“About what? Telling your girlfriend I was a whore? It’s true, isn’t it? So there’s nothing to be sorry about.” I walked off, but Liam stalked next to me.
“We never said you were a whore.”
They’d probably used the word escort-big whooping difference. I started to cross the street to get away from him when a car honked at me.
Liam yanked on my arm, reeling me back onto the sidewalk. My shoulder screamed in pain from the sharp tug.
I gritted my teeth as I flung his hand off and rubbed my sore joint.
“Shit.” Liam palmed the back of his neck. “Did I hurt you?”
“Don’t give yourself so much credit.”
“Oh, will you stop acting like you’re fucking made of steel. A rock almost spliced your spine Saturday. You’re allowed to be in pain.”
So he had seen me… He hadbeen there. “Thanks for your permission.”
He grumbled some unintelligible words. “I don’t get you. Really, I don’t.” He shoved a lock of hair off his forehead.
“What don’t you get, Liam? Did you think I’d enjoy everyone finding out that I went on a date with a guy for money?” I hugged my arms against me, trying to squelch the tremors shooting through my limbs. I was cold and I was mad. Not a good combination.
“You said you didn’t sleep with your customers, so there’s really nothing to be ashamed about. Unless you do…sleep with them.”
My stomach bottomed out. “Them?”
He held my gaze. Did he know about his father? He couldn’t, could he?
Keeping my eyes fixed on his, I said, “I only went out with Aidan.” Technically, it was true. I hadn’t gone outwith Liam’s father; I’d stayed in. “But I’m not doing it anymore, so if you can stop telling people-”
“I’m sorry.”
“Whatever.” I tried to step around him again, but he whipped his arm out to stop me.
“Come back inside. Let me buy you a drink to make up for being a prick.”
“In what world do you think I’d want to go back in there?”
“Then let me buy you a drink someplace else.”
I tightened my arms. “God, Liam, I don’t need a pity drink.”
“It wouldn’t be a pity drink. It’d be an apology drink.”
I shook my head. “Thanks, but no thanks. I just want to walk around.”
He lowered his hand, and I passed by him. But then he was striding next to me.
“The bar’s the other way.”
“Maybe I want to walk around, too.”
“There are plenty of other sidewalks.”
“I like this sidewalk.”
“Liam-” I huffed.
“What? You don’t have to talk to me.”
“That’s not going to be weird at all.”
I thought I detected a smile, but it could’ve been a twitching nerve.
“Why?” I asked.
“Why what?”
“Why are you walking with me? And if you say it’s to protect me from a handsy passerby-”
“My earliest memory is of your birth.”
“My birth?”
He glanced down at me. “Your dad came over to our house to announce that he’d had a kid, and that kid was a girl. I remember how appalled my father was.”
His strange confession unsettled me. “You were four.”
“So?”
“That’s young to remember something.”
Liam’s gaze dropped to my collarbone as though not daring to meet my eyes. “My father advised your dad to take a paternity test.”
I gasped. “My mother would never-”
“It gets worse, Ness.” Liam palmed his hair uneasily
Worse than implying my mother had betrayed my father?
“He also told your dad that he should take you out into the woods”-the volume of Liam’s voice dropped so suddenly I had to strain to hear the rest of his sentence-“leave you there, and then try again.”
“Leave me in the forest? To do what?” I frowned but then I didn’t. Then I opened my eyes so wide my lashes hit my brow ridge. “Oh… He told my father to killme?” I all but shouted. “Because I was a girl?”
Liam’s gaze finally climbed back to mine. “Your father was outraged. My mother, too.”
“And you?” I snapped.
“Why do you think it’s my earliest memory, Ness?” His voice was as thick and dark as the fur that cloaked his wolf form.