Read Online Never Enough: The Vipers MC by Lexi Cross - Free Book Online Page B

leaning my head against the window. What was I gonna do?
     
    I wanted to protect her. From the minute I saw her, I knew I had to keep her safe. There had been so much fear in her eyes, blank terror. It only got worse when she realized she was looking at me and not some random guy off the street. I had noticed, and it didn’t exactly make me feel good. Maybe at the time—all the hatred had come back, and the pain. I had wanted her to be afraid of me. Days later, I didn’t feel that way anymore. I wanted her to trust me enough to let me take care of her. She needed me, whether she believed it or not.
     
    She wasn’t part of my world anymore, the outlaw underground world. She didn’t have the ways of fighting scumbags like that loan shark. I did. I was ready and willing to use them for her. I would do anything for her, didn’t she know that? I would do anything to stop anybody who thought they could hurt what was mine.
     
    She’s not yours . The voice in my head made fun of me, the way it did back when she first left. She never loved you. She was fucking somebody else the whole time. She hates you. You were never good enough for her . On and on, every day, all day. It had gone away after a long time, and I hadn’t heard it in years. The voice was back because she was back.
     
    So she wasn’t mine anymore. Maybe not by law. Inside, I knew different. Jess was mine, she was always mine, she would always be mine. I’d been with hundreds of women since she left, and all I saw when I was inside them was her. Her face, her eyes. I’d hear the noises they’d made, the sounds, the words, and I would imagine it all coming from her. It was the only way I could get through life. I never told that to anybody.
     
    I couldn’t sit back while she was in danger. No way. It wasn’t how I was built.
     
    I needed to sit and think out the ways I could go behind her back to make sure she was okay. One way or another, I would take care of what was mine.
     

 
    Chapter Eight
     
    Jess
     
    I never knew what it meant to wait for the other shoe to drop until I lived with the knowledge that Joe Green’s men would be after me again.
     
    As days passed, I realized he was toying with me. I’d been so sure somebody would be waiting when I got out of the cab. Then again when I walked David to school on Monday morning, after spending most of the weekend locked up in the apartment. I’d even inspected the delivery guy through the peephole in the door, wondering if he was legit or just some goon trying to intimidate me. I only opened the door because I recognized the man as an employee of the restaurant.
     
    He was toying with me. I realized that by Monday afternoon. Joe was seeing how far he could go before I completely unraveled. The ball was fully in his court, and he knew it. The certainty that he would be coming back before long—if not him, one of his enforcers—made life a living hell.
     
    “Mama? What’s wrong with you?” I walked David home from school, looking both ways the whole time. I must have looked like a woman on the run, somebody who had done something horrible and knew she’d get caught eventually. I had done something horrible, all right. I had made a deal with the devil.
     
    “Nothing, honey. Really. I’m just not feeling very well today.”
     
    “You’re squeezing my hand,” he groaned, trying to pull away from my grip.
     
    “Don’t let go!” I realized I’d nearly screamed it, and people up and down the street stopped to look at me. There I was, the world’s worst mother. Screaming at her poor kid for no reason. I could feel their judgment seeping into my skin.
     
    I looked down at my wide-eyed boy, feeling a mixture of regret and guilt. “I’m sorry, honey. You know I don’t mean to yell at you. I can’t have you letting go of my hand in the middle of the street, though. Right? You know that.”
     
    “I know.” He didn’t sound convinced that I had it all together. Well, he was right.