The Obsessed With Him Series: Complete Box Set (A Bad Boy Romance) (20 page)

“Of course,” I said and rolled my eyes.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out the necklace, and I snatched it out his hand and fastened it around my neck. “Anything else?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No. But Olivia – ”

I turned around and walked away, not in the mood to get another warning about what a bad person Colt was.

Please don’t let me be wrong about him,
I thought as I headed down the sidewalk back toward the club. And then I began to run, as if the quicker I got back to him, the more chance my wish had of coming true.

I
spent
the first few hours of the day back in the office while Colt dealt with some kind of delivery probably with one of the kitchen vendors. I fell into a steady rhythm of entering receipts into the computer, the work so monotonous it tempered my anxiety from a rapid boil to a rolling simmer.

But the whole time, my necklace lay heavy against my chest, a reminder of my reality.

Colt and I ordered in sandwiches for lunch, ate them sitting around my desk, talked about food and the weather and a baseball game Colt wanted to watch, what we should do this weekend.

It was ridiculously normal, and I wanted to scream into my necklace, to tell stupid Caleb that I’d been right, that Colt wasn’t a bad person, that I was done helping them, that I didn’t give a crap if they arrested me.

After lunch, it was more office work, until finally, at six o’clock, Colt returned to the office.

“Do you want to go home?” he asked. “I could take you.”

I shook my head. “No, I...I want to stay here with you.” I felt myself flush at him calling his apartment “home.” I knew he meant
his
home, but still. It felt very intimate somehow.

“Oh, yeah?” he teased, and walked over to me, pulling me out of my chair and putting his hands behind me on the desk before pressing his body against mine. “You want to stay here with me?”

“Yes,” I said, grinning as his lips brushed mine.

“What will we do?” he murmured.

“Colt!”

“What?” he asked, acting innocent. His hand moved up under the bottom of my shirt, brushing against my belly. “You didn’t have a problem with it on the couch the other day.”

“Colt!” I said again. I giggled and pointed at my necklace, imagining a truck full of FBI agents listening to Colt and I have sex.

“I don’t give a fuck,” Colt mouthed to me, and he was so close and his lips so hot against my neck that he almost convinced me that I didn’t give a fuck either, and I leaned back on the desk as his hands moved down and unbuttoned my jeans.

But a second later, there was a knock on the office door.

“I’m busy,” Colt barked.

“Colt?” a woman’s voice called. “It’s Ava.”

Ava. The girl from the other night, the one who’d told Colt she’d take him to the after party, the one with the tanned skin and the perfect breasts. Jealousy welled inside of me.

“I’m busy,” Colt said again, his lips still pressed against my neck.

“It’s your uncle,” she said. “He’s here.”

Colt straightened up slowly, buttoning my pants back up and then he was off of me, walking over to the door and throwing it open.

Ava stood there in a tiny sparkly pink string bikini, her nipples like gumdrops through the fabric. “Sorry,” she said. “But your uncle’s here and he’s acting like a dick.”

“What are you talking about?” Colt demanded.

“He’s out on the floor,” she said. “He was giving one of the girls a hard time.”

Colt was out the door in a flash, weaving through the hallways toward the front of the club. I followed him, struggling to keep up with his long strides.

Out in front of the main stage, the lights were down low and a girl named Amber was on stage dancing to a slow beat. The strobe lights passed across the floor lazily. The club wasn’t busy yet – it wouldn’t heat up until around eight or nine, and then get progressively busier from there.

I spotted Colt’s uncle right away. He was sitting at a table toward the middle of the club, dressed in a black leather jacket and nursing a beer.

I watched as Colt approached him. The two men talked, their heads bowed, both of them looking serious.

“What’s going on?” I asked once Colt came back to where I was standing on the side of the room, where the curtain separated the main from the back corridor. “What did he say?”

“He claims he’s just stopping by for a beer.” But Colt didn’t sound sure. He looked over his shoulder to where Mick was sitting. Mick looked harmless enough, just sitting there, watching the girl on the stage move lazily to the beat as she reached up and unhooked her tiny bikini top, her large breasts falling out.

But then he took a pull from his beer and his snakelike tongue licked his bottom lip, and an involuntary shiver moved up my spine. I remembered what Colt had said, how his uncle had beat him, and my anger burned bright.

“And you believe him?” I asked.

“No.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“You should go back to the big office,” he said, ignoring my question. “The other one, the one where you auditioned for me. Wait for me back there until the end of the night, watch TV until it’s time to go home.”

“Okay.” I swallowed. “But what are you going to do?”

“Nothing. I’m going to let him finish his beer, and then once he leaves I’ll instruct security not to let him in here again.”

I nodded.

“I have to go check on the kitchen delivery,” Colt said, and the teasing tone he was using on me just a few minutes ago in the office was completely gone. Now his voice was tense and controlled. “I’ll come check on you in an hour or so.”

“Okay.”

He pushed through the curtain and turned left down the corridor and back toward the kitchen.

Suddenly, I realized I didn’t want to go back to the office and watch TV.

Something inside of me was telling me that I needed to stay out here. I wasn’t sure why – it was like some kind of weird premonition.

So instead of going back to the office, I took a seat in the back. I ordered a diet coke from a passing cocktail waitress, then sat back and waited.

U
ncle Mick didn’t leave
after one beer, like he’d promised.

Instead, he ordered drink after drink, getting more and more drunk. I watched as shot after shot was served to him, each waitress looking more and more disturbed as she gave him more alcohol, none of them wanting to be the one who had to tell him that he was cut off.

I was just about to go to the back and get Colt, to tell him that Uncle Mick hadn’t left yet, that he was still drinking, when all hell broke loose.

Mick called one of the girls over, one of the waitresses. Loose Cannons had a strict don’t-touch policy when it came to waitresses, but apparently Uncle Mick didn’t think that applied to him, because before I knew what was happening, he’d grabbed the girl’s breast through her uniform.

I gasped and was immediately out of my chair, moving toward the hallway to get Colt.

But the bartender must have already radioed back to Colt and told him what was happening, because before I could get out of my chair, he was walking out from the back, striding over to his uncle with a determined look on his face.

“Come on,” Colt said, his eyes blazing. “You’re done.”

“No, I’m not.” Mick stood up, and if the drinking had done anything to dull his reflexes or his body language, it wasn’t apparent. If anything, it seemed to have only emboldened him, to have made him meaner somehow, to have given him courage.

I shivered as I had a flashback to one of my foster fathers, who was a mean drunk.

“Yes,” Colt said. “You are.” He reached down and picked up his uncle’s beer glass and moved it to another table. “Out.” He pointed toward the door.

This infuriated Mick. He stood up and pressed his finger into Colt’s chest. “You little shit,” he said. “I built his fucking club.” He grabbed another drink off a waitress’s passing tray, drained it in one gulp and then threw it to the floor, where it smashed into a million pieces.

I gasped and my hand flew to my mouth.

I looked around for security, but Colt had lost a lot of his security team once he’d cleaned the place out, and now… now there was no one around to help.

The music was still going, but the girl on stage had stopped, and now a crowd was starting to gather around Colt and his uncle, and I got out of my chair and tried to fight my way through.

When I finally got up toward the front, Mick was holding his hands up in surrender.

“Fine,” he said. “Fine. I’ll leave. I just need to get my delivery from the back.”

“The delivery’s been dealt with,” Colt said, his voice steely, his eyes never leaving his uncle’s face.

“What the fuck does that mean?” his uncle sneered.

“It means it’s gone.” Colt said it simply, and I could tell from his tone that he wasn’t scared of his uncle, in fact, he was relishing this. Which made me even more scared, because I wasn’t sure what was going to happen next.

“You little shit,” Mick roared, and he grabbed Colt by his shirt and pulled him close to him, shaking him. “You fucking little shit. I built this fucking place.”

“My
father
built this place,” Colt said.

“Your father built a shitty little restaurant that no one cared about,” Mick spat. “I’m the one who made this place! I’m the one who moved thousands of pounds of drugs through here, I’m the one who made money off all these little sluts spreading their legs. I’m the one who’s special! Not your pussy ass father or his pussy ass son.”

I watched as Colt smiled, a cold hard smile, and then before I knew it, he escaped from his uncle’s grasp, then hauled back and punched his uncle in the face.

Mick staggered backwards and now the circle of people around them was widening, the regulars starting to hoot and holler. Colt may have cleaned out some of the dirtiness of the club, but it was too soon for a lot of the regulars to have realized this, and they were the kind who were spoiling for a fight.

“You little prick,” Uncle Mick said. He grinned and put a hand to his face, where his bottom lip was bleeding. “You fucking little pussy. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

“What I should have done years ago,” Colt said and he was rolling up his sleeves now, and I was yelling his name, but the catcalls of the crowd around us had started to get louder, the men jeering and hollering, and there was no way Colt could hear me.

Colt rushed at his uncle and then I was really screaming, screaming, screaming his name and begging him to stop, but it was swallowed up in the sounds of the crowd.

And then the two of them were fighting, rolling over each other on the floor, the two of them punching and kicking, before springing back to their feet. Colt threw Mick into a table and Mick stood up, stumbling, and then suddenly, there was a glint of something metal in Mick’s hand.

A gun.

He smiled and licked his lip and I saw the murderous glint in his eye.

He was going to kill him.

I screamed Colt’s name again and tried to rush toward him, but someone grabbed me from behind, one of the men, probably thinking they were protecting me from getting hurt, not realizing that the only thing that could hurt me more than a gunshot was someone hurting Colt.

“Yeah,” Mick said, cocking the trigger. “You little shit, you think you’re a big man now, you think you’re so fucking smart.” He spit onto the ground, his spittle black and tinged with blood.

The crowd had quieted a bit now, and I was still screaming, but Colt was in his own world, his own head, and the crowd was retreating, everyone running for the exits and someone was pulling me with them.

And then, suddenly, Colt was rushing at his uncle and the gun went off, a flash bang noise that reverberated through the room and I was screaming and running toward him, but those arms were around me, and I couldn’t get to him.

It was like I was in a dream, one of those dreams where you’re trying to do something and you can’t because you’re stuck underwater or you’re trying to call 911 and you can’t remember the number, only this was so much worse because it was so real, every color vivid, every feeling so sharp that it was impossible to pretend it was a dream.

“Colt!” I screamed and I was trying to get to him, and I could see blood on the floor, but I couldn’t tell if it was Mick’s or Colt’s.

The crowd had completely dispersed into pandemonium now, and those hands were still around me, pulling me to the exit, but I could see flashes of Colt and his uncle tangled together, their limbs flying as they wrestled on the ground. The gun was still in Mick’s hand, and I saw Colt hit his wrist and the gun skittered to the ground.

Colt had him pinned now, and he was on top of him, and he began to hit him, to pound his face, punch after punch.

“Colt!” I was screaming again, screaming his name, but my ears were ringing so loudly that I wasn’t sure if I was even yelling or if my screams were only in my own mind.

And then I remembered.

My necklace.

It was a direct link to the FBI.

I leaned down and spoke into it.

“Please!” I begged. “Caleb, please, you have to come, please! There’s a gun, please, you need to come! Hurry!”

And then I remembered something else – the trick I’d learned from countless years in foster care, the one thing that was guaranteed to hurt a man bigger than you if you got the opportunity to do it.

Kick him in the balls.

I turned around and kicked the man holding me right in the balls.

“Oof!” he groaned and fell to the floor and I whispered a silent apology as I broke free and ran toward Colt.

When I got to him, he was all alone, his uncle laying on the floor as Colt pounded his face.

“You son of a bitch,” Colt spat as he punched him. “You son of a bitch, I was a child, I was just a kid, you fucking sick fuck.”

“Colt,” I said, and I was grabbing his arm, but Colt was in a zone, his eyes glassy, and I knew where he was, because I’d been there myself. He was remembering all the things his uncle had done to him, all the times his uncle had beat him.