“Take what back?”
“If you want to add it to what you’ve already paid this morning, you can, but you can’t take it back and then pay me for only this month instead. Like I told you, I’ve already spent a lot of it.”
“Roksana, I think there must be some kind of mistake. I haven’t paid you yet.”
She narrows her eyes even more and sucks her teeth. “First thing this morning, I was on the phone with a man who seemed to know you. I assumed it was a boyfriend at first, but he was quite cold with me, I’ll have you know, and very impatient. I thought then maybe he was a solicitor of yours, or a banker. He wired the next twelve months’ rent right into my account.”
Quite cold. Very impatient.
And could drop a year’s rent into someone’s account at the drop of a hat.
A white, angry static crackles in my vision and my hearing and I can feel it singe the inside of my veins. “He didn’t happen to give his name, did he?”
Roksana shrugs. “Church something. Churchwell? Churchhill?”
James Church Cason. My hand fists around the envelope and Roksana glances down at it, shrewd assessment in her gaze. “You could give me that for safekeeping,” she says. “In case this Church man changes his mind.”
“I think I better hang on to it,” I manage, anger coursing through me so hot and bright that I can’t even remember why I didn’t murder him the last two times I saw him. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to make a phone call.”
***
The walkto work is windy, with that kind of autumnal spatter that can’t decide if it wants to rain or what, and it matches my shitty mood perfectly when Church answers my call. A shitty mood that’s exacerbated by the fact that I still have his phone number memorized after four years.What is wrong with me?!
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I demand, before he can say a single word. “This is way out of line, even for you.”
“Hello, Charlotte,” Church says softly.
“Don’thello, Charlotteme. You had no right to pay for my rent.None.”
“It’s a gift,” he says. His voice is still soft, but threaded through the words is an unmistakable edge. The one that kept me coming back to Church’s bed over and over again—the cold imperiousness that thaws only for me. “It’s freely given. I don’t expect anything in return, little one.” Even with the strange combination of softness and arrogance, honesty still rings through his words. He’s telling the truth—or thinks he is.
I still say, “Oh, really?” because that’s just who I am.
“Yes, really. I wanted to ease something for you that was in my power to ease, Charlotte. I wanted to make something—anything—better for you and Jax.”
I flush with more than anger, although I’m not sure what for. Embarrassment that he so easily peeled back the lid on my shitty, cash-strapped life? Or something much, much more dangerous?
Am I...touched? That he notices me and thinks of me? Am I turned on by the fact that he still wants to care for me? Am I grateful that he picked the single biggest source of my misery to ameliorate?
Ugh.
Maybe.
Stupid bunny.
My footsteps become more like stomps as my irritation with myself spills over to him again. “You still should have asked, you interfering prick.”
The silence following my insult scratches at me, if I’m honest. I’ve always been colorful with my language around him—prick, bastard, asshole,arsehole if I was in the mood to make fun of him—and I’ve never stepped back from provoking him. But my little rebellions and challenges were always met with scrumptious wrath; more often than not, I was hauled over his lap and spanked until I was begging to be fucked. Sometimes he would wait to punish me for my brattiness, letting the anticipation worm its way under my skin until I was near crazed with it, and then finally tying me to his bed and tracing rebuke all over my body with his tongue and teeth.
And yes, okay, sometimes I provoked himbecauseI wanted some spanking and bondage. Sometimes a girl needs to savor the sweet displeasure of her god, what can I say?
But right now, he’s saying nothing. He’s not purring sexy threats into my ear, he’s not dryly musing aloud about whether his bratty supplicant needs to be bitten or ridden or both. He’s quiet and I find that I hate it.
“Aren’t you going to say something?” I demand.
Church sighs. “What is there to say? That the only thing that kept me on this side of sane for the last four years was the mistaken hope that you were in the States building a life for yourself? That knowing you’ve been suffering, that you’ve been alone, that every day has not only been a struggle but a slow starvation of the things that used to feed you—that the knowledge is fucking damning? And I can barely swim through the hours knowing it?”
The pain in his voice saws right through me, and I stop walking.