“Any brothers or sisters?” I asked, looking straight ahead.

“Nope,” she said, “just me.”

“And your mother…?” I gently pushed.

“What about you, Jax?” she suddenly turned the questions onto me.

“What about me?” I shrugged behind the wheel.

“What about your family?” she asked, staring sideways at me in the gloom of the cab of my truck.

Being hit with such a straight question kinda put me on the back foot and part of me now appreciated why Mina had been so reluctant to talk about her own past. We all had ghosts hiding someplace, I guessed.

“My mother died when I was younger…” I started.

Without offering the usual sympathy that you might expect when telling someone that your mother had died, Mina seemed to skip over this as easily as brushing hair from her eyes and said, “What about your father?”

I glanced at her, sitting beside me on the bench. The passing glare of headlamps and streetlights gave her face a warm orange glow in the dark. She was staring at me. “He’s missing,” I said, looking front again. I didn’t want to talk about him.

“What does that mean?” she asked, seeming to not want to let the subject drop.

“You know, gone…” I started.

“Gone where?” she jumped in.

“Does it matter?” I shot back, pressing my foot against the accelerator and speeding up.

“It would matter to me,” Mina said, her eyes watching me as if examining every one of my facial expressions, however slight.

“He was a drunk, okay?” I said, my fingers tightening around the steering wheel – knuckles glowing white. “When my mother died, he hit the bottle – he hit it so damn hard that he ended up drowning in the stuff…”

“Drowning?” Mina whispered, then frowned.

“It’s a figure of speech,” I told her. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. He hit the road and hasn’t come back. The police aren’t interested… why should they be? He was just a bum.”

“Do you believe that?” Mina asked.

Taking a deep breath, I shook my head and slowed the truck. “No, I don’t believe that. He was just hurting, that’s all.”

I felt Mina’s hand settle lightly on my thigh. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what?” I asked, looking down at her hand, then back at her. I stopped the truck.

She looked at me, and said nothing at first. Then glancing over my shoulder again like she had so many times before, she smiled and said, “What are we doing back at your place, Jax?”

I glanced back over my shoulder at the house I rented with Austin. “How do you know I live here?” I asked, looking back at Mina.

“I recognised that death trap you call a motorbike, parked in the drive,” she smiled at me.

I looked at her with an amused expression. “Do you want to come inside?”

She stared back at me as if she was fighting a war inside herself. I’d seen the expression before in other girls. They want to, but they don’t want to seem too eager or easy. Although in Mina’s case, I would never think that of her. After that kiss earlier, I definitely wanted to continue it in a more… private setting.

But did I really? Did I want to risk sleeping with this girl and then things going badly like what had happened with the other brief ‘relationships’ I’d had in the past?

I guess it was me who was fighting the internal war.

She finally smiled at me. “Sure, I’d love to.”

As I went around to open her door, as I was now used to doing, I set the alarm and led her up the path to my small house. My hand was almost shaking as I put the key in the lock and prayed to the gods that Austin was still out.

The house was in pitch darkness, and as I flipped on the light, I realized the house was empty. I let out a breath.

“Uh, do you want something to drink?” I asked her as she looked around the house. Thankfully it was clean today, which wasn’t always the case. Austin always picked up after himself. I was the one who had to be more disciplined.

“Do you have any wine?” she asked sincerely.

I wanted to laugh. Wine, was she joking?

I smiled at her, chagrined. “Ah, no, sorry. I’ve got beer and a few bottles of the hard stuff.”

“Oh,” she said, as if trying to decide.

I watched as she set her purse down on my couch, but grabbed her iPhone from it, holding it tightly in her fist.

“Here,” I said, going to the cabinet and pulling out some tequila. “Just have a shot, make it fast.”

She wrinkled her nose at me. “Tequila? Ew.”

This time I did laugh. “Or not…”

I pulled a Blue Moon beer from the fridge and popped the top off and took a swig. I could see she was watching me closely so I went over to her.

“You sure you don’t want some?” I whispered, pressing the bottle to her lips, swiping the tip of the bottle against first her top lip, then her bottom lip. She offered no resistance, but instead, stared up at me unblinking, refusing to break eye contact. I watched as her tongue snaked out and licked the round top. As I began to tip the bottle into her mouth, I had my other hand on her upper arm, gently rubbing my thumb along her soft skin. Just as the bitter, foamy liquid was about to slide into her mouth, she pushed the bottle away and kissed me again.

Chapter Sixteen

Mina

The bottle of beer that Jax had held to my lips fell from his hand and dropped onto the carpet. I could hear the glug-glug sound as the foamy contents poured from the neck of the bottle and onto the carpet. Jax either didn’t hear it or wasn’t bothered. He kissed me back. In fact, it was more than just a kiss – it was like he was devouring my mouth. He pressed his lips hard over mine and I gasped for breath as his goatee brushed against my chin and along the side of face. With his tongue exploring my mouth, I felt his strong hands work their way down the length of my spine and settle on my arse. His lips pulled away from mine as he kissed my neck and then took my right earlobe into his mouth. He nibbled the soft flesh with his teeth. I shuddered at the feeling of his hot breath against my neck. He worked his hands down over my arse. His fingers lifted the hem of my short blue dress and I felt his fingertips knead my buttocks. Snaking my arms around his neck, I pulled Jax close and caught the faint whiff of engine oil and grease mixed with the heady scent of aftershave leak from him. The odd mixture made my head spin as he forced me down onto the sofa. He leant over me, and I looked up into his dark eyes.

There was a long pause as we looked at each other. My heart raced in my chest and I felt giddy.

“Is this what you want?” he said, slipping one of his denim clad thighs between my mine and gently easing them apart. I offered no resistance.

I thought of the stream of other girls I’d seen him lead into his house over the last few months. I felt a sudden pang of jealousy. Why should I be jealous? Jax hadn’t been mine then. Was he even mine now? Was I just another one of the many girls he had bought back here? Would I be creeping out before dawn, carrying my shoes in one hand and my panties in the other?

“I want you,” he whispered, leaning close and tugging at his shirt.

I’d heard that before. That’s what the other had said to me as he had lowered me onto my mother’s bed.

I stared up at Jax as he reached up and pulled his shirt over his head. I gripped my phone tight in my fist as if it was some kind of a lifeline – something that would pull me to safety if it all went wrong like it had before. Jax leant over me, now stripped to the waist. His body was something close to one of those statues I’d seen in the art museums back home in London. The muscles covering his stomach looked as if they had been chiselled from stone. His left nipple was pierced, and the silver stud glinted in the dim light from the nearby table lamp. Jax’s sculptured chest and round shoulders were covered in a maze of crisscrossing tattoos. I could see what looked like black angel wings on his chest, snakes and serpents coiling around his muscular upper arms. The sight of his body turned me on and I did want him, but those lingering memories of what had happened to me before – the trouble it had caused – came flooding back in a wave. I closed my eyes, as I tried to push them back into the corners of my mind. Reaching out, I let my fingertips bump over the taut muscles covering Jax’s stomach. I felt him shudder at my touch. His hands were on my thighs as he ran his rough fingers up towards my panties. I ran my hands up the length of his back, pulling him over me. It was like I was using him as some kind of shield – protecting me. I felt his breath against my neck, and that musky smell of his seemed almost intoxicating. I felt one of his fingers hook aside my panties and slip between the soft silk of the fabric and my skin. His knuckle brushed gently against me, which sent my nerves tingling. I felt a sudden urge to give in to him – to let Jax take me and treat me as his own. But I wanted more than that. I wasn’t going to be another one of his quick fucks. I didn’t want him to tell me that he loved me or anything like that. My mother’s lover had once told me he’d loved me – but he hadn’t really. That had been a lie which I had been naive enough to believe. I just wanted Jax to respect me, but would he if I gave in so easily to him? I wanted something steady in my life for once. I didn’t want to make the same mistakes I had made before. That had cost me my relationship with my mother. But would Jax respect me if he knew my secrets? If he knew my past? If he knew my future? The secret I kept wasn’t just going to go away, and if Jax became a part of my life – my secret would become part of his, too.

“I’m so fucking hard for you,” Jax whispered in my ear, pulling down my panties.

I opened my eyes and could see the lust in his eyes as he watched my white panties slide slowly over my tanned knees. He was looking down between my open legs. I suddenly snapped them shut and grabbed hold of his wrists to stop him pulling down my panties any further.

“Stop,” I breathed.