Piece of Me (Behind These Eyes Book 2) Read online

  Piece of Me

  BEHIND THESE EYES BOOK 2

  A.J. DANIELS

  Copyright © 2017 A.J. Daniels

  Cover Design © Just Write. Creations

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 9780995840928

  Note From The Author

  The author has taken creative liberties with all names, places, and organizations mentioned in this book, and are not a reflection of any person, living or dead, or organization.

  Piece ofMe is the second book in the Behind These Eyes series but each book in the series can be read as a standalone, although, it’s recommended to read them in order. Make sure you stick around for an excerpt of Always You at the back of the book

  Prologue

  Katherine

  The thing about love is that you don’t get to choose who you fall in love with or when you fall in love. Most of the time you never see it coming.

  Then there are those times when you see it coming, and even though you try everything in your power to prevent it from happening it still smacks into you like a semi-truck. Just like the way I fell in love with Jason. He was my best friend. My protector. I was perfectly happy with our relationship the way it was. As friends. Until I wasn’t.

  I was about to learn that sometimes the person you don’t want to love is the one you end up falling for the most.

  And I fell hard.

  1. Tequila

  Katherine

  Some loud obnoxious beeping rouses me from a very enticing dream. Hugh Jackman is doing really, really delicious things with his tongue and I don’t want him to stop.

  Damn, that man is talented.

  When he lifts his head, I’m expecting that sexy Australian accent to do me in, but all that comes out when his lips move is that annoying beep.

  Frustrated, I throw my arm out in the general direction of my night stand but instead of hitting solid wood, my arm connects with solid muscle and a huff sounds from my right.

  The events of last night flash in my mind’s eye like a stop motion movie. The six of us at the bar. Shots of tequila. Lots of tequila. Dancing by myself. Jay dancing with me. There was kissing. Lots of kissing, and lots of…touching.

  I sit bolt upright suddenly realizing that I’m naked and the solid wall of muscle my arm just hit belongs to Jay.

  Oh, fuck my life!

  I run a hand down my face in horror. I can’t believe I slept with Jason. Sure, we’ve been flirting back and forth for over a year now but it was never meant to go beyond that. It was never meant to get physical. This is why I’m not allowed around tequila. It makes me do horribly stupid things that I would never do when I’m sober.

  I peek out of my right eye and am met by a set of very drool-worthy abs.

  Holy shit, the guy has the body of a Greek god.

  A trail of golden hair leads down to that ‘v’ muscle I love so much on guys, but I’m slightly disappointed when the lower half of his body is covered by my navy-blue duvet cover.

  A slight chuckle snaps my attention away from that muscle and to his face. God, this man is beautiful. Square jaw with light stubble, straight nose, and amazing emerald eyes that are staring back at me. A smirk pulling at his lips. A lock of dark blond hair hangs down his forehead.

  “Like what you see?” he teases.

  I roll my eyes. “Don’t look so pleased with yourself. Tequila was involved.”

  I gather the sheet closer around my body and move towards the bathroom.

  He laughs. “You can keep denying it, but this was bound to happen. And I wouldn’t say no to another round…or two.” He shoots me a wink when I poke my head out from the bathroom.

  “Were you always this cocky?”

  He grins. “Not cocky, babe. Confident.”

  I snort and roll my eyes turning back to start the shower. “Yeah, well, I’m confident that this will never happen again.” I call from the bathroom.

  “You sure about that?” he says startling me when he suddenly appears in the doorway.

  “Seriously? Why do you have to sneak up on me like that.” I grip the sheet tighter.

  This man has the power to undo me and I’m not totally sure that I’m okay with it. I like being in control, in all aspects. It was the reason for almost every one of my breakups and why I’m currently single. Men just don’t like a woman who loves being in control.

  But it was the one thing that I didn’t think I would be able to give up. Being in control kept my anxiety at bay and I didn’t like the way I felt when I was anxious.

  I flake out of a lot of things when my anxiety runs rampant. I somehow manage to talk myself out of leaving my house and just staying curled up under my duvet cover watching Netflix. Even something as simple as going to the grocery store becomes a nightmare. I’ve quit many a job because of anxiety.

  But this man standing in front of me, gloriously naked, is threatening to undo that control.

  He cups my face with his hand and his thumb runs gently up and down my cheek bone, his emerald eyes staring intently into my amber ones.

  “Stop fighting it,” he whispers.

  “I can’t.” I drop my head causing his hand to fall away from my face.

  I miss his touch instantly. I wish I was normal. I was I could just stay wrapped up in him. But I can’t and I doubt I’ll ever be able to.

  He hangs his head and takes a step back. I want to reach out to him to stop him from leaving but my arms don’t move and nothing comes out when I open my mouth.

  “I’ll see you around, Kat.”

  I’m not sure how long I stand there staring out the doorway to my room. I don’t even remember Jay getting dressed or hearing the front door open and close. But when I finally get into the shower the water is like ice.

  Jason

  “You look like someone just shot your dog,” Mike calls from the boxing ring when I walk through the gym door.

  “Long night,” I throw over my shoulder, placing my gym bag on the bench and grabbing my boxing gloves and wraps from it.

  “I bet,” Mike laughs. “So, how was it?”

  I know he’s talking about Kat. It’s been a long running joke in our circle of friends that we should just fuck and get it over with. Apparently, the sexual tension when we’re around each other is noticeable to everyone in a fifty-mile radius.

  I love Mike like a brother but right now I want to punch his fucking face in for that comment. It usually wouldn’t bother me this much but I was already in a bad mood after leaving Kat’s.

  Fuck, I get it. She’s scared. None of her asshole exes stuck around for very long but they were weak. They didn’t appreciate what they had in front of them. If it came down to it, I would take a bullet for that woman.

  And that right there, ladies and gentlemen, is why I’m in a pissed off mood. This woman can frustrate me and make me the happiest I’ve ever been in the span of a few minutes. She’s constantly testing my limits, making me work harder than any other woman has before.

  But when she laughs, it’s the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard and I forget about how difficult and frustrating she can be. And when she cries, I want to protect her from the world and hunt down the person responsible and make them pay for every single one of her tears.

  She’ll never see me as anything other than the party boy though. The king of one-night stands. Even though Mike takes the cake for that last one.

  I’ll only ever be her best guy friend who she just happened to sleep with after a night of one too many tequila shots. A half smile pulls at the corner of my mouth. But what a fucking great night it was.

  “You okay, man?” Parker asks sitting on the bench next to me and my grin fade
s.

  I don’t take my eyes off Mike sparring with Cole in the ring. “I’m good. Just need to go a few rounds in the ring,”

  Out of the corner of my eye I see Parker stand, picking up his gym bag. “Dani and Bell are cooking dinner tonight.”

  Dani started letting Bella help her in the kitchen when she went to live with them permanently. Bella was so excited the first time she was able to help that she begged Parker to invite us all over for dinner that night.

  After that, it’s been an unspoken tradition that if Bella’s helping with dinner, all of us are invited.

  “I’ll be there.”

  ***

  The sound of laughter greets me as I walk into Parker’s house this evening. I follow it to the kitchen where Bella is standing on a stepstool grating cheese next to Dani. Kat and Alice are sitting on the other side of the center island with half-filled glasses of white wine. After the situation with Adam ended, Dani decided to not go back to her previous identity as Ashley Martens; however, Kat and Alice decided they wanted to go back to their original identities. To who they were before Adam threatened all their lives.

  Kat doesn’t see me at first, which allows me a second to stare at her. Not in a fucking creepy way. But how can you see someone as beautiful as she is and not stare?

  The sun streaming in from the kitchen window accentuates the subtle red highlights in her long, curly, dark hair. I remember the way it felt running through my fingers; it was like silk. Her perfectly round ass is perched high on a bar stool. Her amber eyes sparkling with amusement at something Bella has just done.

  This woman is beauty personified. Not just physical beauty either. She’s beautiful on the inside too.

  We met two and a half years ago, when Dani and Parker had first started seeing each other. In those short couple years, I’ve seen her go toe-to-toe with someone double her size because they were harassing a homeless man. I’ve watched her give that same homeless man the last bit of change she had, even knowing that he would probably turn around and use it towards buying more booze or drugs.

  I’ve watched her cry during movies but try to cover it up before anyone could notice. I’ve seen the way her eyes light up when we walk past a pet store and she sees all the puppies in the window but then in the next second she’s angry because they probably came from a puppy mill.

  But she’ll never know how I feel because she’s determined to firmly place the ‘just friends’ label on us.

  Fuck. I need to grow some balls and get over it.

  “Oh hey, Jay. Parker and Mike are in the den watching the game,” Danielle says when she spins around and sees me standing in the entrance to the kitchen.

  I don’t chance another glance over at Kat before I turn and head down the hallway.

  I remember the day she first confided in me about what she was passionate about. We had been on our first vacation as a group and Kat and I had gone off to walk along one of the side streets off the main drag.

  ~ Two, almost three, months ago, June. ~

  “Kat!” I yell after her when she suddenly stops, turns, and takes off back the way we came. It takes me a minute to realize that she’s running straight to a little cove surrounded on either side by cliffs. Then I hear it.

  It’s faint at first but the more I concentrate on the sound, the louder it becomes. As the cove and Kat come more into view my feet slow and my heart rate picks up.

  I can barely make out their silhouettes in the dark but trapped in the cove is a pod of bottlenose dolphins; adults and babies.

  I get the eerie feeling that we’re not supposed to be here. Someone went through an awful lot of trouble to do everything they could to block this cove off from prying eyes. From the high fence to the signs. I can’t read them because they’re not in English, but if I had to guess, I’d guess they said something along the lines of Do Not Enter.

  But Kat doesn’t stop, she’s already climbing the fence and dropping to her feet on the other side before kicking off her shoes and running into the water.

  “Jesus, Kat!”

  “Help me, Jay,” she throws over her shoulder when she’s already waist deep in the water.

  Christ, this woman’s going to be the death of me.

  Scaling the eight-foot high fence, my boots hit the sand on the other side seconds before I’m running down the beach and into the water after her.

  “We need to cut the net,” she yells as she bobs up and down in the freezing water.

  I pat down the pockets of my jeans in search of the utility knife I always carry with me. Old habits die hard, I guess. As soon as I pull the knife into my palm I swim over to the net and start cutting through several of the ropes.

  A flash of light to our right towards the shore catches my attention, my hands work faster trying to cut through the rope and once the final one snaps I’m hauling ass back to Kat, grabbing her arm and pulling her to the side and behind a bunch of tall rocks just as we hear the click of a lock and the fence rolling open.

  “What’s going on?” one voice asks sounding further away.

  “I don’t know. I thought I saw something in the water by the net,” a voice closer to the shore yells back in broken English.

  “It’s just those damn dolphins! The trainers will be here tomorrow,” the first voice calls back.

  “Jason,” Kat whispers in front of me.

  “Shh,” I try to peek behind her and around the rock to see where the two men have gone but she tugs on my arm drawing my attention back to her. It’s dark and I can just barely make her out against the black of the rocks.

  “My shoes.”

  “What?”

  “I kicked my shoes off on the sand just before running into the water.”

  “Maybe they won’t- “

  As soon as the words leave my lips a spotlight gets turned on and more voices are yelling from the beach.

  Fuck!

  “Go,” I push her in front of me and up the rocky embankment to the tree line.

  Voices yell behind us to stop but our legs keep propelling us forward until we break out of the tree line and onto the boardwalk. Running feet get closer as my eyes scan the crowd and the buildings.

  I’m pulling her through the front doors of a nearby café and towards the back by the counter, angling our bodies away from the café’s front windows, just as the men break the tree line.

  The barista behind the counter is eyeing us up and down. The whole thing would’ve been comical if we hadn’t just been illegally trespassing and weren’t soaking wet.

  Kat looks at the barista, shrugs her shoulders and just casually says, “what’s a vacation without a spontaneous night swim,” then giggles and turns back towards the door, coffee in hand.

  After I make sure that we’re not being chased anymore, we grab a pair of flip flops for her, and I slow down our pace as we make our way back to the resort.

  “Okay, now would you mind telling me what that was about?”

  She sighs, outlining the lid of her coffee cup with a finger. “Every year twenty-three thousand dolphins are slaughtered in that cove. Those are just the ones that aren’t chosen by trainers for a life of captivity. I didn’t know that they would have any dolphins in there now. The season was supposed to be over two months ago, in March.”

  Tears are flowing down her face as we near the entrance to our resort and she stops walking. “When I heard them crying I had to be sure that I wasn’t imagining the sound. And then when I saw that they had trapped babies as well I knew I couldn’t just let them be killed. They don’t take the babies, Jason. They poke and prod them and let them bleed out until they sink to the bottom. I just…I couldn’t…”

  “Shh, it’s okay, Kat. I get it.” I wrap my arms around her and hold her until the tears subside.

  “How can humans be so cruel? What makes one life more worthwhile than another? And since when did education become about sticking a living breathing thing behind bars or in a tiny pool behind a glass? It’s bullshit, Ja
son. They wouldn’t be allowed to slaughter these animals if people would stop visiting those stupid aquariums or swim-with programs.” Kat pulls away from my arms and turns her back on me so that I won’t see her crying.

  “I’m not following. How does what they do here relate to aquariums?”

  Her shoulders rise and fall with each breath. “Those fishermen drive thousands of dolphins a year into that cove and then trainers from aquariums, hotels, and swim-with-dolphin programs from around the world come down and pay tens-of-thousands of dollars for the young female bottlenoses and the rest they…” She inhales deeply, spinning on her heels to face me. “The rest they slaughter and sell labelled as other meat.”

  Kat shakes her head, her sad eyes looking up at me. “Dolphin meat is extremely high in mercury and those people don’t even know that the meat they’re buying could kill them.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I wish I could do more. This needs to stop. It’s barbaric and if they keep slaughtering those dolphins they could go extinct in our lifetime, Jason.” She shakes her head in disbelief. “In our lifetime,” she repeats. Her shoulders drop in defeat. “But I’m just one person. There’s no way I would even be able to put a dent in dolphin slaughter.”

  “It only takes one voice.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  Kat huffs, crossing her arms over her chest. I hate seeing her this hurt. Her heart is breaking for those dolphins we let free from the nets enclosing them in that cove. But her heart isn’t just breaking for them but for all the others before them and the ones that will be driven in after them.

  I have never wished more that I could put a stop to the evil in this world the way I did that day, hearing her talk about those dolphins.

  2. Not Supposed to Love you

  Katherine

  “Wow, awkward much?” Alice comments next to me.