Accepting the Moon: Prequel (Moonrising Book 1) (2 page)

“This wasn’t in the plan,” I said. “This was not supposed to happen to me.” I knew that seemed so cliché of me to say, and I knew people cheated on their spouses all the time, but I honestly never thought it would happen to me.

“I know,” he said again. “I’m so sorry, baby. Please—”

My eyes widened in surprise. “Please? Please what, Marc? Forgive you?” I laughed sarcastically. “How? Tell me how I am supposed to ever be able to trust that you won’t do this again.” I shook my head. “No—I don’t think I will forgive you for this—not today… not ever.”

I think he realized in that moment that I had no intentions of staying with him. Did he think I was ignorant?

Swallowing hard, he took a hesitant step toward me. “We can get through this, baby. I promise I will never hurt you again. I’ll make this better if you’ll just let me. I love you,” he whispered, and even managed to keep eye contact with me.

How many lies had he told that I never saw through to the real man he was: a deceiving, mind-manipulating, cheating bastard.

Yes. He thought I was ignorant. And I guess I had been, but I wasn’t going to be any longer. I refused to lie to myself every day while knowing, deep down inside, that he would do it again and again.

I let him take another step closer while I turned the two-carat diamond engagement ring to the inside of my hand with my thumb.

“How could you do this to me, to us?”

He shook his head and moved into my personal space. “I didn’t realize how much you mean to me. I know now. It will never happen again,” he said, his voice shaking with emotion. If I hadn’t caught him in so many lies already, I might have believed he was genuinely upset. “I need you, Mena.”

“You should have thought of that before you put your wedding band in your pocket and screwed someone other than your wife!”

In an instant, his expression turned sour and I couldn’t get my arm up in time to block the blow from the back of his hand across my cheekbone. I was too stunned to cry out. He had never hit me before.

I whimpered as my hand hovered shakily over the throbbing area under my eye. I knew I needed to pull myself together. I couldn’t let him beat me without a fight. I refused to let him have that sort of control over me.

“I hate myself for hurting you like that, Mena, but I said I was sorry, damn it! You should have just accepted the apology and forgiven me. Do you think this is fun for me? Do you think I enjoy hurting you?”

With so much adrenaline rushing through me, it had been difficult to stay calm while he made it sound like him hitting me was my fault. I couldn’t hold it back any longer, and I nearly missed the look of shock in his eyes before my left hand slapped him hard across his right cheek.

Bright red blood poured freely from the long gash my ring had carved in his cheek, and he looked at me in horror as I grinned menacingly at him.

“Explain that to your whore. Your wife is leaving you.”

Jaxon scanned the growing crowd of the club with guarded eyes.

Puppets, every last damn one of them, he thought.

Shaking his head, he slapped a twenty and the empty old fashioned glass on the bar hard enough to get the bartender‘s attention over the raging, death-metal music that was the club‘s entertainment for the night.

“Another double?” the bartender asked, and Jaxon nudged the glass with the tips of his fingers to encourage the pouring of the sweet, burning poison.

He smelled the approaching human before he heard her voice, and his lips curved up at the corners as she took the seat beside him. It appeared she was going to make it easy for him.

“I haven‘t seen you in here before. You from out of town?” the female voice shouted over the noise pollution.

Not really, but he couldn‘t hunt in the same area too often or eyebrows would start to rise. He wasn‘t about to tell her any of that, though.

“I‘m visiting a friend,” Jaxon shouted back as he turned his head, flashing his million dollar smile at the girl. She looked to be in her early twenties, pretty, bleached-blond hair, maybe a little too thin and a bit over the top in the make-up department, but she would do. He didn‘t want her body, after all.

He offered her his hand to shake, but when she took it, he brought her knuckles up to his lips for a tender kiss, keeping eye contact with her the whole time.

She swooned, and he grinned as he released her fingers.

“Is your friend here at the club?” She glanced to his other side, obviously making sure there wasn‘t another woman sitting there that had already staked her claim on him. She smiled when she found the spot empty.

To her obvious delight, Jaxon shook his head. “I‘m Brandon,” he lied. “And you are?”

She sighed heavily as her eyelashes fluttered and her glossy eyes focused on his. “Yours for the night, if you‘ll get me away from all this noise and smoke. I wasn‘t quite expecting,” she winced and cupped her hands over her ears as she shouted, “this. My friends insisted we come see
The Fighting Tarsier
.”

He grinned and ran his fingers lightly over her knee. She inched closer, encouraging the forward gesture. “Your place?” Jaxon said.

She grimaced in what appeared to be actual pain. “I live with my parents.”

Jaxon‘s lips flattened into a tight line as he wondered if she was really even old enough to be in a club. His head jerked once in the direction of the exit sign. “I‘ve got a room at a motel a few blocks from here. C‘mon.” He stood, grabbed his jacket from the back of the stool and led her through the crowd of jumping bodies. He was sure he had never seen dancing quite like that before, not in the last two centuries anyway, and never in the United States.

She appeared to be delighted with the idea of leaving the club with a total stranger, but Jaxon honestly couldn‘t care less about where she placed her standards. He only needed one tiny, meaningless thing from her, and then he would send her on her merry little way.

“Do we need a cab?” The blonde asked as they stepped out into the frigid January air.

Jaxon shook his head. “If you don‘t mind the cold and a little bit of misty rain for a mile or two, we can take my bike. The motel is about ten or twelve blocks that way.” He nodded to the west, toward the bad side of town, and Blondie, all of a sudden, didn‘t look all that enthused about leaving with him anymore. She glanced longingly toward the street and a passing cab.

He closed the distance between them and lifted her chin with one of his fingers, turning on his charm. “It‘s safe. I promise no harm will come to you. You can trust me.”

She nodded once, then took his hand and let him lead her around the corner of the club to the alleyway.

Jaxon could have taken what he needed from the girl then and there, but the risk of being seen was too high and, as second in command under Phoenix, he couldn‘t afford to screw things up… again.

The slight drizzle had become a downpour by the time Jaxon parked his bike at the motel he used for special occasions, such as this one.

It wasn‘t the Ritz-Carlton, or even a Motel 8, but there weren‘t any cracks under the door and the roaches were pretty small. He never stayed more than half an hour, so spending the thirty-eight dollars for four walls out of sight suited him just fine. He wasn‘t the only male who paid for rooms by the hour, although his reasons were quite different from the other lowlifes he‘d seen coming and going.

They ran underneath the short awning over the office door and Jaxon pushed his way inside. The girl tugged her hand free of his and held her cell phone up when he turned to see why she had stopped.

“Go on ahead. I‘ll wait for you right here. I just need to text my friends and let them know I left the club. I wouldn‘t want them to worry about me.”

He eyed her a moment longer, thinking the second he turned his back she would bolt, but the night was still early and he could just wait for one of the hookers to drunkenly stumble out of one of the other rooms if his prey scurried away, so he gave her a nod and turned toward the man behind the counter to get his room key.

I scrambled to find the wiper switch again and quickly realized the blades were already wiping the sheets of rain from the windshield as fast as they could. As if not being able to see through the storm wasn‘t problem enough, I couldn‘t seem to keep my tear ducts from leaking and blurring my vision even further.

“Stupid, cheating bastard,” I mumbled under my breath, and wiped the dampness from my burning cheeks with a tissue.

I refused to say, ‘What else can possibly go wrong?’. Out loud anyway. I already had the feeling Karma was kicked back with popcorn and laughing out loud at the obstacles she was throwing at me. Giving the bitch a challenge was not on my list of things to do.

Up ahead, a massive animal darted across the road and was out of sight before I could tell what the thing was. A wolf, maybe? It wasn‘t uncommon to see one up north, on the outskirts of the mountains, but in the city? I had never even heard of a sighting. Maybe it was only a large dog, I thought.

I eased off the accelerator just in case it had friends about to follow. Hitting an animal of that size could do some serious damage to a car, and I didn‘t need to be stranded in the bad part of the city in a storm with a wrecked vehicle and an injured, pissed off wolf just waiting for me to open the driver‘s door of my Audi.

I laughed a little at the image my imagination had dreamed up, and then screamed as I slammed on my brakes and cut the wheel, desperately trying to keep my car on the slick pavement and avoid hitting anything in the process.

The Audi finally came to a stop and was pointed in the direction I had come from. I hadn‘t hit anything. There wasn‘t much to hit; there wasn‘t a lot of traffic through this area, especially at one-thirty in the morning.

“Jesus,” I whispered as I covered my pounding heart with my hand.

There had been so many of them—at least a dozen or more.

The police! The police would know what to do, I thought, and then reached for my cell phone. It wasn‘t in the console, where I always kept it while driving. I quickly turned on the interior lighting and checked the floorboards to see if the device had fallen during my driving escapade.

My eyes closed and I groaned when I realized I had placed it on the nightstand beside the bed before packing some of my things, and in my haste to get out and away from Marc…

I covered my face with my hands and cried. My cell was still at home.

The sound of a horn blaring brought me out of my stupor, and my heart shot up in my throat as I looked up to see the headlights of a semi heading right for me. The Audi was still in drive, so I shoved the accelerator to the floorboard and raced to get out of the road before I was flattened by the big truck.

The nauseating feeling was back full-force as I rolled to a stop in a motel parking lot.

Struggling through the overwhelming dizziness that fogged my brain, I eventually came to the conclusion that it was not safe for me to be behind the wheel, at least not until I calmed down—and the storm blew over. I realized I had only two options as I stared up at the flashing
vacancy
sign: use the office phone to call my brother to come get me or rent a room in the place and attempt to start over in the morning.