Free Last Chance Rebel by Maisey Yates Page A

then. Enjoy me withholding forgiveness.”
    She didn’t even know what this fight was. Hating him for caring. Hating him for feeling some kind of responsibility for it. She shouldn’t know any of it, that was the problem. What she’d said to him earlier was the God’s honest truth.
    She didn’t want to know his life. She didn’t want to know if guilt kept him awake. Didn’t want to know if he felt good, bad or indifferent.
    This belonged to her. It was her pain. Her own personal tragedy. It had shaped everything she was, had disrupted her entire life in ways no one knew. In ways Gage West certainly couldn’t know.
    Him feeling guilty...well, that seemed selfish. He wasn’t scarred up. His body was beautiful. Women didn’t look at him with pitying glances the way men looked at her. He didn’t have to deal with a terrible limp after a long day of physical labor. What right did he have to co-opt any of the suffering?
    She should probably tell Jonathan what was going on. At least he could tell Gage to back the hell off. Except, she knew that she wouldn’t. Mostly because she wanted to handle all of this herself. It felt unwieldy and more than a little out of control, but she still didn’t want anyone else getting involved. Because her feelings were too raw. Too confusing. She didn’t know what to do with them.
    She didn’t want to talk to Lane. She didn’t want to talk to Alison. She didn’t want to talk to anybody. She wanted to pick up a chair and break it over the back of Gage’s head.
    Except she was too sore to do that. Because of him. Which made her want to hit him even more.
    â€œI’ll be at your place tomorrow,” she said. “By six. Because I have to go in and work at the store afterward.”
    â€œYou damn well won’t be there.”
    â€œI damn well will be, and if you stiff me out of my pay, I’ll make your life hell.”
    â€œWe haven’t even settled on a wage.”
    â€œMake it a fair one!” She turned on her heel and hobbled back to her table, her heart pounding hard. She had no idea where all that had come from. All of that anger, all of that effortless rage. She wanted to stand there and scream at him forever.
    She remembered her dreams then. She’d had all kinds of dreams after the accident. Some of them were about pain, and about more surgery. But then, after those dreams had faded had come the other dreams. Dreams of standing in an empty room, in front of a man whose face was hidden in shadow. And she would scream at him. Yell at him and hit him until all of her anger had quieted.
    She would shout every detail of everything he had done to her. Emptying all of the toxic pain from her chest and pouring it into him.
    She wasn’t going to do that in Ace’s bar. But she had a feeling she had it in her.
    â€œWho was that?” Lane asked when Rebecca sat back down at the table. She had sort of forgotten that her friends were an audience for that encounter.
    â€œThat was him,” Alison said, “wasn’t it?”
    â€œI don’t want to talk about it.” She was starting to feel a little bit like a broken record. And like a terrible friend. She had never confided everything with them. She had never really confided everything with anyone. She didn’t like anyone knowing she was vulnerable. Didn’t like anyone to know that she was affected by what had happened all those years ago.
    It was important that Jonathan not know how badly her injury still hurt sometimes, because he was already too protective for her sanity. It was important that her friends not realize what a ridiculous sad virgin she was.
    It was just as important that everyone stayed a good distance away from the black hole of horrific nonsense that was the epicenter of her life.
    â€œIt was him.” Lane frowned. “He’s younger than I thought he would be.”
    â€œHow old did you think