Heart of Steel (Demon Riders MC Book 2) (8 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

They don’t exchange any words as Dane parks the bike and leads them up to his studio above the body shop.  Elyse has had to resist the urge to speak to him, to break the silence with what would probably be an unbelievably lame joke.  Tension radiates off of him, dissuading her from opening her mouth at all until she gets to the top of the stairs.

“Are you going to talk to me at all?  Or am I just going to get the Dane Fletcher Silent Treatment?”  She crosses her arms and looks up at him with concern in her eyes.

“You want to talk, we talk inside, not out here.”  He looks pointedly towards the shop floor and his warning about Lance bugging the place comes back to her.  She doesn’t bother to tell him that Lance isn’t anywhere near hi-tech enough to pull something like that off, the man doesn’t even own a laptop!  He always insisted on writing up all his notes on an old typewriter he’d found at a yard sale.  When they’d first started dating, Elyse had thought it was romantic. Now she just thought it was pretentious.  She doesn’t tell Dane any of these things because she gets the distinct impression that he doesn’t want to hear her even mention Lance’s name.

She follows him through the door of his studio.  He locks the door behind them and looks at her, angrier than she’s ever seen him.  It’s different from the way he’d looked at her the night of their fight or the night at the bar.  That had been hurt, betrayal. This was something else.

“What the hell was that?”  He has drawn himself up to his full height, forcing Elyse to crane her neck up to look at him.

“What the hell was what, Dane?” She keeps her tone even, taking her cue from the way Rick had spoken to him.  She folds her arms so that he can’t see how nervous she is.  She’d told Suzi and Rick that she would take care of Dane and smooth things over with him.  She hadn’t mentioned that she had absolutely no idea how to do that.

“Back at the lake.”  He paces around, as if he has too much energy inside of him to contain.  “What you said about
him
.”  It was clear who they were talking about, Dane didn’t need to say his name.

Elyse swallows hard, meeting his angry stare with her cool one.  “Which part?”  She knows that she’s baiting him, but part of Dane’s issues stemmed from keeping things bottled up inside of him until he exploded.  If he wanted to be mad at her, she at least wanted them both to know what he was mad about.

“Where should I start?”  He looks around as if he’s asking someone else the question.  “How about the part where you told me you’d kick my ass if I touched one little hair on his head?” 

“I meant it; I would.  Next question.”  She tries not to tap her foot out of nerves rather than impatience. 

Dane’s eyes widen so much they look ready to bulge out of his head.  “Because you care about him.”  He virtually spits the words out.

“Not in the way you’re thinking.”  Elyse keeps her voice calm, as she tries to transmit the truth of what she’s saying with her eyes. 

“After what he did to you, the way he’s pretty much been stalking you since you broke up, and you still won’t let me do what needs to be done?”  Dane shakes his head at her in amazement.  “You would put the club at risk because you have the warm fuzzies for him?”  He’s speaking faster as the anger and frustration inside of him ramps up, winding up for a release that Elyse is pretty sure will be explosive if she can’t talk him down.

“I don’t have the ‘warm fuzzies’ for him, as you put it.  He’s an ex, I thought he was my friend, but that was naïve of me.  And I’d be putting the club at risk even if I agreed that throwing him off the nearest bridge was a good idea—which I don’t!”  She sighs deeply, rubbing at the headache developing between her temples.   “Did you not hear anything I said back there?  That his family could destroy you guys?” 

The blank expression on Dane’s face tells her that he’s not really listening to her; he’s too wrapped up in his own anger.  The fact that she’d stood up for Lance, that wasn’t what was really bothering him.  It was part of it, but not all, not by a long shot.

“What else, Dane?  What else made you attack a poor, defenseless picnic table?”  She smiles at him, but it’s not returned. 

“You think this is funny?”  He shakes his head at her, barely able to get the words out through his gritted teeth.  Dane moves like lightening, grabbing the nearest thing, which happens to be a bookcase filled with car and bike magazines.  He lets out a roar, pushing it over, sending it crashing to the floor.  He stands over it, panting hard, looking at the mayhem that he’s caused.

Elyse swallows hard at what she’s just seen, reminding herself of what Suzi and Rick had warned her of—that Dane’s temper gets the best of him and that it was best to leave him alone.  She had no intention of doing that, not then and not now.

“No, I don’t think it’s funny, Dane. I’m just trying to lighten the mood, something I’m apparently not very good at.”  She rolls her eyes at herself.  She knows that she’s in way over her head, but at the same time, she knows that there wasn’t anything else she could have done except jump onto the back of Dane’s bike and be here for him.  She surveys the broken bookcase and the magazines that have spread out across the floor like a wave.  “Did that at least make you feel any better?”

Dane pauses, seeming to consider it.  “A little.”

Elyse waits, knowing that there’s only so far you can push Dane before he pushes back.  She watches his chest rising and falling as he starts to calm down, and the haze of anger that has come down over his face slowly dissipates, but not completely.

“You said you would…be with him.”  Dane struggles to get the words out, as if not saying them out loud will make them less true.  “Is that what you want?”

Elyse huffs an impatient sigh.  She wants to be there for Dane, but she can only find so many ways to tell him the same thing.  “Of course it’s not what I want!”  She throws her hands up in despair, looking at Dane as if he’d lost it. 

“Then, why would you say that you would do that?”  He rakes his fingers through his hair, his eyes searching her face, straining to understand.  That’s when Elyse realizes how clueless he is about how she feels.

“You really have to ask me that?”  She shakes her head, not believing that he doesn’t get it.  “There’s not a lot that I wouldn’t do to make things right, to stop Lance—”

“Don’t say his name.”  Dane makes a cutting gesture with his hand, slicing through the air.  His voice is stone cold, but Elyse can hear the hot fury behind it.

“Fine.”  Elyse doesn’t point out that not saying his name doesn’t make him or the problem any less real; she doesn’t get the impression that’s something he would appreciate right now.  “To stop
him
from spilling all your secrets to the world, to stop you and the rest of the guys from spending a pretty sizable chunk of your lives in an six-by-eight cell, having to look over your shoulder in the showers and make friends with some guy called Bubba. To stop all of that from happening, yes I would do what I could!”  She breathes hard after her rant.

“You would sleep with him?”  Dane’s question tells her that he has only been half-listening to her.

Elyse swallows hard against the bile that’s risen up her throat at the thought of it. 

Dane doesn’t wait for her to answer.  “You think I would want you to do that?  To pimp yourself out for me or for the club?”  Dane pins her with that intense glare of his, and she has to force herself not to take a step back under his scrutiny.

“If you’d wanted me to, then I wouldn’t have said anything.”  Elyse watches as Dane’s expression soften at her words, and she takes a small step towards him.  “If you wanted me to, then you wouldn’t be the man that you are, and I wouldn’t want to help you.”

Dane watches her, skittishly, as if he’s expecting her to turn tail and run at any point.  But she stands firm.  It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Dane has been let down so many times; she has no intention of continuing that cycle.

“I don’t want you to do this—not for me and not for anyone else.”  His words are quiet, but the determination in his voice is unmistakable.  It’s not a request.

“Like Suzi and Rick said…it’s not like we have a whole lot of other ideas.”  Elyse shrugs, wondering when this had become her life, when using her body as currency had become something that she could talk about like this.  “It’s not something I want to do, Dane.  I don’t want him.” 

As if that had been the only thing that Dane had been waiting for her to say, he closes the distance between them and pulls her towards him, holding her tight against him.  Her arms come up around his neck, and she plasters herself to him, not wanting there to be any inches of air between them.  She can feel his heart hammering in his chest, the vibrations thrumming through her body.

“I can’t stand the idea of you with
him
.”  His jaw clenches at the thought.  “I need to fix this, but I don’t know how.  I always know what to do, what the next step is.  I’m not used to feeling so…useless.”  His shoulders drop as he says the word, and his voice is filled with unease.  Dane is a man of action, a man who thinks quickly and acts even quicker.  The fact that he doesn’t have a solution to the Lance problem is making him crazy.

“Useless is the last word I would ever use to describe you.”  She speaks against his chest, holding onto him as if she’s afraid of what might happen if she lets go.

“I’m sorry.”  Dane’s voice is muffled, as he buries his head in the crook of her neck.

“For what?”  She strokes his head, running her fingers through his hair and just breathing in the scent of him.

“For getting mad, for the table, for the bookcase.”  He keeps his voice low, and he won’t look at her, clearly ashamed of the way his anger had overtaken him. 

“It’s not important.”  Elyse pulls back a little so that she can look at him, and she sees the vulnerability in his eyes.

“It
is
, Elyse.  That’s not the person that I want to be, that’s not the man that I want to be for you.”  His expression is stern as he looks at her, his jaw set in determination. 

She’s about to say something to comfort him, but she can see that he hasn’t finished yet, there’s more that he wants to say.  Dane isn’t the most talkative of men when it comes to his feelings, so in the short time Elyse has known him, she’s learned that when he needs to say something, she should close her mouth and listen or he’ll clam right back up again.

“Sometimes, I get angry…I get so angry that I just lash out and whatever or whoever is nearby gets caught in the crossfire.”  Dane takes a deep breath, struggling with what he’s about to say.  Elyse keeps completely still, not wanting to do anything that will shut him down.  “The club, they use me as an enforcer sometimes. They know that if something sets me off, then I’ll do whatever I need to.  If they want to send a message to someone, I’m their guy.”  Dane shakes his head, huffing a mirthless laugh.  “My mom used to tell me that I’m too much like my dad. He had a temper like me.  It was the worst thing she could have ever told me.” 

The sincerity and the hurt in his eyes makes Elyse’s heart ache for him.  She wonders what kind of a mother would tell her son something that she must have known would affect him so deeply. 

“You’re not like him.”  She puts her hands on either side of his head, forcing him to look at her and listen to what she’s saying. 

“He used to come home some nights and just trash the place.  He’d be angry for one reason or another, and he’d take it out on whoever and whatever got in his way.  Sometimes that was my mom; sometimes it was me.  But it was like he was a different person, like he didn’t even see us, didn’t really know what he was doing, like the rage just took over.”  Dane shakes his head. His eyes are distant as he looks back into the past at the man that made him and made his and his mother’s life a living hell for so long.

“You’re not like him.”  Elyse repeats the words, like a mantra, hoping that one of the times she says them, he’ll actually believe them.  “You have a temper, so what?  Nobody’s perfect.  That doesn’t define you, Dane.  You’re so much more than that.” 

He looks at her for a long moment, like he’s trying to gauge whether she’s telling him the truth or not.  “I don’t want you to be afraid of me.”