Free No Magic Moment (Secrets of Stone Book 4) by Angel Payne, Victoria Blue Page A

for once, a welcome sting on my face.
    I caught Michael’s stare. Correction: glare. He still struggled a little against the guards, body clenched and face tight. His hair hung in his eyes, thick and sweaty—and damn him, on a purely physical level, pretty sexy.
    Lust was not made for a moment like this.
    “I’m going to go tell Andre where to pick us up, okay?” I told him. “I’ll meet you right back here.”
    His expression didn’t change. Not that I expected it to—or that it would’ve been just a tiny bit helpful.
    Dammit.
    I didn’t have time for this bullshit. He was the one who’d decided to make a death threat to his uncle—in public—and had us thrown out of a charity dinner, with the threat of it being documented by a dozen leading gossip rags. Now he acted like some if not all of it was my fault.
    I lifted the hem of my dress and stormed off in the direction of a cell phone signal.
    Fuck him—and fuck the testosterone-fueled horse he rode in on.

Chapter Five
    Michael
    T he pair of hotel thugs—pardon me, security professionals —didn’t let up their hold until they’d “escorted” me all the way to the beach. There, the patient knightly thing they’d been pulling with Margaux was dropped like the act it was.
    “Okay, asshole.” The burlier of the two, a jackhole named Pete, jerked me away from his buddy, as if dislocating my shoulder would appease the dick growth gods. “Time for you to cool down.”
    His buddy grunted as he hurled me into the sand. “Well said, bro.”
    “Yeah.” I rolled onto my elbows. Screw the tux; wasn’t like I was going back inside. “He’s a goddamn rocket scientist.”
    I dragged a hand through my hair, trailing sand over my face in the doing. Like I fucking cared. Wrath still pummeled my bloodstream and I wasn’t ready to flush it anytime soon. If I stayed enraged with Declan, I didn’t have to think about still being afraid of him.
    Yeah.
    Even now.
    The fear.
    Every time I even thought of the man’s face, it burst into my gut all over again, festering until it emerged as the emotion I could deal with: the fury. It lent me power over the helplessness…and the guilt. All those years of taking the brunt of his violence because I had no choice, then watching him do the same to Mom. Hating him more every time. Wanting to throw acid on the worm he really was. Dreaming of the day I’d be big enough to fight back, to bash his face in—
    Before I could.
    Because the coward left.
    Between my fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays. Just like that. Not that he’d ever “settled” in with us at the house, thank fuck, but the week between his little “check-in visits” stretched to two. Three. Four. A month. A year. Then ten. Mom and I had been preparing to celebrate that milestone when Dec turned back up like the disease that he was.
    Mom and I were older by then. Wiser. I’d filed the restraining order that day. Within a couple of days, the security system was upgraded on the house. I’d even installed a tracking device in Mom’s truck—
    But the fear returned. And with it, the anger.
    The shit I refused to process, despite Mom’s attempts to get herself “aligned” and move on. Part of that, I understood. Moving on, I could handle—but who the hell wanted to be “aligned” about memories of their mother being thrown against the wall, berated until she cringed into a ball, “disciplined” until there were welts? Bruises that had kept her in the house for days…
    Marks that made me pray, with every fiber of my being, for Declan Pearson’s painful death.
    A death I’d pleaded even harder for once Margaux exploded into my world.
    Because of her, I’d smiled again. Laughed again. Yeah, at first it was at her expense, something I’d never be proud of—but soon, she had me smiling with her, for her. Didn’t mean the little spitfire didn’t piss me off, but this anger was the good kind. The kind love always conquered at the end of the day. Did I