Page 23 of His to Seduce
“I haven’t lied.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it.” He grinned then and set down his drink. “I’ve got a wife to get back to. Told her I’d give her an hour of freedom before she was beneath me again. We done with our bullshit for the night?”
Like I was going to stop his honeymoon for my bullshit.
I waved him off. “Go. Have fun.”
“Don’t have to worry about that. Last night Blue did this thing—”
“Ack. Fuck.” I pressed my hands to my ears like a kid. “Don’t need to hear that shit, Tyson.”
“Yeah, but it made you laugh, and you haven’t done enough of that since you’ve been back, either. So I’m not fucking around, David. Find someone to unload on, like Aidan said. We miss you.”
He left and I turned to Declan. He was standing at the table, a pensive expression on his face.
“You have anything you need to add?”
“I think they said it all.”
I needed to get out of there. All the heavy talk had killed my high of the day with Camden, and all I wanted to do was get back to her so I could forget about everything they’d said. “I’m going to take off. Have a good night.”
Declan grinned. “Have fun with Camden.”
I walked away without responding but heard Declan’s low laughter echoing behind me.
Shoving my hands into the pockets of my shorts, I took the long way back to my bungalow. Camden would still be with her friends, and the last thing I wanted to do was be alone in a quiet place.
Kicking off my sandals and holding them in my hand, I walked along the beach until I found a dark, shaded area away from the lights of the resort and sat my ass down.
Years of being a doctor had been flushed down the drain after a horrific night in the emergency room. The patient was a little girl, her body so small and mangled, blood seeping from what had seemed like everywhere. She had eventually survived, but it would take years of therapy to get her walking again. Her mom hadn’t made it.
And the dad? Absolutely fucking destroyed.
All due to a carjacking gone bad and bullets flying in a city where the assault weapons they had used were illegal in the first damn place. From what I’d learned from cops later, they’d been headed south of the city after the mom had taken her daughter on her tenth birthday to seeThe Lion Kingat the theater. A drug deal went bad, men were killed, and when the killer needed to steal a car, the men he had been running from caught up with him. Gunshots rang out, hitting the mom in the head before she could get away. The daughter had been hit in the thigh and stomach.
And me? I’d snapped. Because fuck it. Every night it was the same damn thing, repeating likeGroundhog Day. Wake up, lose some people, save some people. The majority were young men, rushed in with bullet holes in their bodies, and they all had the same damn excuse. “I was just standing on the corner, man, minding my own business. I didn’t do nothing wrong.”
Yeah. Bullshit. But we weren’t lawyers or judges. Our job was to fix them, and when we did, if they weren’t arrested for anything, we sent them back to their corners on the streets where they’d deal drugs, pimp out prostitutes, sell more guns, or worse—ruin innocent people’s lives—until we saw them again.
My dreams of becoming a doctor evaporated in what seemed like an instant the moment I saw Gavin Merryfield—I’d never forget his name—so full of grief and despair and ruin, turn from a man into a ghost before my eyes.
I’d gone home that night and bawled my eyes out. Bawled harder than I had when my own dad died when I was eighteen. All those years of studying and classes and working, only to end up feeling like I wasn’t doing a damn bit of good because the death tolls kept rising, and it was all just…worthless.
But could Camden handle that? Who knew when I’d be able to tell her? She thought I was some dirt-poor bartender, but in truth, I had more money than I could ever possibly need thanks to the McGregor Trust Fund. I’d been one of only a few students I knew who had paid tuition in cash, without a blink of an eye. She might be able to understand me walking away from a career I didn’t know if I ever wanted to return to, but even I knew she’d already feel betrayed by my not being honest about the other shit.
I’d grown up with girls and women throwing themselves at me, and I never knew if it was for my trust fund, family connections, or just me. Camden’s need to have a guy with money made her the exact kind of woman I should have stayed away from, even though I knew there was a reason she needed that.
She doesn’t seem like the kind of woman to give second chances.
Yeah, Tyson was right. She wasn’t, which meant I had a short amount of time to get her so tied to me that when I told her the truth before she found it out from someone else, she’d be hooked so deeply she couldn’t leave.
