“You’re hot,” I said softly.
“What?” he clipped roughly.
“You’re hot,” I repeated. “I can see them sending you in when they—”
“Unh-unh.” He shook his head, pressing his body into mine as the electricity snapped and sparked through the room. “I am not the DEA’s resident prostitute with a dick,” he growled. “The play I made with Darla was my choice, a long job, a sacrifice I decided I had to make ’cause the life I was livin’ bein’ under that cover I had to get out of. It was sucking me under. It was suffocating me. That shit, those people I had to spend time with, no contact with clean air, decent living, good folk, it was dragging me down. I had to make a Statue of Liberty play and I made it. And the fuck of it was, I made that sacrifice and the whole thing got fucked in a bad way, Tess, where I had to watch those morons take a good man down and almost take him out.”
His face dipped closer and he kept going.
“You were not that. My assignment with you was light cover. Getting close. Nosing around. They investigated your finances, your bakery, and they knew you were less likely a suspect involved in his operation and more likely a possible witness and knew he was jacked. But the amount of communication and your name on his accounts, they had to be sure. I took it where it went because, after about an hour with you, I knew you were clean and I knew where I wanted to take it after the investigation was over. I came in late on this one because I’d just come off that last one. And when I took that job, you were the light of a warm, sunny day, Tess. Darla was the dead of a cold, dark fuckin’ night.” His face got even closer and his voice got low when he finished. “It felt good to feel the sun again.”
I stared into his glittering eyes.
Then my mouth whispered, “Your job is pretty intense, Slim.”
He stared into my eyes. The sparks disappeared, the warmth invaded, and he rolled to his side, back to the back of the couch, taking me with him, his arms tight around me, his legs tangling with mine.
“Yeah, baby, it is. And it can fuck with your head. That’s why when I met a woman whose house always smells like there’s a cake in the oven, who holds tight and presses her tits to my back when she’s with me on my bike, who looks at me like I can make the rest of the world melt away and for her its only me, I know I wanna hold onto that woman.”
To those sensational, warm gushiness-inducing words, I blurted, “It’s in my belly.”
I watched him do a slow blink before he asked, “What?”
“It’s a poisonous snake curled up tight. It can get really small. So small, I forget it’s there. But when it uncurls, it swells and gets so big it fills me up, crawls up my throat. So deep up my throat, Brock, sometimes I think it’s going to choke me, and when it starts uncurling, I’m always terrified it’s gonna strike.”
One of his hands slid up into my hair and the skin around his eyes got soft before he whispered, “What he left you?”
“Yeah,” I whispered back.
I watched him lift his chin as his fingers sifted into my hair against my scalp and then he shoved my face in his throat.
When he spoke again, his voice was thick. Thick in a way I knew what that meant, thick in a way I knew what it meant to me and I pushed closer to his long, lean body as he asked, “You gonna work that shit out?”
“I…” His hand tensed on my head and my fingers curled into his tee before I whispered, “Yeah.”
“You gonna let me help?”
I closed my eyes.
Then I repeated my whispered, “Yeah.”
His arms got tight, drawing me close and I held on.
“You scared, baby?” he asked.
I didn’t repeat my “yeah,” I just nodded.
His arms got tighter and his voice got thicker as I felt his neck bend and his lips say against my hair, “Don’t be. There’s a wild that’s fucked and there’s a wild that’s just plain wild. You just hooked yourself to a different kind of wild, Tess, and I swear, baby, swear”—his arms squeezed before he finished—“I’ll show you that’s a good, safe place to be.”
I sighed deep and I did this because I believed him.
Then I whispered, “Okay.”
Brock had no response. He just held tight. He did this for a long time. Long enough for me to relax in his arms. Long enough for my fingers to uncurl and settle flat on his warm, hard chest. Long enough for me to realize that cosmopolitans on a back deck at a really bad baby shower with girls who were good to the core and wanted the best for me didn’t shed even a little light on what I had on that couch in that moment.
The only people who knew what was happening were Brock and me.
And after that time went by, he pushed up, grabbed his beer then settled with his back to the couch, his head on my toss pillows at the armrest, me mostly on his body, his beer in his hand resting on his chest, and when I lifted my head to look at him, I saw his quicksilver eyes on me.
Then he muttered, “All right, babe, now tell me about Kentucky.”
I bit my lip.
Brock grinned.
I quit biting my lip and grinned back.
Then I whispered, “I have to take my contacts out and get my glasses.”
His eyes went warm and his mouth got soft as his arm around me loosened and he whispered back, “All right, darlin’, I’ll be right here.”
That made me grin again.
Then I jumped up to take out my contacts and get my glasses.
CHAPTER SIX
Drawback Cancelled
“FUCK,” I HEARD muttered and my eyes drifted open to see Brock’s tee-covered chest.
We were still tangled together on the couch. Apparently we fell asleep there because early-morning sun was shining through the blinds.
I also knew that it was morning because I could hear Fiona Apple singing “Fast as You Can” from my bedroom and I knew my alarm had gone off.
“Damn,” I mumbled, shifting and preparing to push up, getting a knee underneath me and a hand in the cushion when suddenly two strong arms locked around me. I found my soft body colliding with Brock’s hard one. His hand slid up into my hair and it guided my mouth to his.
He kissed me, long, sweet, deep, and wet.
My toes curled, my belly got warm, and my body melted into his as one of my hands slid up his neck into his hair curling around the back and holding on.
When he broke the kiss, my head lifted away an inch, my eyes lazily opened, and I heard Fiona Apple was getting way louder (and I didn’t care).
“You passed out before we got to the fun stuff, babe,” Brock informed me in a deep, sexy, sleepy, rough whisper.
“I did?” I asked.
“Yeah.” I watched his mouth grin. “Right in the middle of talkin’ you just faded away.”
Crap.
How embarrassing.
I stared in his sexy, sleepy eyes and bit my lip.
Brock’s eyes dropped to my mouth.
Then I found myself on my back in the couch, Brock on top, and he was kissing me again, longer, sweeter, deeper, wetter and he added some pretty freaking great hand action.
Mm. It felt nice waking up this way.
Fiona quit singing “Fast as You Can” and “Get Gone” started, sounding loud from my adamant alarm clock that was a fancy one where you could shove in an MP3 and it woke you soft and nice with music you liked. But the longer you let it play, the louder it got.
And we’d let it play for a long time and Fiona’s changing tempo in “Get Gone” from sweet and melodious to pissed off and pounding was filling the house so much even Brock’s fantastic kisses couldn’t block it out.
Clearly mine couldn’t block it out for Brock either since his mouth broke from mine and he muttered, “Fuck, babe, sorry but I gotta turn that shit off.”
“Fiona Apple isn’t shit,” I told him.
He gave me a look, knifed off me, and prowled to my bedroom.
I watched his ass as he went, thinking it would not be good if th
at look meant he didn’t like Fiona because I loved Fiona. It wasn’t like I played her 24/7 but she got a lot of airtime in Tess O’Hara’s house.
No, that wasn’t entirely true. I was thinking about Brock and Fiona Apple but mostly I was thinking about how great his ass looked in his faded jeans.
Once I quit thinking of this (around about the time he disappeared), I looked around for my glasses, saw Brock had taken them off and put them on the table at the side of the sofa. I nabbed them, slipped them on my nose, got up, and walked to the kitchen.
I was at the sink filling the coffeepot with water when he made it into the kitchen.
It took a bit of effort but I didn’t drop the glass pot into my ceramic sink when I saw a smokin’ hot, clothes-disheveled, usually sexy and unruly haired, now sexier and unrulier-haired (due to sleep and my hands running through it), heavy-eyed Brock Lucas saunter into my kitchen.
Whoa.
I’d never woken up with Brock but just looking at him in the morning was nearly as good as one of his kisses.
I turned off the water and moved to the coffeemaker, covering this reaction by asking, “Do you not like Fiona Apple?”
His response was, “Is this a deal breaker for you?”
I’d flipped up the top of the coffeemaker and turned to him while I poured the water in seeing he was preparing to open the fridge.
That was when I said, “I’ll take that as a no.”
He stood, fingers curled around the fridge’s door handle and his eyes leveled on me. “Babe, I listen to Credence, the Eagles, Santana, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Thorogood, shit like that and pretty much anything country if a chick ain’t singin’ it. Does that sound like a man who’d like Fiona Apple?”
“No,” I replied. “It sounds like a man in dire need of a crash course in three decades of music. The boys are back from Vietnam, Brock. Follow me into the new millennium.”
He grinned at me and muttered, “Smartass,” before he opened the fridge door and stuck his head into it.
I was feeling warm gushiness in my belly due to his grin and seeing his head stuck in my fridge when I heard my cell ring.
I shoved the coffeepot under the coffeemaker and moved to my purse on the kitchen counter, wondering who was calling me at that ungodly hour and why. Then I pulled out my phone, looked at the display, and saw it was Martha.
Damn.
I hit the button on the screen to take the call and put it to my ear.
“Hey, honey,” I greeted. “What’s up?”
“His filthy, rusted, beat-up, in desperate need of a trade-up truck is still in front of your house, that’s what’s up,” was Martha’s greeting and my eyes moved out the kitchen doorframe and toward the front window that was still covered by closed blinds.
Then I asked, “How do you know that?”
“Because I swung by your place on my way to work to check and see how crazy stupid you’re being with a smokin’ hot guy and I found out you’re being off-the-charts crazy stupid with a smokin’ hot guy.”
“Martha!” I snapped.
“Am I wrong or did his truck not start last night and he hitched a ride home?” she asked.
My eyes went to the microwave then they went to the kitchen counter. “I cannot believe you. You are the one who’s crazy. First, you don’t leave for work for an hour, and second, my house is thirty minutes out of your way to get to work.”
“I am committed to the mission of stopping you from making another very bad mistake,” she returned.
I heard the fridge close but I didn’t need to hear it to be very aware that Brock was in the room and he could hear every word.
“I can’t talk about this now,” I told her. “Come by the bakery tonight after work. We’ll have a cupcake and a chat.”
“Girl, I’m single and my best friend just dropped ten pounds and got a three hundred dollar hairstyle. There is no way I’m eating one of your cupcakes because eating one means eating four and I don’t need those cupcakes on my fat ass when I’m out on the prowl with you. No one looked at me before, what with you and your bodacious ta-tas and the look on your face that says to all comers, ‘Isn’t it sweet, the whole world is like Disneyland!’ I eat your cupcakes, which never fail to settle on my ass, I’ll become invisible.”
“That isn’t true,” I told her.
“Which part?” she shot back.
“All of it,” I answered instantly.
“Girl, wake… up.”
I sighed. My eyes moved to Brock to see him, hips against the counter, open jug of milk in his hand, and I was pretty certain I missed him drinking straight from it.
A drawback.
He grinned at me and I felt the sweet hum in the air, saw his eyes dancing, and knew he was grinning in order not to burst out laughing.
Okay, cancel drawback. He could drink straight from the milk jug all he wanted as long as he filled my kitchen with that great vibe and grinned at me while looking all morning hot guy.
“Hello!” Martha snapped in my ear and I jerked my eyes away from Brock.
“I’m here,” I told her.
“Ohmigod, he’s right there muddling your head,” she muttered.
She wasn’t wrong about that.
Time to get serious.
“Martha, really, honey, we need to talk.”
“Shit.” She was still muttering.
“It’s important,” I whispered, and felt the amused Brock vibe flatten but the kitchen filled with warmth.
Martha heard my tone, read it, and immediately gave in. “All right, but we’re not meeting at the bakery for cupcakes. You’re coming over and I’m making salad.”
I blinked at the counter. “You’re making salad?”
“I’m making salad.”
“Honey, the last time I had dinner at your house, you fried celery.”
The warmth in the room remained but the hum came back and it was heralded in by Brock roaring with laughter.
My eyes cut to him and I bugged them out but he ignored my hint, kept laughing, and did it shaking his head.
“I hear he found that amusing,” Martha noted irritably.
I looked away from Brock and pointed out, “Martha, babe, you fried celery. Anyone would find that amusing.”
“I’m an experimental chef,” she fired back.
This was true. But she was not an altogether successful one.
I sighed again.
Then I suggested, “How about you come over here and I’ll make salads.”
“Will smokin’ hot guy be there?”
“His name is Brock,” I whispered.
“Will smokin’ hot but bad for you Brock be there?” she amended.
“I don’t know,” I told her, the truth. “But what I have to say won’t wait and he knows about it anyway, so if he is, you’ll deal. If he isn’t, he isn’t. Yeah?”
Silence.
Then, “So this isn’t about him?”
“No, it isn’t. It’s about something I should have told you a while ago but I didn’t and I need to…” My eyes slid to Brock and saw his were on me as I saw he was moving toward me. Then he made it to me. His arm wrapped around my belly, the front of his body hit the back of mine, I felt his heat, then I felt his face in my neck. Only then did I continue. “I need to get rid of it, so it’s time to tell you about it.”
Straight off the bat, she whispered her guess. “Damian.”
That’s when I knew she knew. Or she might not actually know but she sensed there were deeper issues at play but she backed off and let me deal with them. And when I stuck to my guns and got shot of my ex-husband without sinking into the depths of despair, she gave me that play.
“Yes,” I whispered back.
Brock’s arm gave me a squeeze.
I closed my eyes.
“All right, babe, I’ll be there at seven.”
“Martha?” I called.
“Yeah, Tess,” she answered.
“Love you, honey.”
“Love
you too, babe.”
“But you keep stalking me, that love will die,” I warned on a tease.
“Whatever,” she muttered, knowing it was a tease, then disconnected.
I hit the screen to end call and dropped my phone on the counter. When I did this, Brock turned me so we were face to face and both his arms were around me.
“Not my biggest fan,” he muttered but he didn’t appear the least broken up about it.
“You want to hang with me, you might want to put some work into that,” I suggested.
“Right,” he replied, then said, “No, babe. I’ll tell you now, she don’t like me, she don’t like me and I don’t give a fuck.”
Hm. Another drawback.
“She’s my best friend,” I reminded him.
“If she is, she’ll come to see what’s good for you and she’ll sort her shit out. If she’s a different kind of woman, she won’t. Instead, she’ll see green and won’t clue in that men do not want high-maintenance drama queens so much they steer well clear and until she shifts that shit outta her life, it’s gonna be a lonely one. Unlike her friend who sees a man drinking outta her milk jug, processes that it’s highly unlikely she’s gonna break him of that habit, seein’ as he’s forty-five and still does it and has since he was a kid, lets it go, and moves on all in the expanse of about a second. Instead of throwing a shit fit about it, which gets her nowhere, is a waste of energy, and leaves both involved feeling like garbage.”
Well, I had to admit, all that was interesting and insightful and weirdly mature.
Still.
“Well, now that we’re on that subject, it’s somewhat unhygienic for you to drink out of the milk jug.”
“Babe, I had my tongue in your mouth for ten minutes this morning. How’s that any different?”
I tipped my head to the side while considering this point.
Then I shared, “Your point holds merit.”
He burst out laughing, and in the middle of it buried his face in my neck so when he was done he could kiss me there.
This was nice as in way nice.