Passing His Guard (Against the Cage #2) (17 page)

As he disconnected the call, Ryann gasped. Total shock filled her face, and then quickly morphed into rage as she stared at him like she couldn’t believe what he’d just done. The air left his lungs at the look of betrayal in her eyes. His chest constricted, refusing to breathe. Why in the hell was she looking at him like that? If anyone had the right to be pissed off here, it was him.

They stood there a moment in a wordless faceoff as he watched her grapple for control. She must have found her edge because a few seconds later, anger flooded her fine features, twisting her beautiful face into a mask of rage.

“You fucking asshole!” She stepped forward and slammed the heels of her hands against his bare chest. For a slip of a woman, she was surprisingly strong. Unprepared for the force of her strike, he took a step back to catch his balance. The give wasn’t very much, but it was enough for Ryann to slide past him. But she wasn’t the only one livid, and with the speed of a striking viper, he caught her arm, jerking her back around to face him. This two-timing manipulative chit wasn’t getting off that easily.

“What’s the matter, Ry? Pissed that your boyfriend found out you were fucking around on him?”

He didn’t think it was possible for her to look more furious, but as he blasted her with his cutting question, every male instinct clamoring inside him warned Aiden to protect his groin.
Wham!
Her knee flew up just as he shifted his weight and lifted his leg. Her patella connected solidly with his thigh so hard that had she hit his balls, they would have been lodged in his throat. As it was, his thigh would be wearing the evidence of her wrath for some time to come.

“That’s not my boyfriend, you presumptive, arrogant piece of shit!” She lost the battle with her tears and angrily swiped them away. Fuck, every one of those giant drops might as well have been a dagger in his heart. She flailed to get free of his grip—a sob breaking from her throat as she wrenched on her arm, trying to get away. If she kept it up, she was going to hurt herself.

It took 0.6 second for Ryann’s revelation to slam into him with the force of a hook kick to the head, and about 0.3 second for his head to catch up with his heart, and 0.1 second to realize he was totally screwed. Still, the fighter in him didn’t give up, and the dipshit in him didn’t know when to quit while he was ahead, though he suspected
ahead
had passed about the time he told whoever had been on that phone—threatening her—that he felt sorry for him and good luck.

“Ryann, stop.” He tried to reason with the enraged woman, regret burning his throat to ash and making his voice raw. Holding on to her was like trying to catch a tiger by the tail. Her claws were out, and she was hell bound and determined to get away from him. But something in his gut told Aiden if he tapped now and let her go, this woman would be lost to him forever. So he held on and weathered the storm of her anger. Dodging blows, and taking others, because dammit, he deserved it after what he’d just done, what he’d accused her of.

His gut told him she was in trouble, which ratcheted his protective instincts off the charts. When her small hand curled up and she hammer-fisted him in the chest, he caught her wrist and tugged her closer, pulling her into his guard and wrapping his arms around her slender frame, holding her tight against his chest.

“I’m sorry . . . Baby, I’m sorry . . .” He’d repeat the words over and over, as long as it took for her to calm down and hear them. But he would not let her go—no matter how hard she fought or how many times she cursed him. And Aiden was surprised to discover that Ryann had a pretty colorful vocabulary.

He had no idea how long he stood there waiting for her to drop her guard enough to shoot in, but it felt like forever. By the time she exhausted herself, his heart was shredded. All he wanted to do was hold this slip of a woman with the temper of a tiger and the courage of a fighter. It didn’t take a genius to deduct that things were not as they seemed. And the more he discovered about Ryann, the more she intrigued him. And the hell of it was, he wanted to know her—really know her—to protect her. He genuinely cared about this woman, which was why he’d nearly lost his shit when he’d thought she was seeing someone else.

“Shhh . . .” he whispered.

Her struggles were only half-hearted now, whether from exhaustion or defeat he couldn’t know. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she was in his arms. “I’m sorry . . . Baby, I’m so sorry,” he crooned against the top of her head, which barely reached his shoulder—the perfect height to tuck her beneath his chin. She fit against him so perfectly, like she was made just for him.

“I thought . . .” he started to explain, but there were no words to excuse his behavior or his assumptions.

“I know . . . what you . . . thought,” she hiccupped against his chest. Her tears scalded him, leaving behind a hot, wet trail of sorrow. Evidence of the pain he caused slipped between his pecs, following the road map of muscles down his chest and across his abdomen. “I don’t need to hear you say it. Let me . . . go.”

Never.
His grip on her instinctively tightened. Ryann tensed in his arms, refusing to yield to him, to take the comfort she’d so greedily consumed last night—that was before he’d utterly offended and insulted her. “Come on, Ryann, just let me explain . . .” He wasn’t sure what the hell he intended to say if she gave him the chance. He only knew he was desperate to hold on to this woman right now and he didn’t want to let her go.

“There’s nothing to say, Aiden,” she said woodenly.

Fuck, she sounded so distant, so broken. He’d done this to her, reducing her to an unrecognizable woman who was nothing like the strong, independent female he knew, the powerhouse in a small package that never took no for an answer and was a force to be reckoned with. This wasn’t the same woman who’d drugged him, abducted him, stumbled onto a robbery, and nearly gotten herself killed. Yet through it all, she’d held it together—not missing a beat. Rock solid—that was his Ryann. Wait . . . his? Since when did he lay any claim to this woman?
Probably about the time you stripped her bare and had your face buried between her legs
, his unhelpful self quickly answered.

“You just told . . . the man who’s made my life a living hell . . . for the last month . . . ‘good luck.’ Then you all but called me a . . . a whore by accusing me of having a boyfriend after we . . . After you . . .”

She tried to wrest free from his grasp. God help him, he was an asshole. Muttering a self-damning curse, he gently framed Ryann’s tear-stained face and tipped her head up, forcing her to meet his determined stare. “First of all, I want to know who’s doing this to you and why. Because I promise you, that shit’s gonna stop. And secondly, I never called you a whore and I don’t think it. What happened between us last night was—”

“—a mistake,” she cut in, finishing his sentence, which was
not
what he was going to say at all. She took a step back, pulling away, and it took all his strength to let her go. “It can’t happen again. It won’t happen again. This”—she waved her finger between them—“is a mistake. It would never work.”

Why was it a mistake? Just because he’d thought the same thing last night didn’t stop him from wanting to know where the hell she thought he was lacking.

“I think it would be best if we just pretended that last night didn’t happen.”

The hell it would!
What was she thinking?—that she could just forget her first orgasm? Was she going to pretend
that
didn’t happen? Because he had news for her: That fucking happened, and he wanted it to happen again. In fact, he wanted it to happen again right now. So he’d be damned if he was going to let her forget it. If she thought forgetting him was going to be so easy, she had another thing coming.

He’d been trying to forget this woman since the day she walked into his gym a little over a week ago, and look how well that turned out. Ryann had him twisted in so many knots, his balls permanently ached. But pushing her right now wasn’t going to do either of them any favors. Maybe what she needed was a little space to regain a sense of control in the situation that admittedly had blown far from it.

Holding up his hands in surrender, he took a measured step back and nodded his acquiescence. “If that’s what you want, Ryann.” Was he giving up? Not a chance. But she didn’t need to know that, and now was not the time to take the offensive with her. This was the stage in the game where a fighter danced around his opponent, finding his range and testing his skills. To the crowd, this was never an exciting part of the match. On the outside, it didn’t look like anything was happening, but in reality, a fight could be won or lost based on what a fighter learned about his rival during those critical moments.

Some of the tension seemed to ease from her shoulders as she perceived this small victory as a win, but he wasn’t tapping out. “All right, then. As long as we’re clear.”

Crystal.

“Do you umm . . . want the shower first?” She walked backward toward the bed, keeping her eyes on him the entire time. Smart girl. She stopped by the chair where her suitcase was lying open on the table next to the lounger.

“Nope, I’m good. Had a few of them last night.”
Step in. Jab. Move out.

“So you don’t mind if I hop in?”

Too short.
Ignoring his subtle dig, she turned toward her luggage and began rummaging through her clothes.
Circle. Approach.
“Be my guest. I left my shirt in there. I’ll just go grab it.”
Arms up. Circle. Step in.
“Hey, Ryann?” he called, stopping in the bathroom doorway.

“Yeah?” She glanced over her shoulder when he didn’t answer right away.

Jab.
“Will you toss me my underwear?”
Contact.

CHAPTER

 17 

Y
ou all right?”

Ryann shot him a quick glance from the chair next to her and returned to the restless bouncing of her foot. “Yep.” How in the hell could he sit there and look so calm? “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Aiden’s brow arched in question, but he didn’t push her. He turned those uncanny amber eyes forward and appeared to be reading the antidrug posters plastered on the wall across from them. He was stretched out in that lazy sprawl, arms up, fingers laced behind his head, looking as if he hadn’t a care in the world and all the time in the day. What did he care if they sat in a police station all afternoon? It wasn’t his life on the line, and this morning’s phone call had been a blatant reminder hers was precisely that.

She cast him another glance, unable to help noticing how that lax pose put his impressive arms on display. She was bound and determined not to appreciate the ropes of muscle stretching up his forearms, or the defined cut of his biceps and his chiseled triceps. Seriously, who had arms like that?

He wore a simple camo-colored V-neck T-shirt they’d picked up at the local clothing store. Apparently, they didn’t grow them that big here in Portage, because XL was all they had and it was still tight on him. And those relaxed-fit jeans didn’t look very relaxed, either. They hugged him in all the right places and strained in others, not that he seemed to notice or care. Whether wearing a two-thousand-dollar suit or skintight fight shorts, the man was so comfortable in his own skin, it didn’t matter what was covering his body. And considering how much she wanted to jump out of her skin right now, that grated.

She hadn’t expected coming here to hit her so hard, but the déjà vu of sitting in the police station waiting for the officer to take her statement brought back a slew of painful memories rising to the surface that were all too fresh. How many hours had she spent waiting in one of these hard plastic chairs, trying to get someone to listen to her?

Sitting in this police station was a good reality check, reminding her why she was here in the first place, and what she had to do. Aiden was proving to be a dangerous distraction she couldn’t afford. The more time she spent with him and the better she got to know him, the more she liked the cagey, flirtatious fighter. Getting attached to a client was a really bad idea. It was a rookie mistake and she’d been doing this job long enough to know better.

The longer she delayed in delivering Aiden to Madeline Kruze, the greater the chances of something going terribly wrong. All it would take was for him to change his mind about returning with her, and all this would blow up in her face. There were so many factors out of her control. Although she could always drug him again, she supposed.

“How much longer do you think this is going to take?” Her waspish tone belayed her impatience to have this over with. They needed to get back on the road before anything else happened to derail their course.

Aiden gave a negligent shrug. “These things take time. I suspect this isn’t something these guys do every day. Portage doesn’t exactly strike me as a high-crime area. If they don’t follow everything by the book, all it’d take was a smart lawyer to come in here and get these assholes off on a technicality.”

“Is that what you did?”

Those arresting eyes locked on her, making her pulse jump. The blood in her veins heated until she wanted to squirm in her seat under the intensity of his stare. She hated the way her body responded to him. With just a look, he turned her mind to mush and dissolved her will. Despite her claim to forget what happened between them, she knew in her heart that was nothing more than wishful thinking.

“Excuse me?”

“When you practiced law, which side of justice were you on?” She was baiting him, desperately searching for more reasons not to like this man, to think less of him. Unfortunately, she feared his answer would do little to dissuade her heart either way. In the rather small amount of time they’d spent together, she found herself liking him far too much. She liked the white-collar/blue-collar contradictions in him. He was intimidatingly intelligent, yet he spoke with the uncouth vernacular of a hard-knocks fighter. She admired the strength and courage it must have taken him to walk away from an inheritance worth millions of dollars and to forge his way in an industry that chewed up lesser men and spit them out. On the outside he appeared to be nothing more than Disco Stick Kruze, but in her heart, she knew there was so much more. There was a depth to this man that he worked hard at not letting other people see.

“Whichever side they paid me to be on. I told you I was a good attorney, Ryann. I never said I was an honest one.”

His gaze swept over her, lingering in all the places that made her blood heat, her skin tingle with anticipation. How could just a look make her hot and achy? But it wasn’t just any look. It was Aiden with those unnaturally golden brown eyes that seemed to penetrate her soul.

“What about you?” he challenged. “What makes a half pint of a woman think it’d be a wise decision to become a private investigator?”

His jab hit closer to home than he ever could have known. If she continued to verbally spar with this fighter, she wasn’t going to walk away unscathed. She hesitated a moment, not sure how much she wanted to tell him, especially here. Instead, she shrugged. “My father was a PI, and I followed in his footsteps.”

In typical lawyer fashion, Aiden latched onto that one word and began his cross examination. “ ‘Was’?” His countenance turned serious and he straightened in the chair, abandoning his lazy sprawl. That too-perceptive stare locked on her, refusing to give her quarter. She immediately regretted telling him even this much. Dear God, she didn’t want to do this here, and she didn’t think she could talk about her dad and keep her emotions in check.

“Gads, you’re such a lawyer,” she mocked, trying to turn the conversation back on him, but he wouldn’t be deterred.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he pressed.

It might just be easier to tell him. Maybe then he’d understand why she didn’t want to talk about it. Deadpanning her expression, she hoped her emotions would take the hint and follow suit. “My father was killed last month.”

Aiden bit out a ripe curse that held more emotion than her own voice. “Jesus, I’m sorry.”

And he sincerely meant it. He turned toward her and took her hand in both of his. His grip was firm, more comforting than she wanted to admit. What would it be like to have a man like this in her corner? she wondered. From what Ryann knew of him, she’d bet nothing rattled this fighter who seemed to possess the courage of a lion and the strength of a bull.

She cleared her throat and pulled her hand away from his. Not because she didn’t want his touch or like the feeling of his hands on her—but because she liked it too much. He was hell on her defenses, and she was trying like crazy to keep a guard around her heart.

“What about your mother?”

“My mother died seven years ago. Which is exactly how long it took for my dad to ruin his life.”

The last part of her confession tumbled out before she could bite it back. Those unnatural eyes skated over her, missing nothing and making her feel emotionally raw as he took in every word with genuine concern and empathy. Weren’t lawyers supposed to be heartless?

“I’m very sorry, Ryann. How did you lose her?”

“Cancer. It devastated my dad. He took her to all the specialists he could find. And then the hospital bills began rolling in and he had to start taking a lot of extra cases to pay them. I tried to help him, but he wouldn’t let me. Said he didn’t want me involved. My mother was a strong woman. She fought so hard. But slowly the cancer began to win. In the end . . .” She couldn’t continue. The emotions were still too raw, the memories too fresh—even after all these years. Some wounds never fully healed.

Aiden muttered a curse under his breath. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that. Do you have any other family? Any siblings?”

She shook her head. “There’s no one. I’m an only child.”

“Me, too.”

His confession surprised her, though not as much as what he said next.

“I was always kinda grateful for that. I wouldn’t wish my parents on my worst enemy, let alone a brother or sister.” But he wouldn’t let the conversation remain on him, revealing just enough information about himself to make her want to open up. “How did your father die?”

“Officially? Hit-and-run. But he was murdered.”

Aiden’s brows pinched into a scowl. “Do you have any idea who did it? Have you gone to the police?”

“Yes and yes. I’ve been investigating it myself since the police determined it was a hit-and-run. There were no witnesses, at least no one that will talk, so I can’t prove who did it and the police aren’t interested in solving the case.”

“Why the hell not?” he demanded, championing her cause and making her heart melt into a puddle on the floor.

“Because they’re paid not to. Vincent Moralli is untouchable.”

Aiden muttered a foul curse, the furrow of his brow taking up a full-on scowl. “Vincent Moralli? Ryann, Vincent Moralli is not a man to tangle with.”

“How do you know Vincent Moralli?”

“Who do you think kept him out of prison all these years?”

She flinched as if he’d struck her, no longer able to maintain the visage of impassivity. “You work for Moralli?” With each word, her voice hit a new octave. He winced.

“Worked,” he clarified. “Moralli is the largest client at my father’s firm.”

What were the odds of that man being the common denominator between them? Ryann didn’t believe in coincidences, but she couldn’t find the thread of connection linking them together. Still, something didn’t feel right about this. Before she could say as much, the door across the hall opened and an officer she recognized from the night before, the one who’d planted his boot into Aiden’s back, stepped into the hall.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Ms. Andrews, Mr. Kruze.” The officer acknowledged Aiden with a nod but only briefly made eye contact. He was clearly uncomfortable around Aiden. Whether it was remorse over his less than gentle treatment of him, or fear that Aiden would use his influence to make trouble for him, she didn’t know. “We’ll be taking your statements separately. Ms. Andrews, if you’ll please come with me.”

Separately? A moment of alarm sent Ryann’s heart leaping inside her chest. Aiden had to know this was his chance to get rid of her. She had to say something—make him understand why she’d done it. Maybe he would understand. Maybe he would help her. She must have looked as panicked as she felt, because before she could spill her guts and beg Aiden to keep his silence, he glanced at the officer and said, “Will you please give us a moment?”

The cop nodded and stepped back in the examination room. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Once they were alone again, Aiden grasped her shoulders and turned her to face him. “Are you all right? Ryann, talk to me.”

“You can’t tell them,” she pleaded, no longer caring to disguise the desperation in her voice.

“Tell them what? What the hell are you talking about? Sweetheart, you’re not making sense.”

“About what I did to you. Aiden, they’ll arrest me. You said it yourself, I’ve committed a felony. If you don’t come back with me, if I don’t get that money from your mother, Vincent Moralli is going to kill me.”

The look of surprise on his face was quickly erased by concern with a healthy dose of pissed-off. Though she couldn’t be sure, she suspected the latter emotion wasn’t directed at her, even though his grip on her tightened until she winced.

“What the hell kind of trouble are you in, Ryann?”

“I’ll tell you. I promise I’ll tell you everything. Just please don’t tell them what I did to you.”

Instead of agreeing, he pulled her into his arms. God help her, he felt so good, so safe. Despite all the promises she’d made to herself and the boundaries she’d tried to erect, Ryann found herself wrapping her arms around him, clinging to him. She tried to ignore the way her curves molded to his unyielding chest, or the strength in those arms that had the power to crush her but offered only comfort.

“It’s going to be all right, Ryann. I’m not going to say anything. Actually, the thought never crossed my mind. But you will tell me what this is all about when we get out of here.”