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  The man’s hands caught mine, and he slowly set me away.

  “I got it,” he said. “You’re good.”

  I wasn’t good. I was dying.

  “Uhh,” I hesitated. “Okay.”

  The man’s eyes met mine.

  That was when I felt myself freeze.

  His eyes were…scary.

  Scary was the only word that could describe them.

  I felt like he could see straight into my soul with those eerie, witch eyes.

  “Have a good one,” I said, scrambling my way around him.

  But with the way he was standing in the doorway, I had to brush my entire body against his to get away.

  And God, his body.

  If his arms and chest had been defined, that was nothing compared to the abs that I could see through his t-shirt.

  There was no way in hell the man belonged here then. Who in their right mind, with a body like his, would be caught dead in a bakery? There was no way he maintained a body like he did while also eating sweets.

  Trying to ignore the way my breasts felt while grazing his arm, I hurried outside and told my nipples to get themselves under control.

  I didn’t look back until I was in my car.

  And when I did, I was shocked stupid to see him staring at me.

  Starting my car, I backed out of the parking spot and jetted in the direction of home, all the while confused on why my heart felt like it was beating straight out of my chest.

  Chapter 2

  I’m not sure if Target knows this, but there’s a whole demographic of women who want to wear shorts that don’t show off their twat.

  -Royal’s secret thoughts

  Royal

  Pissed didn’t even begin to describe how I was feeling right now.

  “What do you mean he was beat up?” I snapped, unsure if I’d heard what I thought I heard was what I actually heard.

  “Your brother was hurt by a dealer that thought he was encroaching on his turf. He’s okay, but he’s going to need to stay the night in the hospital to rule out a concussion.” Marta bit her fingernail. “Your father is on his way.”

  He would be.

  I’d called him four times today because I couldn’t get a hold of Jimmy and he hadn’t once returned my calls. Getting a hold of Jimmy wasn’t unusual for my dad. Jimmy didn’t like answering my father’s phone calls, so my father hadn’t been worried.

  Me, on the other hand? It wasn’t normal for Jimmy not to return my calls. Which had been why I’d been calling my father.

  “Is he really okay?” I asked. “He’s going to be okay?”

  Marta’s hand on my arm made me still. “He’s going to be fine.”

  My shoulders drooped. “Good.”

  “It’s all bluster. I think, overall, they took it incredibly easy on him considering,” Marta continued. “I…”

  “You need to leave.”

  My dad’s booming voice had us both looking up in time to see him barreling down right on top of us.

  “I’m not leaving,” Marta said. “He’s my son.”

  “You also almost got him killed,” my father countered. “You’re the last thing he needs to see.”

  “You can’t make me leave,” Marta snapped. “I’m here to stay, whether you like it or not.”

  “I can make you…” The Judge reared his ugly face.

  There were two parts of Raiden St. James. The first part was my father. He was the stiff, non-relenting asshole that always got what he wanted. And if that guy didn’t get what he wanted, the one who I called ‘The Judge’ in my head showed. The Judge was the manipulative bastard. The man that, if he didn’t get his way, did what he wanted and that was by forcibly removing his opponent.

  The Judge showed up more often than not when it came to Marta St. James.

  “Do you really want to do this in the hallway of the hospital where your son is in a room because he was jumped by a drug dealer?” I snapped at The Judge.

  Raiden St. James didn’t like being reprimanded. Even more, he didn’t like when that reprimand came from a girl that he wasn’t too sure he liked altogether.

  “Why are you even here?” he asked. “You’re the reason that he’s in this place in the first place.”

  I gritted my teeth.

  “I am not,” I snapped.

  “You don’t think that I don’t know that you were the one to get him this job?” he asked. “The job that was the only place in town that would hire his handicapped ass?”

  If I could’ve gotten away with punching my father in the face, I would have.

  Sadly, I was able to contain myself.

  But barely.

  “Father,” I said through clenched teeth. “I didn’t get him that job. He got that job all on his own.”

  Kind of.

  See, I worked for Little and Stratton, a welding company off of Eleventh Street. Eleventh Street, where only the worst of the worst lived and thrived. One day, I’d met my brother at the convenience store where he now worked, and the woman had offered him a job almost on the spot when she saw how he handled a fight between a couple of local gangbangers.

  My brother had accepted, and ever since then, Jimmy had been working right across the street from me.

  Which was both good and bad.

  Good because I got to see him all the time. Bad because he was working in a dangerous place where the world was different.

  There was this imaginary divide that started at the beginning of Eleventh Street and continued all the way to the end. That divide was like an entirely different world where cops weren’t called on people and things were handled internally.

  Meaning, nothing would happen to that little fucking prick who’d hurt my brother because he’d find a way to get out of it mostly by nobody speaking up even though the jumping had happened in broad daylight.

  “I think it’s time for you to go, too,” he said.

  It was time to go.

  I had half an hour left in my lunch break, and my boss and I were on a big timeline.

  Now that I knew that my brother was safe, I’d be going back to work. But mostly that was because I couldn’t stand my father and he was probably going to be here for the long haul.

  Without answering him, I headed into the hospital room and stopped beside my brother’s bed.

  He looked horrible.

  His eyes were both black and swollen shut. His hands had defensive wounds on them. His jaw was bruised, and his lip was split on both the bottom and the top.

  “Stop staring at me,” my brother said.

  I smiled, even though all I wanted to do was cry.

  “I’m not staring,” I lied. “I’m admiring your new look.”

  His lip quirked and that small movement made the crack in the bottom of his lip start to bleed.

  I nearly wept. The only thing stopping me from doing so was the way I was digging my nails into my palms and likely breaking my own skin in the process.

  “It’s a good one, isn’t it?” he asked. “I finally have some street cred.”

  I would’ve laughed at the absurdity of it if he hadn’t been speaking the truth.

  The young, impressionable teens that came into the convenience store, better known as Sparky’s where Jimmy worked, had always given him shit because he ‘didn’t know what it was like’ to live and breathe Eleventh Street.

  Well, now, he did.

  “Dad’s kicking me out,” I sighed. “I have to go back to work anyway. I haven’t gotten much done because I’ve been worried about you, calling you and all of your friends. Plus, I don’t want to hear them fight for hours. But I just wanted you to know that I stopped by, and I love you.”

  He reached for my hand, and I gathered his large palm in both of mine.

  “Thank you for looking for me,” he said. “I know that you’re the reason I was found so fast.”

  I probably was.

  I�
�d been looking for him for hours, calling every single person I could think of that might have seen him.

  Eventually, one of the shop’s regulars had come by with a funny look on his face, told me to go check out an alley, and that was where I’d found him being carted off by an ambulance.

  I’d called Marta to meet us at the hospital and had rushed back to Stratton to grab my keys and car and tell my boss I was taking my lunch break.

  “I’d look for you forever if that was what it took, bro,” I teased.

  When I went to pull away, though, he suddenly reversed his grip and clenched onto my left hand with surprising force.

  “Don’t go searching for answers,” he ordered stiffly.

  I gritted my teeth.

  I wouldn’t lie to him.

  I’d be finding answers whether it got my ass in the bed right next to him or not.

  “Royal…”

  “It’s time for you to go,” my father boomed. “They’re going to do an exam.”

  I looked over to see a doctor I hadn’t seen before, Marta and my father hovering in the doorway.

  I looked back over to Jimmy and said, “I’ll come by after work.”

  “You’ll not,” The Judge snapped.

  I sighed.

  “Come see me tomorrow,” Jimmy suggested. “He’ll be at work.”

  He would.

  “Fine,” I said. “Love you, Jimmy Bird.”

  Jimmy let me go after a small squeeze. “Remember what I said.”

  I didn’t answer him.

  I wouldn’t be remembering anything.

  ***

  I stomped to the corner where it’d all gone down and took a look around.

  My brother’s blood still stained the concrete where it’d happened.

  And his scooter was surprisingly exactly where it was left, still turned over on the side and everything.

  That was a minor miracle in and of itself.

  It’d take a while for a new one to get in, so it was a damn awesome sight to see it.

  Walking to it, I bent low and failed to budge it even a little.

  I stood up with a muttered oath.

  “Goddammit,” I growled.

  I felt more than heard something coming from my right and whirled.

  That was when the same man from yesterday, only much rougher looking, appeared as if out of thin air.

  He didn’t stop to talk. Didn’t offer any words of hello.

  Just bent down in a half squat and righted the chair as if it weighed nothing more than a feather rather than a couple hundred pounds.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”

  He grunted out something that sounded like ‘you’re welcome.’

  Before I could think better of it, I touched his arm.

  “You didn’t happen to see anything that happened to the man that was in this chair, did you?” I asked.

  “No,” he said as he turned from me and started walking away.

  I growled low in my throat.

  “Coward.”

  The man stopped, turned, and regarded me with his cool, glacier colored eyes.

  “Sorry?” he rasped.

  God, his throat sounded like he gargled with rocks and smoked a pack a day.

  He looked scarier than yesterday.

  I wasn’t sure if it was due to the fact that he was on Eleventh Street, or because he was just scary and I hadn’t noticed it as much yesterday because I’d been in the process of choking.

  Whatever the reason, I was sorry that I’d called him a coward almost instantly.

  “N-nothing,” I lied.

  He narrowed his eyes. “No, I think you said something. Please repeat it.”

  I bit my lip and wondered if I was about to die.

  It was a very real possibility at this juncture of my life.

  I’d never been able to watch what I said, but most of the time, it didn’t get me into this bad of trouble.

  But, with a backbone of steel, I repeated what I’d said, knowing it would get my ass in a sling.

  “I said coward,” I repeated, this time more clearly.

  His eyes narrowed. “I’m not a coward.”

  My brows rose. “Could’ve fooled me.”

  “Sometimes, little girl, you don’t know what’s hiding on the other side of the road. And, let’s just say, what’s hiding over there is better for you not to know about,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes. “That’s a fuckin’ joke.”

  His teeth gritted.

  “It’s not. All I’m saying is that there’s more to this than you think, and you not knowing is for the best,” he said.

  “What I’m getting out of this is that you saw it happening, you know who did it, yet you didn’t do anything,” I drawled, sounding pretty evenly toned for how pissed I was.

  He sighed. “Listen, Ruby…”

  I narrowed my eyes. “My name is Royal.”

  His eyes sparkled. “Oh, even better.”

  I hated jokes about my hair. Even more, I hated jokes about my name.

  I was a natural red-head.

  So fuckin’ what.

  “You could’ve fucking done something,” I snapped. “And since you didn’t, my brother is in the ICU recovering.”

  His head tilted.

  “I did do something,” he said. “I made sure they didn’t touch the chair.”

  I gritted my teeth to keep from telling him thank you.

  That was a very nice thing for him to do, but what would be even nicer was if he told me who’d been responsible for hurting my brother.

  I narrowed my eyes, but before I could get him to talk, he was gone.

  When I called out to him, he ignored me, then disappeared into an alley.

  When I followed him into the alley, he was gone.

  Or at least I thought he was gone.

  I was halfway down the alley, passing a dumpster that was taller than me, and was looking left and right like a dumb girl, when a massive hand clamped onto my wrist and pulled me deeper into the shadows.

  “Listen,” the man growled, pinning me to the dirty building with his hard, enormous body. “I’m not sure you’re taking this very seriously. This dude that fucked your brother up is a bad dude. One that’ll kill you if he knows that you’re out for revenge. Now, do me a fuckin’ favor and go back to your little welding shop and pretend that everything is okay.”

  I took a deep, calming breath to try to wrangle my racing heart under control, but it was no use.

  The man that was pinning me to the wall was big, and I was really small in comparison. Also, I was a shameful slut because him holding me to the wall, my hands up over my head—when did they get over my head?—and his hips pinning my body to the wall was turning me on.

  “Are you even listening?” the man asked.

  Was I?

  I wasn’t sure.

  All I could feel was the hardness of his body. The way he towered over me. The way that I liked the way I felt.

  Also, was that his cock? Because Jesus Christ on a cracker, if it wasn’t, I was going to be sorely disappointed.

  “You’re not, are you?” he asked. “Fuck me.”

  He stepped away from me with disgust, and I had to fight back the moan that was on the tip of my tongue.

  “I’m sorry,” I blinked rapidly, trying to get my head on straight. “Were you saying something?”

  His eyes narrowed on me.

  “I was saying that you need to go back to work and keep your nose clean,” he said. “Stay at Stratton’s and don’t leave, no matter what.”

  My eyes narrowed right back at him, my red-headed temper coming out to play.

  “I will do what I want to do,” I shot back. “And you won’t be able to stop me.”

  He sighed as if he’d expected that answer. “What you want to do is going to get you killed.”

  My eyes went wide at
that news. “What are you talking about?”

  The man shoved his hands into his pockets, and the movement pulled his jeans down lower, exposing his lower stomach for a few short seconds before he pulled them back up.

  “I’m talking about you looking into the guy that fucked your brother up,” he said. “You think that he has a conscience? He doesn’t. He just fucked up a man in a wheelchair that was talking to one of his girls. Do you honestly think that his moral compass is one that’ll stop him from hitting girls?”

  I didn’t say anything to that, because I didn’t have anything to say.

  He was right.

  The guy that beat my brother up probably wouldn’t care that I was a girl.

  “Even worse, he knows you dwell down here, so he knows you know the score,” he continued. “And trust me when I say, he’ll fuck you up. And he probably won’t stop at just beating the shit out of you.”

  The man let his eyes rove up and down the length of my body, making my nipples harden and my body shiver.

  Jesus Christ, the man’s gaze was potent.

  It was like a straight shot of need straight to the hoo-ha.

  “Do yourself a favor and take a break from all this.” He paused. “Even better, get the hell off of Eleventh Street altogether.”

  Now that I wasn’t going to do.

  Stratton had hired me when I was a lost soul.

  He’d taught me everything that I knew and had even offered me a job once I got out of trade school.

  I wasn’t leaving Stratton until either he died or I did.

  “That’s a big ol’ negative, Ghost Rider.” I grinned. “But you can bet I’ll go back to work now.”

  I pushed away from the wall, ignored the slimy thing that I’d just stepped in, and hurried out of the alley.

  When I was at the mouth of it, I looked back and asked, “Hey, what’s your name?”

  He crossed his arms over his chest. “You don’t need it.”

  “Okay, Kemosabe,” I said. “I’ll just call you what I want then.”

  With that, I took off, hurrying down the two blocks that it took to get to the shop.

  When I arrived, it was to find Stratton pacing back and forth along the forecourt, looking worried.

  “Fuckin’ shit, girl,” he said when he first saw me. “I called Marta and she said you left over an hour ago. I started to get really freakin’ worried.”

  I held up two sandwiches. “I bought us sandwiches.”