The tears ran down my face. I hadn’t been able to stop them. He knew the words to hurt me. “No!” I cried out again, but this time the pain was there in my voice. It cracked. “Fight me, Reese. I like it when you fight me,” he hissed in my ear.

How could my mother stay married to this man? Was my father worse than this? She’d never married him. She never told me about him. I didn’t even know his name. But no one could be worse than this awful man.

I couldn’t do this again. I was done being scared. Either he would beat me until he killed me, or he would kick me out. I had feared both for so long. My mother had told me once that all men would do in this world was think about sex when they looked at me. I would be used by men my whole life. She was always telling me to leave.

Today I was ready. I only had eight hundred and fifty-five dollars saved up, but I could get a bus ticket to the other side of the country and get a job. If I got out of this house alive, that’s what I was doing.

Marco’s hands slipped down the front of my shorts, and I bucked against him, screaming. I didn’t want his hand there. “Let me go!” I yelled, loudly enough for the neighbors to hear.

He pulled his hand out and jerked me around by my arm so hard it popped. Then he slammed me against the door. His hand punched my face with a loud crack. My vision blurred, and I felt my knees go weak. “Shut up, bitch, and take it.”

His hands grabbed my shirt and jerked it up, then tugged my bra down. I sobbed, because I couldn’t stop the horror. It was coming, and I couldn’t stop him.

“Get away from my husband, you whore, and leave my house! I don’t want to ever see your face again!” My mother’s voice stopped Marco, and he moved his hands off my breasts. I jerked my shirt back down.

My face was burning from the punch, and I tasted blood on my lip as the stinging cut under my tongue began to swell.

“Out, you stupid, good-for-nothing whore!” my mother screamed.

That moment changed everything.

Mase

Two years later

Fucking hell. What was that noise? I peeled my eyes open as sleep slowly faded from my brain and I registered what had woken me up.

A vacuum? And . . . singing? What the fuck?

I rubbed my eyes and groaned in frustration as the noise got louder. I was sure now that it was a vacuum. And it sounded like a really bad version of Miranda Lambert’s “Gunpowder & Lead.”

My phone said it was only eight. I had been asleep for two hours. After thirty hours straight with no sleep, I was being awakened by bad singing and a motherfucking vacuum?

As she sang the first two lines of the chorus, I winced. She was getting louder as she sang. And it was seriously off key. That was a good song she was butchering. Didn’t the woman know that you didn’t come into people’s houses at eight in the fucking morning and sing at the top of your lungs?

I was never going to get back to sleep with this racket.

Nannette must have hired an idiot to clean her fucking house. But then, knowing Nannette, she was pissed because I was here and there was nothing she could do about it. She had probably paid the woman to screech outside my bedroom door. Nannette didn’t own the house; our dad, Kiro, did. He’d told us that while Nannette was back in Paris, I could stay at the house and spend some time with our other sister, Harlow, who lived in Rosemary Beach with her husband, Grant, and their new baby.

This must have been the bitch’s way of getting back at me for staying at her place.

Now she was singing the chorus over and over again at the top of her lungs. God, it was like waking to a nightmare. This woman so needed to shut up. I had to get some sleep before I went to visit Harlow and her family. She was so excited about me coming all the way from Texas. But this idiot was messing up my sleep very effectively.

I threw back the covers and stood up and headed for the door before I realized I was naked. My head was pounding from lack of sleep, and I was getting angrier as I searched the room for the damn jeans I had taken off when I’d gotten here. My vision was blurry, and the dark curtains were closed. Fuck it. I reached for the sheet and wrapped it around my waist and went for the door.

I swung it open just as she started singing the opening lines to another song. Dammit. Not another song. This time, she was murdering “Cruise” by Florida Georgia Line.

I blinked and rubbed my eyes against the light, my vision still blurry. Shit, did the woman not see me standing here?

After a few seconds, I finally was able to open my eyes in a squint to see a round little ass wiggling as she bent over. My eyes slowly opened wide as I took in the longest damn legs I’d ever seen. And holy fucking hell, her ass. Was that a freckle under her left butt cheek?

She stood up, and her tiny waist only made her ass look better. She continued to shake her bottom as she sang off key. I winced as she hit a very high note. Damn, the girl couldn’t sing.

Then she turned, and I hardly had a moment to appreciate the front view before she screamed and dropped the vacuum cleaner as she pulled her earbuds out of her ears. Big, round baby-blue eyes stared at me in horror as she opened and closed her mouth a few times as if she was trying to speak.

I took the moment of silence to check out her full pink lips and the perfect shape of her face. Her hair was pulled up in a bun, but it was the color of midnight. I wondered how long it was.

“I’m sorry,” she managed to squeak out, and my eyes went back to hers. She was really something. There was an exotic quality about her. It was like God had picked all the best pieces and put them together to create her.