprising how much he felt for her and how quickly it had come on. Although they had been apart for three long months, Zane still felt exactly the same. Vanessa Carmichael was his other half, but, just like then, he knew he had his work cut out for him when it came to convincing her of that.

He kept her in his sights, watching as she gracefully lowered herself to the black leather couch, fluffing her short brown skirt out so that it didn’t show any more of her long legs and beautiful olive skin. Zane had to bite his tongue.

The last time she had come to his house, she’d been on that couch too. Only because that was the closest piece of furniture they could get to in their haste to practically tear one another’s clothes off. That night had been memorable, especially after Zane had fucked her up against the rough wood siding on his front porch, unable to keep his hands off of her long enough to make it inside. Not that she had been complaining.

Unfortunately, Zane was pretty sure V wasn’t here to let him worship her with his mouth, although he liked that idea much better than what she probably had in mind. He knew based on his conversation with Kaleb just a short while ago that this wasn’t a pleasure visit. V had come over to see him just to keep him from going to her house. He could tell just how much she wished to be anywhere else by the way she sat with her back straight and her hands perfectly poised in her lap.

Him, on the other hand...

Zane wanted V as close to his side as he could get her. Preferably, he’d rather be on top of her. Or under her. He wasn’t picky either way.

“Drink?” Pushing away from the door, Zane glanced in her direction as he made his way to the refrigerator. He wasn’t sure what he had to drink, but he was fairly certain there was water. At this point, that’s all he needed. For some reason, he felt a little dehydrated, and he was sure it was due to the way his blood pressure had skyrocketed and his body temperature had increased since the second he saw V on his front steps.

“No, thank you.”

All prim and proper, V was. Or so she tried to pretend. She might’ve forgotten that Zane had seen her totally out of control with lust a time or twenty, but he hadn’t. He was pretty sure he never would forget either.

“You didn’t have to come all the way out here, you know.” Zane sat on the wooden table across from V, doing his best not to reach out to touch her. “I would’ve come to your house.”

V’s pert little nose scrunched, her eyebrows dove down in a frown, and she didn’t look directly at him. She tried to play off her initial reaction by leaning back against the cushions, pretending to get comfortable as she did. She looked tense, and not at all like she wanted to talk to him.

She didn’t make a sound for what felt like an eternity. “Talk to me, V.”

“I don’t think that’s a great idea.”

It was Zane’s turn to frown as he studied her, trying to understand what she was getting at. He’d been to her house on numerous occasions, right up until the assault and never once had she seemed unhappy to see him.

“What? Talking?” If she didn’t intend to talk to him, what the hell had she come over for? “Help me out here, V,” he leaned closer, resting his elbows on his knees with the water bottle clutched between his hands.

Zane never had been good at reading a woman’s mind and V’s was particularly difficult to read. She had an uncanny ability to keep herself closed off as much as possible.

“No. You. Coming to my house. We know how well that worked out last time.” V’s remark apparently shocked her as much as it shocked him. Her eyes flew up to meet his, and he saw the same horror reflected in the whiskey brown color that he’d seen moments before Jake Sanders had knocked him unconscious.

So that was how she was going to handle this? Did she think that making him stay away from her house was going to protect him? He felt the swirling, black hole, filled with vehemence and loathing for what that bastard did to them, open up inside of him.

There had been so many times he wished he could go back to that day and change how things had played out, but no matter how many times he thought about it, he knew he couldn’t have changed anything. Jake had planned it all out and somehow the man had gotten away with what he’d done, which had another jolt of anger bursting free inside of him.

Zane would admit that he hadn’t been happy when he found out that V had tried to take all of the blame on herself. He’d wanted to talk to her, to shake her until she understood that nothing she did caused it to happen. But seeing her now, seeing the absolute anguish on her face broke his heart. The self-induced guilt was eating her alive.

“Are you ok?” Sitting the water bottle on the table beside him, Zane moved an inch closer, his knees nearly touching hers.

From the moment he woke up in that damned hospital bed two months ago, Zane had wondered how she was holding up. Both physically and emotionally. From the outside, V looked just as radiant as always, but he knew her better than she thought. She was notorious for pretending all was great and perfect, but when she didn’t know he was looking, there had been plenty of times he had seen her with her guard down.

It hit him that he didn’t even know whether she had sustained any injuries that day. His memory had taken a little time to come back to him, but as soon as he recalled the way one of those bastards had shoved V, sending her slamming into the ground, he’d damn near walked out of the hospital that day. That one push had distracted Zane enough, giving those fuckers exactly the opportunity they needed to catch him off guard.

“I’m fine. Why?” Her nonchalant attitude pissed him off sometimes. She acted as though nothing fazed her, but he knew better. He could see it in the way she forced a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes.

“Did they hurt you?” He had to ask the question because he had to know. No one seemed to know exactly what happened right after Zane had been knocked out. Well, no one but V.

“They didn’t hurt me,” she said, sounding for the first time, like she was trying to reassure him. “They weren’t there for me, Zane. Jake just used me to get to you.”

“He didn’t use you, Vanessa. Jake came after me. It just happened to take place at your house. There’s a big difference.”

The words came out a little harsher than he intended, but it was more than obvious that she was layering the blame on herself. He wanted to reassure her that it wasn’t her fault. He knew they needed to talk about what happen, but Zane was hesitant to relive those memories so soon after he was released from the hospital.

He knew full well what it would do to him mentally. That black hole of fury was pulling him under, and if there was anything Zane knew about himself, it was that his temper bordered on out of control. He’d become intimately familiar with it during the few conversations that he’d had with that damn psychiatrist – or whatever she wanted to call herself – that his mother insisted he talk to in the hospital.

V’s eyes lowered. “I’m so sorry.” Her whispered words broke his heart and pissed him off at the same time.

“You have nothing to be sorry about, V.” This time he lowered his voice, trying to reassure her as he leaned closer, reaching out for the first time to touch her. Tilting her chin up so she had to meet his eyes, he smiled sadly, “Nothing that happened, that day or any other, was your fault.”

“No?” V stood suddenly. Her abrupt shift had Zane flinching backward instinctively.

Yeah, he was clearly going to have to work on that.

Pushing himself to his feet, he closed the gap between them, towering over her as she stood staring up at him. At six-foot-four-inches, Zane was not by any means a small man. He was still working on gaining the pounds he’d lost while in the hospital back, along with the strength that was zapped from him thanks to a month in a coma.

Standing next to V, all five-foot-seven or so inches of her, Zane couldn’t help but remember how well their bodies fit together. She was tall and curvy and breathlessly beautiful. Even in those heels, he still had to look down at her, and when she hit him with those whiskey brown eyes, some of his anger subsided.

“No, baby. None of it was your fault. You couldn’t have predicted what that fucker would do.” He kept his tone low and even as best he could.

Truth be told, Zane should’ve been smarter. He should have known after Jake jumped him at Moonshiners that the man was rapidly losing touch with reality. Maybe it was because Zane had knocked his ego down a notch the day Jake had insulted V, or maybe Jake was just a loose cannon, bound to explode at any time. Either way, Zane should’ve been prepared.