Page 2 of Cognac Secrets
At first, I thought men who’d picked me up and professed I was a rare beauty or whatever had actually meant it. I’d bought into their bullshit, hook, line, and sinker, time after time, thinkingthey saw me… but no. The first time had left me devastated, when I’d woken up in the middle of the night in the cheap hotel room he’d gotten us to him putting on his pants and telling me I’d been fun, but let’s not make it out to be more of a thing.
He'd berated me when I’d cried. He’d told me love wasn’t a thing anymore when I’d professed that’s what I’d thought we’d been doing – falling in love.
I couldn’t tell you how much my heart yearned for that… to be loved. For real. Just once. Byanyone.
But the years passed, and the more I got used for sex, the more I realized that love was just a fairytale told to small girls to keep them compliant. That if it did exist, it wasn’t what I’d been raised believing it was from all the cartoon movies with beautiful princesses and dashing princes. There was a reason they were calledfairytalesin the first place. Fairies didn’t exist. Neither did true love. It was all just another mechanism to keep women and young girls chasing after a man like we needed them…
Which we didn’t. We wanted them. There was a difference. The sad reality being that none of them realized that the latter was far more precious than the former. To be wanted was far more important than ever to beneeded… but alas, it just seemed to be how it was. The way of things.
I’d had some really good lovers. Some really good partners… and I’d had some not so good ones, too.
The common denominator to all of those short relationships and their utter failure was me, and I knew that. I was as my daddy always said. Too difficult to love. Too willful. Too obstinate. Too much of a pain in the ass. Not pretty enough, not good enough. And yet, I held the knowledge like a secret and projected confidence wherever I went, because for some fucked-up reason, I couldn’t stop believing in the goddamn fairytale that there was someone out there for everyone. That someday, all my monumental defects and malfunctions aside, someone would finally see me and want me, warts and all.
It hadn’t happened yet, and I worried it never would, but I was determined for whatever reason to keep on keeping on despite how much it hurt to be rejected, time and time again.
Despite how crestfallen I felt on the inside to have fooled myself into believing that I’d somehow connected with this guy, this biker, only to have him call me by another woman’s name.
Damn my luck.
Still, there was one thing that I knew in this moment on the dance floor. Whoever this Mia woman was? He loved her, and missed her, and longed for her in a way that called to the echo of sadness in my own heart, pulling on my heartstrings in such a way that it made me a marionette… a puppet, willing to do anything to soothe that hurt, that ache in his being. Because I knew I couldn’t stand hurting like I did on the regular, and his hurt called to mine in the moment. So, for right now, for tonight, I made the decision to be whoever he needed me to be – because goddammit, I was just too fuckingnice.
Wouldn’t be the first, nor the last time it got me into trouble, I reckon.
CHAPTERONE
Bennie…
“Right here.” I gently led her by the elbow, guiding her into the back seat of the black SUV. She settled into the seat, smoothing her pencil skirt over her knees, and looked up at me with those wide, deep brown eyes of hers.
“Thank you,”she murmured through those imminently kissable lips. I gave a curt nod and shut the door to the armored vehicle and swallowed hard, schooling my face into a blank slate from behind my aviators as I took a step back to allow the car to pull away smoothly from the curb.
Two blocks up, the vehicle exploded, and I would never see my beautiful Mia smile again.
I sat up in bed, panting, soaked with sweat, haunted by the trust in those deep brown eyes of hers as she’d looked up at me, as I’d put her in the back of that instrument of death.
She’d trusted me, and she’d died for it. I’d trusted that her family only had her best interests at heart…
But it’d been nothing but betrayal all around, and I’d been the one meant to protect her.
I’d failed.
I put my head in my hands and raked my fingers through my sweat-slicked hair, sniffing and clearing my throat.
It was still something like three hours before I needed to be up and start the fuckin’ grind that was my independent accounting for several small businesses and to do a few books for some not-so-legal, underground enterprises – the club included.
I’d gotten wrapped up in some of the illicit stuff after I got out of the Army. I’d served a few tours, had combat experience, and had come out with some serious PTSD and disillusionment, along with a few other injuries that’d been deemed “not service related,” which was bullshit.
I’d tried getting hired on to some jobs once out, started college for accounting, but shit was expensive even with the college credits. Even though school was taken care of, living expenses weren’t.
That’s when a buddy of mine from my unit overseas had reached out. Said there was some good money in the personal protection racket. Said the work was boring but steady and they were looking for a guy. He thought I might be interested.
He’d been right about that. At the time it’d felt like a lucky break… even luckier that I was supposed to look out for the dude’s daughter and not dude. Mia Stephanopoulos was smokin’ hot, around my age, a spoiled Mafia princess, and with a stubborn streak a mile wide and six times as long. She punched my ticket in so many ways, but I knew I didn’t stand a chance with her. That wasn’t what I was there for, but Mia Stephanopoulos was just full of surprises and one of those surprises was that I fit her bill.
The affair was secret and torrid, and right under her daddy’s and her brothers’ noses. Somehow, that just made things hotter.
We carried on for over a year, and it was good. We were in love and trying to figure out how to get her out and to disappear, fade away, and live our dreams of a simpler fucking life when all hell had broken loose.
She’d been targeted by a car bombing attack at shift change as I’d sent her and Tommy off to some gala thing like the Met or whatever. The attack had initially been blamed on a rival family, but they didn’t want anything to do with claiming responsibility – which was odd.
