“I make money, sweetheart.”
And he did. I shifted uneasily on my too tall shoes and tried not to let him see how my pulse fluttered under his unwavering gaze. There was something about being desired by a man that you knew could destroy anyone in the room. It shouldn’t feel good, shouldn’t make my thighs clench and my insides pulse, but it did, he did.
I smirked at him and tossed the longer part of my razor-straight bob over my shoulder.
“Race is an entrepreneur of sorts.” The kind you would only find in a place that was as dark and as broken as the Point.
Adria obviously wanted to ask more questions. I saw her open her mouth, but before she could get a word out, a loud BANG rang out and the typical college party I had been using to try and escape the aching reality of my everyday turned into a chaotic riot.
There was no mistaking the smell of gunpowder and the copper tang of spilled blood as pandemonium erupted and more shots rang out. I went to grab Adria, but because we were so close to the door, a flood of panicked bodies separated us in a split second. I felt hard hands grab me and pull me out of the way of the stampede. My face was pressed into a rock-hard chest and a big hand held my head down as I was roughly moved through the press of running and flailing bodies.
My heart was in my throat and I heard the gun go off one more time, followed by the shriek of a female voice. Race let out a litany of swear words from somewhere above my head, and he let me go for just a second. I heard glass breaking, felt him shift, pull me along behind him, and then the cool night air was around us. He set me away from him a little bit, but grabbed my hand and proceeded to pull out me along behind him. Our feet crunched over the broken glass of the back door he had obviously shattered in order for us to escape through.
I was panting and running after a guy with legs twice as long as mine in stilettos and skinny jeans, so it was practically impossible, but I did it. He didn’t stop until we had rounded the yard on the other side of the house and made our way across the street. Most of the other partygoers had dispersed, and the wail of sirens could already be heard in the distance. I put my hands on his chest and pleaded with him, “We have to find Adria.”
His eyes were practically black, full of emotions I was scared to name.
“I can’t be here when the cops show up, Brysen. I have to go.”
I gasped at him and balled my hands into fists so I could thump him on the chest—hard.
“Help me find her, Race!”
He just shook that perfect blond head and gazed down at me.
“You’re the only one I was worried about.”
My heart tripped, but the sirens were getting closer and he was moving away from me. I grabbed onto his wrist and realized I was shaking so hard I could barely hold onto him.
“Don’t leave me.” My voice sounded scared and lost. I didn’t know what to do in a situation that involved guns and violence. It unnerved me how nonchalant he was with it all.
The shadows in his eyes moved and his mouth turned down at the corners. Before I could react, his hands slid around the back of my neck, under the edge of my hair, and he yanked me up onto the tips of my toes. I clasped both hands around his wrists, tried not to freak out when my chest flattened against his and I pretty much just dangled there while he proceeded to kiss the shit out of me.
It was dark, people were stumbling about drunk and bewildered, I was worried about my friend, and I was angry at him . . . always angry, but for the first time since I had laid my eyes on him, all that want, all that tangling, greedy lust was let loose, and I kissed him back.
It wasn’t romantic, it wasn’t sweet and filled with tangible longing or loving care. It was brutal, violent, hard and hot, and nothing in my entire life had ever felt better. His tongue invaded. His teeth scraped. His hands bruised, and I could feel his erection through the front of his jeans where we were pushed together. I should’ve protested, said something to make him stop, but all I could do was moan and rub against him like some kind of wanton cat in heat.
And just when I was contemplating curling around him, coiling into that big body and making myself at home, he dropped me, stepped back, left me blinking up at him like an idiot, shook that golden head, and disappeared into darkness without another word. I stared at the spot where he had been, wrapped my arms around my chest, and tried to keep from falling apart on the spot.
“Brysen!”
I jerked my head up as Adria came barreling into me. She almost took both of us to the ground.
“Oh my god, I was freaking out! Where did you go?”
I hugged her back, mostly to see if that would stop the shaking. It didn’t.
“Race took me out the back for some reason.”
Her eyes were huge in her face.
“Why would he do that? No one knew where the gunman was.”
I just shook my head. “I don’t know, I just followed him.” He didn’t really give me a choice.
“Some guy caught his girlfriend with another guy. Can you believe that? All that for something so stupid.”
I didn’t get to ask her how she knew what the ruckus was all about because the police were finally on the scene and they were giving those of us left lingering about the third degree.
The university and the house where the party was at were both located on the Hill. Things like random gunfire, jealous boyfriends, and cheating girlfriends belonged in the Point; at least that’s what most people from the Hill tried to fool themselves into believing. By the time it was all said and done I was exhausted, emotionally drained, and could still taste Race on my lips. My night out in order to forget had turned into a memory that I would remember forever, even if I knew how bad an idea that was. Maybe gray wasn’t such a bad shade to be surrounded in after all. It was boring and bland, but it was safe.
I drove Adria back to her apartment, fielding questions about Race the entire way. She was fascinated by him, could feel that magnetic pull he just naturally had. I tried to tell her that he was bad news, that the world he operated in was so far away from her almost MBA as she could imagine, but of course that only added to his mystique and appeal. What nice girl from the Hill didn’t lust for a naughty boy from the Point? It couldn’t have been any more clichéd if it tried. By the time I was headed home, I had a headache and my stomach was in knots.
When I parked in front of the cookie-cutter tri-level my parents had built before everything fell apart, I had to really think about whether or not I wanted to keep the engine running and just keep driving until I was somewhere else, until I hit a different life. Two years ago, everything in my world had been cheery and full of color and light. I was living in an apartment with girlfriends, attending college, fending off boys with only one thing on their mind. I was silly. I was carefree, and I never thought about any of it going away.
Now I was living back at home, taking care of one parent suffering from a crippling bout of depression who also had a tendency to self-medicate, and another who was a workaholic and obviously burying himself in his job to avoid the troubling things going on at home. Mostly I came back to keep my little sister, Karsen from being affected by the sadness and the darkness of it all. She was seventeen, a straight-A student, and bound to be off to college in just a few more years. I could tough it out until then. After all, my parents had always worked hard to keep our family on the fine line between the Hill and the Point, and I felt like it was the least I could do to repay them. We had never been obnoxiously wealthy, but we had never been forced to try and survive on the battleground that was life on the streets of the Point either. I really felt like I owed them for that at the very least.
Sighing, I made my way inside. There were no lights on because Karsen wasn’t home and my mom was undoubtedly passed out in bed. I swung by the kitchen to grab a beer that was actually cold and puttered by my dad’s office on the way up to the floor where my room was. He was seated behind the computer, like always. His balding head bent down and his eyes locked on whatever
was on the screen. I frowned a little and twisted the cap off the neck of the bottle.
“Hey.”
I saw him start and his gaze jerked away from the monitor. “Brysen Carter, you scared the piss out of me.”
“How was she?”
He cleared his throat and returned his attention back to the computer. “Fine. Everything was fine.”
That was highly unlikely.
“Did you even check on her tonight, Dad?”
“Brysen, this is very important. Can this wait?”
Not really, but everything came second to his job. I didn’t say anything, just pulled off my shoes and wandered around the corner to where the master bedroom was located. The door was cracked and the TV was on. I pushed the door open with the flat of my hand and hissed out a swearword.
My mom was sprawled sideways across the bed. Her head was hanging over the edge and the same whitish-blond hair that I had on my head was in a tangled mess, touching the floor. An empty bottle of vodka was resting on the pillow and light snores were coming from her. I put the bottle of beer down on the dresser and went in to set her to rights. Clearly Dad hadn’t bothered to pull himself away long enough to make sure she was all right. He had just left her to her own devices, and this was always the end result.
She peeled one watery eye open to look at me and mumbled my name as I wrestled her under the covers. I snatched up the empty bottle and resisted the urge to smash it on the floor. Just barely. She hadn’t always been this way. She was always a little off, wrestled with emotional ups and downs, but a car accident, a horrible back injury, and endless amounts of pain, plus the inability for her to go back to work, and this drunken, sad shell of a woman was what my mother had become. It always made my heart twist and my guts tug because it didn’t have to be this way. She could get help, my dad could support her, and maybe my life could go back to some kind of normal, but that wasn’t happening and for now I just had to make do until Karsen was old enough to get out on her own.
I flipped off the TV and shut the door behind me with a thud. It would take a tornado to rouse her from that kind of drunken slumber anyway. I kicked off my tall shoes and finally found my way to my room.
Living back at home as an adult was so weird. It wasn’t like I had a curfew, had the same rules and regulations to follow as I had when I was a teenager, but everything about this childhood room felt wrong. I felt like I’d left some part of myself outside the door every time I resigned myself to another night, another day spent here.
I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and pulled up the last message I had sent to Dovie asking her to go to the party with me tonight. Now that she had a full-time job working at a group home for all the kids lost in the system, I hardly saw her anymore. Add in the fact that she was living with and involved with the only guy in the Point I considered scarier than Race, meant I rarely went by her house or saw her outside of school anymore. Tonight she had declined the invite because she had homework to do, but I secretly wondered if Bax had told her not to go.
He hated everything that had to do with the Hill. He was from the streets, an ex-con, a thief, and there was no doubt he was up to his eyeballs in Race’s criminal enterprise he was running. Shane Baxter had a reputation in these parts that was as legendary as the man who sired him. The man he and Race had taken down. They were not the kind of guys you wanted to mess with, but I really liked Dovie so I braved the shark-filled waters she swam in to keep her in my life and call her my bestie.
I twisted my phone around and sent her a message:
Saw Race at the party tonight.
It took a few minutes for her to answer back.
What was he doing there?
He said working.
I bet.
I rolled my eyes a little at what constituted as “work” for him and typed out:
Someone had a gun and fired off shots inside. Race got me out but took off because of the police.
I was still pretty steamed about it, and still heated from the inside out by that kiss. Why did he have to taste so good, feel so right, yet be so wrong?
She answered back in a matter-of-fact way only someone firmly immersed in the Point could do:
He can’t risk messing around with the police. No one from here really can. I’m not surprised he took off. Is everyone okay?
Fine. Everyone was fine.
I wasn’t fine. Having an idea that someone was a criminal, that they might not be on the up and up was something entirely different than having the proof right in front of your face. I didn’t understand that world, didn’t want to understand it, therefore, no matter how hot he was, how much he pulled me out of the miasma of my day to day life, Race Hartman would never be the guy for me, and that made things deep inside of me burn.
We chit-chatted some more. Me about nothing in particular, and her about the guys. Bax scared me so I was nervous and anxious around him, and I think she tried to make him more human, more likable in my eyes, to offset that. And Race, well, he spun me around and it took every effort I had to pretend disinterest instead of rabid curiosity every time she mentioned something about him. It was getting harder and harder to do.
I told her goodnight and sent a message to my sister to tell her goodnight as well. Karsen was a good egg, a kid who deserved to make it out of this house unscathed and unscarred from the state the Carters were currently in. She was a small little thing, with the same pale hair I had, but our mom’s brown eyes instead of Dad’s blue like I had. She was as sweet as could be, and when she shot back a smiley face, I finally settled into my routine for the night.
It was while I washed my face and climbed into the shower that I could finally admit that I was lonely, that I was sad, that I was overwhelmed with all the things I was feeling and the battle of always keeping the things churning inside me in check. In the shower I could cry and no one could tell. This wasn’t the life I wanted. This wasn’t where I thought I would be at twenty-one, but I had to adapt, had to change in order to do what was best for everyone, and that was just the way it was going to be. I didn’t have any choice in the matter.
I toweled off, ran a brush through my hair, and climbed into a pair of yoga pants and a tank to sleep in. The stress of the night, the adrenaline from everything started to leach out of my system and I finally got to fall onto the mattress facefirst. I was letting my eyes drift shut, trying really hard not to relive every flick of Race’s tongue, every scrape of teeth, when my phone lit up with a new message. It was late, and the only person I thought it could be was Karsen, so I bolted upright and swiped a finger over the screen.
It wasn’t from Karsen. It wasn’t from a number I recognized at all. It was five words, no big deal, but the rock that settled in my stomach when I read them told me something was off.
You looked so pretty tonight.
I just stared for a second before answering back.
Who is this?
So sorry I missed you.
What in the hell was that supposed to mean? I asked who it was again, and when I didn’t get a response back, I just switched my phone off and tossed it back on the nightstand. That was strange and I didn’t like it.
Talking about missing someone when gunshots had been going off wasn’t funny, and I was raw enough not to like it one little bit. I flopped back on the pillow, stared at the ceiling, and wondered why exactly Race had pulled me out the back of the house when everyone else had been stampeding toward the front door. I was grateful for his help, glad he had just reacted and taken me along for the ride, but now after that weird text, I was starting to have questions.
This is why I didn’t have time for a guy like Race. If he had been anyone else, his motivations would have never even been in question. I would have just taken it at face value that he was trying to get me to safety, but because of who he was, the life he lived, I had to wonder. And what had he meant by “you’re the only one I’m worried about”? I knew he wanted me, played games with me because I was a challenge,
but there couldn’t be more to it . . . could there?
Ugh. I didn’t have the time or the space for any of it. Too bad it was his pretty face and his perfect mouth that followed me into dreamland.
JAY CROWNOVER’S NEW YORK TIMES AND
USA TODAY BESTSELLING MARKED MEN SERIES
RETURNS THIS FALL WITH
Rowdy
After the only girl he ever loved told him that he would never be enough, Rowdy St. James knocked the Texas dust off his boots and set out to live up to his nickname. A good ol’ boy looking for good times and good friends, Rowdy refuses to take anything too seriously, especially when it comes to the opposite sex. Burned by love once, he isn’t going to let himself trust a woman again. But that’s before his new coworker arrives, a ghost from the past who’s suddenly making him question every lesson he ever learned.
Salem Cruz grew up in a house with too many rules and too little fun—a world of unhappiness she couldn’t wait to forget. But one nice thing from childhood had stayed with her: the memory of the sweet, blue-eyed boy next door who’d been head over heels in love with her little sister.
Now fate and an old friend have brought her and Rowdy together, and Salem is determined to show him that once upon a time he picked the wrong sister. A mission that is working perfectly—until the one person that ties them together appears, threatening to tear them apart for good.
On sale October 2014
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo by Sassymonkey.net
JAY CROWNOVER is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the Marked Men series. Like her characters, she is a big fan of tattoos. She loves music and wishes she could be a rock star, but since she has no aptitude for singing or instrument playing, she’ll settle for writing stories with interesting characters that make the reader feel something. She lives in Colorado with her three dogs.