What did I want him to admit?
I heard the click of my seat belt, and then he caught me under the arms, jerking me across the center console. Then the steering wheel was in my back as the kiss deepened. Now it was my turn to get aggressive, grabbing his hair and jerking it back—partly to hurt him and partly so I could attack him with my tongue. The fire I’d felt at the bar was nothing compared to the burn coursing through me now. I wiggled, trying to find some way to get close enough to him for more contact, but it wasn’t possible.
Finally we broke apart, gasping, our foreheads resting against each other.
“This is ridiculous,” he said. “Come home with me. We’re good together, Mel. You know we are.”
I thought about it. What would it hurt, just one night together? Whatever else had gone wrong between us, there’d never been anything wrong with our chemistry. He caught my hand, raising it to his lips to kiss my knuckles. A stray bit of light from the streetlamp caught on his ring—a Reaper.
His club.
My brain slowly reasserted control as I ran my thumb across it.
“This is why,” I said, wishing I could turn off reality and simply go with him. “They’ll always come first. You’re a good daddy to Iz, but your club is more important than anything else. I want better than that for myself, Painter. I deserve better. That’s why I can’t go home with you.”
With that, I pushed away from him, sliding back across the console awkwardly. He stared at me in the dark, the silence between us so heavy I felt like I was smothering.
Finally he spoke.
“What’s that supposed to be—some kind of fucking ultimatum?”
“No,” I said, feeling clearer than I had all night. “Not at all. I will never ask you to leave the Reapers for me, Painter. Just like I’ll never settle for a man who isn’t one hundred percent mine. We want different things. That’s why all of this is such a big waste of time.”
“That’s bullshit.”
I don’t know what I’d expected him to say, but this wasn’t it.
“You’re a hypocrite, Melanie,” he continued. “You’re all about how evil the club is, but who’s watching your kid right now so you can go out and party?”
“Dancer,” I admitted, wishing like hell I’d just hired the kid down the street. But she’d invited her boyfriend over last time, and while I was pretty sure Izzy hadn’t seen anything, I didn’t feel like I could trust two horny teens to watch her . . .
“Yeah, and who helped you move into your house?”
“You and Reese.”
“Me and Reese and Horse and the prospects,” he said. I was starting to get the ugly sense I wasn’t going to win this fight. “When your car broke down, who towed it in and had it fixed?”
“Reese,” I whispered.
“Yeah, and which one of us wound up in the hospital after that homeless motherfucker went on the attack? Call me crazy, but if I remember correctly that was you, Mel. You know, you with your job where you see more blood and guts and destruction in one night than I see in a year?”
“That’s unfair and you know it,” I snapped. “You forgot one key point—my job is fixing those people, helping them.”
“And I’m sure Izzy will be very comforted by that fact when you turn up dead because some guy named Todger ambushed you in the parking lot,” he snarled. “But the good news is that he probably won’t even remember what he did, so I guess that makes it all okay, right?”