He set me gently on my behind on the counter then he put a hand on either side of me and leaned in.

“You want a sandwich?” he asked.

“Sure,” I answered.

He pulled away, which I didn’t like all that much, considering I liked seeing his face that close, since it was a very handsome face.

He moved to the fridge, and I watched while saying, “Tia isn’t answering her phone.”

“That would be because it’s in her bedroom,” Buck replied, and my watching became staring as he turned from the fridge with bags of deli items and a jar of mayo.

“It’s in her bedroom?”

“Yeah,” Buck answered, dumping the stuff on the counter and reaching for a loaf of bread.

“You were in her bedroom?”

His hands—hands, incidentally, that had skin torn and angry-looking at his knuckles—worked the plastic wrap on the bread.

“You wanted her, we looked for her. But, babe…” He hesitated as he looked at me. “We didn’t find her.”

Oh no.

My heart clutched.

“Did you find Esposito?” I asked.

He nodded, looking down at the bread. “Oh yeah, found him.”

Oh dear.

That explained the torn and angry-looking skin on his knuckles.

“What happened?”

“Thinkin’ Esposito is not gonna fuck with you anymore, Toots,” he muttered, lining up four slices of bread in a square.

This was good news that didn’t hold a lot of detail for which I was grateful.

So I got to the important stuff. “And Tia?”

“Tia is in the wind,” he replied, reaching to open a drawer and get a knife.

“In the wind?”

He looked at me. “Packed in a hurry, car’s gone, found a tracking device thrown in a corner of the garage, ’spect it’s from her car.” He stared at me for two long seconds then finished cautiously, “She left you to him, Clara.”

I closed my eyes and bit my lip, which hurt (again) so I stopped doing that, made a mental note not to do it again, then opened my eyes and whispered, “No. We made plans to make a break for it.”

His brows drew together, and I kept talking.

“I’d talked her into it. We were supposed to meet at a 7 Eleven. I didn’t show. She’s probably out there somewhere and scared out of her mind.”

“You were gonna make a break for it?” he asked.

“You said that was what we should do. I thought that was good advice. So that’s what I decided to do, and I talked Tia into going with me. Now she’s out there and—”

He put the knife down and moved to me, standing in front of me and leaning into his hands on the counter on either side of my hips again.

“Babe, I told you that was what you should have done, not what you should do. That was an option before you got tied up in Esposito’s mess. It isn’t an option now. Until I explained it otherwise, Esposito thought he owned you. He thinks that, you bolt, he goes to the end of the Earth to haul you right back.”

“He thinks he owns Tia,” I told him.

“No, his shit is centered on you.”

“What?”

“Clara, honey, you’re his toy. He plays with you. He gets off on it. She’s nothin’ to him. She was, but he played with her and broke her and now his interest has shifted. Unless she walks into a room and reminds him she exists, he forgets. He’s got dozens of girls. He just made her into one of them. So now, sensin’ your vulnerability, homin’ in on it, usin’ it and puttin’ Clara Kirk out to work for him, that gets his rocks off.”

I stared into his eyes as my heart slid up into my throat.

“My name is Clara Delaney,” I whispered around the lump, though it wasn’t, not really.

Delaney was my adoptive parents’ name and I barely remembered them.

The fact was, I didn’t know what my name was.

“Not to him,” he whispered back.

I pressed my lips together (that didn’t feel good either, but I kept doing it) and looked to the side.

He was right and Mrs. Jimenez was right. There was a lot of bad in the world and I attracted more than my fair share of it.

I felt Buck’s presence leave me and I saw him go back to his bread. I watched him slather an alarming amount of mayonnaise on all four pieces before I spoke again.

“Maybe we should talk about Esposito,” I suggested, even if I didn’t want to.

“You’re clear. That statement was made.”

“And what about the Club?”

He glanced at me. “Come again?”

“You’ve made an enemy of Esposito today, Buck.”

He went back to his sandwich making and did it talking.

“While I was sharin’ how I felt about what he did to you, Chap was with the guys who pull Esposito’s strings, sharing with them whose bed you were in last night. They understood the situation. Might be luck, since we hear word they haven’t been happy with Esposito’s games for a while. Might be they just get it. Probably both mixed with the fact these guys are guys who like focus, not dealin’ with problems that shouldn’t be problems in the first place. Esposito is a liability and proved that further today, seein’ as you don’t touch the woman of a biker, ever, and absolutely not like that.”

Okay, well then, that seemed all good.

Though, “the woman of a biker” comment was perplexing.

I decided to sidestep that, because…

Priorities.

“I’m worried about Tia.”

“I’ll eat. I’ll make a few calls, get the word out Aces High wants her. We’ll find her.”

This made me feel relief.

“Thanks,” I murmured.

Buck turned his head and grinned at me.

No teeth, but still, his full lips framed by that beard tipped up was also pretty terrific.

Who was I kidding?

It was fabulous.

He then piled an alarming amount of shaved roast beef on the sandwiches.

“It’s weird,” I remarked while he was doing this, “that she didn’t take her phone.”

“You can track someone through their phone. She knew enough to find and dump the device on her car, she knew to leave her phone behind. Smart.”

This was partly good, partly bad.

I didn’t want Esposito to find her (once he, um…recovered), but that also meant we couldn’t.

Further, it meant I couldn’t communicate with her and she had no idea where I was.

I watched him put two slices of muenster cheese on the beef, then topped the cheese with the other slices of bread, pressed in, picked one up and handed it to me. Then he went back to the fridge, returning the mayo and deli products and coming back with a beer and a Coke. He popped the top of the Coke for me, twisted off the cap of the beer and flicked it into the garbage.

I stared at my humungous sandwich.

“This is a big sandwich, Buck,” I noted.

“Yep,” he agreed, downing a gulp of beer then putting it on the counter and picking up his own sandwich.

I stared at a big splodge of mayo coming out the side.

“With a lot of mayo,” I went on.

He took a huge bite, his eyes on me. I watched as he chewed and swallowed.