Hate Fuck: part two Read Free Page B

tell him more. Tell him that I know he’s a good man, deep down, and that I trust him.
    But I’m not sure I do. The fear inside me is a sharp, stabbing pain. It feels wrong to doubt him, but within hours of sleeping together, he dragged me perilously close to the edge of scandal.
    Not on purpose. I close my eyes, not wanting to see how he clenches his jaw and guards his gaze as he takes in my silence.
    From the second he saw me, I’ve known Cole is pissed I’m here. But then he kissed me, and for a second I thought it might work out somehow.
    “I didn’t want to leave your bed,” he repeats his earlier statement, his voice rough and raw.
    My eyes snap open. “But you did.”
    “It’s what I do. I fix shit. Sometimes that means I leave in the middle of the night.”
    “And get arrested?”
    He shrugs like it’s no big deal.
    I shrug right back, my eyes narrowing because it’s totally a big deal. “Now I’m your alibi for last night, aren’t I?”
    He snaps to his full height and glares at me. “Nobody needs to know that. I would never drag you into this shit.”
    “You don’t think anyone’s going to find out you’re sleeping with Morgan Reid’s daughter? You think you’re the only team who can hack into digital data streams?” My voice lifts as I wave my arm over my head in Wilson’s general direction. “The cops—”
    “Don’t have the budget for someone like Wilson. And nobody else cares. We care because we want to find out who killed Anabeth Fletcher.”
    I close my eyes at the name of the poor woman who died.  
    “We weren’t…She and I…” he trails off, and I stare at him, incredulous.
    “Seriously? She’s dead , Cole. I don’t care if you fucked her.”
    His eyes flare at that. “Really? I’d care if I heard on the news that you were having a secret affair with someone. That’s the story that’s being spun, right?”
    I can’t help it. My voice raises itself, and all of a sudden I’m yelling at him. “I’d never have a secret affair with someone, you asshole! I date people, and only one at a time. I don’t have affairs . I don’t do anything illicit, or dirty, or wrong .”
    He doesn’t even blink at me calling him an awful name, even though I already regret it. “Really, beautiful? Because last night you were all over me being your dirty little secret.”
    “That was a mistake.”
    He’s across the room before the words fade into the air between us. He stops an inch short of slamming me against the door again. “Nothing about last night was a mistake,” he grinds out. “And I’m not complaining about being your secret anything. I’m not sleeping with anyone else. Anything you see or hear, if it’s true, belongs in the past.”
    “The recent past?”
    “The past ,” he repeats, this time with emphasis. “Once we’re not yelling at each other and I don’t need to get back to work to solve a fucking murder , you can have as many details as your delicate little ears can handle.”
    That shuts me up, because no, I don’t want details. Not now, not ever. I don’t want the images of Cole and other women in my head. Multiple women at the same time. Damnit. It doesn’t take much to poke the green-eyed monster inside me, and I don’t have that right.
    He drops his forearms against the door, bracketing me in place without touching me. He glares at me. “What we have, Hailey…it’s different.”
    “We don’t have anything,” I whisper. Lies . My skin itches for him to touch me.
    Like he knows what I need, he slides his hand around my neck and holds me in place as he presses his forehead to mine. “Would we? If everything was different? If you weren’t innocent and light, and I wasn’t darkness and—”
    “I’m not as innocent as you think.” And he’s not as dark, either, but I don’t care about that fight in the same way. “I can handle the truth. What happened last night?”
    He shakes his head. “No. You don’t need to know anything about