Bronx laughed and stood up.
“Don’t be stupid,” I told him. “I know that you’re trying to help, but I don’t want you in the cell behind me. And keep an eye on Ames for me, too. Let me know if anything else happens that I don’t know about.”
After everyone filed out, it was only me and the woman that wasn’t appearing to try very hard to keep her distance any longer.
“Your brother and family are good to you,” she said softly.
My eyes lifted to meet hers. “Yours are, too. We’re both lucky.”
She nodded once and fell into step beside me.
“I wanted to talk to you about something,” she murmured quietly as we walked.
The stupid chains were clinking so loud that I could barely hear her.
“About what?” I asked, trying not to allow my heart to take off in my chest.
I could smell her.
She smelled like baby powder and apples.
I nearly groaned as I shuffled, the chains between my legs not allowing me to take any more than a half step.
She kept pace with me, however.
“I heard your brother talking about Brees and his baby with Ames. I…” She paused. “They moved to town somewhere close to here. I think that she’s likely here to start up trouble.”
I rolled my eyes.
“I’m not from here. I don’t know anyone here. She can’t even access me. I’m not worried in the least,” I admitted. “You probably should stay out of her way, though. Ames is the type of vindictive bitch that would fuck your life up.”
“Same goes for me,” she admitted. “I’m not from here. I don’t know anybody here. When I go to the grocery store, I put on a ball cap and my headphones so nobody will talk to me. So yeah, I don’t think she can start anything up with me.”
That made me sad that she didn’t have anyone here.
“You should go back home,” I said gruffly. “Where you have people that’ll protect you and have your back if you need help.”
She looked over at me. “I’m where I’m supposed to be.”
And with that, she walked away, swinging that shapely ass as she went.
• • •
Three months later
“Random cell inspection,” I heard the inmate closest to me grumble. “Son of a bitch.”
I saw him toss something over the ledge of the railing, then rolled my eyes.
“You stupid son of a bitch!” I heard someone say. “I would’ve swallowed that if you’d given it to me.”
I ignored them and lay on my bed, glad that I didn’t have a roommate for the time being.
I also didn’t sweat the random inspection. It was what it was. I didn’t have any contraband in here. What was the fuckin’ point?
I didn’t do drugs, didn’t smoke, and saw no reason to hide a shank in my cell when my fists would work well enough if I needed something to protect me.
Needless to say, an inspection was just another part of my day.
At least, not until she came into the cell.
“Hey, Kitty Kitty!” I heard the moron that’d thrown whatever drugs he’d had in his cell over the railing earlier say. “Come over here and let me pet your pussy.”
I gritted my teeth, hoping I wouldn’t see who I knew I would see, and turned my head.
Of course, it was exactly who I’d hoped I wouldn’t see.
Not that my eyes didn’t eat the sight of her up.
But Jesus Christ. Did I really want to be sporting a huge erection with about eight people crowding into the tiny cell that I was encased in?
Fuck no.
Yet, there she was. There my boner was. And there the eight other people were.
Great.
“You have a problem with us searching your things, Solomon?” a male guard asked.
When the random inspections happened, at least they didn’t only send female guards. They always had male guards there to help.
Again, I wasn’t being sexist or anything, but Jesus Christ, this place was a hellhole, and it terrified me to have her there.
“Are you even listening to me, Solomon?” I heard one of the guards ask.
I didn’t know their names.
I didn’t bother to learn them because I just didn’t care.
The only guard that I cared about I tried not to show anything at all.
I didn’t want the other inmates knowing that I had a weakness. It was better to continue showing the world that I didn’t give a fuck about anything.
“Sorry,” I grumbled. “Search away.”
The guards went to ransacking.
All of them pretty much ripped the room apart as they searched, uncaring about the mess that they were making.
All of them but one particular woman who took time cleaning up after herself as she ‘searched.’
Though, what she was searching for I didn’t know.
Her eyes skimmed over my books, her fingers trailing over the spines almost reverently.
I felt other things inside me clench at her obvious love of the books.
“Nothing,” I heard called by one of the guards.
“Same,” another one called.
One by one, they all called off their names and ‘nothing’ before all eyes settled on Blaise.
Blaise, who was staring at a photograph I had on the wall.
It wasn’t your usual type of photograph.
Honestly, had I known that she was going to be here, I would’ve torn it down.
But since I wasn’t given any warning, I hadn’t thought to take down the photo of Brees and me.
A photo taken about three weeks before it’d all gone down. A photo where we both appeared happy.
I hadn’t been happy. Even before the altercation with Blaise and him, I hadn’t liked him all that much.
He was a prick who thought his shit didn’t stink. He was also a prick who showed you one thing to your face and did something completely opposite when you weren’t there to keep an eye on him.
“Oh, that’s it then,” one of the guards said. “This was our last inspection.”
One of the guards started to pull out a sheet of paper and nodded once. “Except for bottom cells. Cells I’m not going anywhere near.”
The bottom cells weren’t that big of a deal anymore. But a long while ago they made the bottom area into the isolation cells, and in isolation, prisoners weren’t allowed to have anything in there with them. Not even a blanket or a sheet in case they tried to hang themselves while they were in there.
Which meant that there were none because unless a guard gave it to them, they weren’t going to have anything in those cells.
And guards didn’t rat other guards out. No matter what they did or didn’t do.
Though, I had a feeling Blaise was an exception to those rules.
“All right,” another guard said as he walked out.
The others followed until there was only Blaise.
But one guard, a big male guard that looked to have the hots for my woman—and in my head, she was my woman—stopped right outside the cell door.
“You got this from here?” the guard asked Blaise.
Blaise rose her hand in a lazy wave. “I want to ask him about this book.”
“I’ll be right outside.” He looked at me. “Don’t do anything funny.”
I gave him the deadest look I could muster, and he flinched.
I had no clue what he saw, but I had a feeling that it was what I felt.
And the anger, annoyance, and disgust with the situation I found myself in—had found myself in for all these fucking years—was really starting to get to me.
I was, for all intents and purposes, dead inside.
“I’ll be right out here,” the guard reiterated.
“I heard you the first time,” Blaise grumbled, sounding annoyed herself now.
She didn’t reciprocate the feelings that the other guard felt for her, and for some reason that made me feel intense satisfactio
n.
The moment the guard was ‘gone’ and we had as much privacy as one could in a jail cell in the middle of a federal prison, Blaise’s eyes turned to me.
There was no more aloofness to her face.
There was intense hunger. Hunger that I felt right back in regard to her.
She took a step toward me, not coming too close because the guard that still had us in his line of sight could still see me, and stared directly into my soul.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I wasn’t okay. I was slowly dying inside, day by day, and nobody even knew it.
“Fine,” I lied. “Why?”
She swallowed hard. “Because you don’t look like you’re doing okay. You look… defeated.”
I felt my spine stiffen. “I’m not fucking defeated.”
She grinned then. “Then don’t look it. Because, just between you and me, I’m trying as best I can here. When you fight and get in trouble, I can only do so much on my end. Eventually you’re going to either get really hurt, or do something I can’t fix. Like last week when you decided to beat the shit out of that guy for stealing your milk. I know you wanted the milk, and I know it’s a fight or die kind of world in here, but there’s a line. And you won’t get early release if you keep being one of those problem prisoners.”
She had a point.
I wasn’t what they would consider a ‘model’ prisoner in here.
Too many people tried to pull too many damn tricks.
I don’t know if it was because I looked like a challenge or not, but every goddamn person that walked through the doors thought it would be a great idea to challenge the unchallengeable.
“Don’t know if that’s something that’s any of your business,” I admitted.
Her eyes narrowed and she stared at me with so much anger right then that I almost took a step back.
“You could’ve left me,” she hissed. “You could’ve just called off the dogs. You could’ve stopped him and went on about your business. Yet you didn’t. Why didn’t you?”
Because I want to fuck the hell out of you. Because you’re mine. Because when I close my eyes, you’re all that I see.
Yet did I say any of those things? Hell no.
“Maybe I should have,” I lied.
I didn’t even know her.
Not really.
She was an acquaintance at most.
Yet, from the moment I first laid eyes on her, I had trouble keeping my eyes from wandering. From finding her in a crowd of hundreds. From wanting to touch and stroke her body. A body that I hadn’t seen in anything but bulky clothing since I first met her.
But oh, the hint of what I could see.
The small curves hinted at even bigger ones unclothed.
The swell of a breast behind a bulky jacket or a bulletproof vest.
The soft, feminine curve of a hip behind a utility belt or an unshapely set of fatigue pants.
God.
Oh, how I wanted her.
It was wrong.
I was years older than her. She was in her mid-twenties now. I was in my almost-forties.
Fifteen years easily separated us, and about a lifetime of experience.
Yet, that didn’t change what I felt. How much I fucking wanted her.
The glimpses of her in this hellhole were what was getting me through the goddamn day, and she didn’t even realize it. Didn’t realize that she was saving me with each stolen glance.
“Mackenzie,” the guard watching her barked. “Let’s go already. I don’t have all day.”
Blaise sighed, her shoulders slumping slightly in defeat.
“We both know that I mean more to you, and you mean more to me, than we’re both willing to admit.” She rolled her eyes. “I left you something by your books.”
And with that she was gone, leaving me staring at her retreating back.
It was only as the door was closed to my cell, and there wasn’t a guard or prisoner in sight, that I went to the books along the wall.
When I separated them, my heart skipped a beat at what I saw.
It was a small thing. No bigger than my fist.
But it was enough to make me remember a conversation I’d had with another prisoner not too long ago.
What I wouldn’t do for a goddamn Snickers.
I’d told that to the man in front of me, all the while I’d been very much aware of the guard at my back.
Blaise.
Goddamn, but she was surprising.
I picked up the snack size Snickers bar and ate it whole.
CHAPTER 3
Whatever. I’m getting cheese fries.
-Blaise’s secret thoughts
BLAISE
Six months later
My heart was hammering as I made my way on shift.
Today I would be in the same unit as Sin.
It didn’t happen all that often.
In fact, it happened so rarely—once a month—that I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I was going to have butterflies until I saw him.
The moment I did thirty minutes later, I felt my heart rate go from controllable levels to you might die if you allow this to keep up levels.
Licking my lips, I tried not to let either my attraction to the man, or my need to see him, show on my face.
And I went to work, patrolling the yard while I surreptitiously watched the man of my dreams work out.
When I’d first gotten into the yard, he’d been running around the fence.
Now he was using the weight bench to lift an unseemly amount of weight.
He had every single plate that could fit onto the bar on it, and he was squatting it like it was featherlight, and not who knew how many hundreds of pounds.
He would squat down, and the unshapely orange pants would finally hug him around his ass, showing off his perfectly formed backside.
I stopped when I realized that in my daydreaming, I’d gotten too close to another guard.
The one that liked me. The one that kept asking me out despite me continuously saying no.
“Drummond.” I nodded as I tried to continue past him.
“Wait, Blaise,” Drummond called as I tried to bolt before he could say anything. “I wanted to ask you something.”
I felt my insides turn to dust.
“What?” I asked, resigned.
“Would you like to go to a wedding with me?” Drummond asked. “It’s next weekend. Formal. I can’t find anyone that wants to go with me. Nobody likes going to formal things.”
That, or maybe they just don’t want to go with you because you give off really weird vibes.
Or maybe that was just me.
Whatever the reason, I was about to turn him down gently when an inmate who’d heard our exchange chimed in.
“Listen,” the inmate drawled as he walked past. Not running like Sin had been, but walking and still looking just as sweaty. “You’ve asked her like a hundred different times to go out with you, and she’s said no every single time. There comes a point where you need to just take the hint. You gross her out. Just like you gross everyone else here out. Take the fucking misery elsewhere, because it’s getting exhausting.”
The inmate started to continue to walk, but Drummond got pissed and shoved him. Right into another inmate that had a touching issue.
That’s when shit degraded.
Fast.
One second, everything was calm and collected, and the next shit just… hit the fan.
Inmates started fighting. Guards started protecting themselves.
And before I could so much as process what the fuck was going on, he was there.
Protecting me once again.
I sighed. “I can handle myself, Sin.”
He backed me up until the fence was at my back, and he was at my front.
And all of his hot, sweaty, I want to put my mouth over every square inch of it body was pressed against me.
His skin was still bare.
He’d taken his shirt off
at some point in between when I’d arrived, and when all the fighting had started, and now there were so many inches of bare skin for me to enjoy that I was finding it hard to concentrate on anything else.
“I know you can,” Sin drawled. “But there are about two hundred men out here pissed off because they’re being caged like animals, and there are about ten of you guards. I don’t want you getting a face full of fist like the creep guard is getting right now.”
Drummond was getting a face full of fist, but he was trading punches with the inmate who’d called him on his shit. He wasn’t being ganged up on by the inmates.
The riot alarm started sounding and shit really hit the fan then.
At one point, shit got so out of hand that even I was starting to get scared.
Men were just… everywhere.
One inmate was using the forty-five-pound weights off the weight bench to bash another inmate in the face. While another one closer to us was using the bar to jab people hard in the biggest body parts, taking them down with one single blow.
Then there was someone all the way across the yard that had what looked to be his shirt around a guard’s neck and he was choking him.
Drummond again, this time with a different inmate.
I groaned and started to move out from behind Sin, but he caught me before I could so much as take two steps away from him. Even while being engaged with two very big, very burly dudes.
Sin took them both down with two well-placed punches to the face.
One fell at his feet and tripped up the other one, momentarily distracting him. The other one went to take a step forward and took a face full of Sin’s fist right to his nose.
I watched as his eyeballs rolled back into his head and he went down like a tree.
The smack of his body hitting the dirt caused a plume of dust to billow up around him and us, momentarily distracting me from what I should be doing—which was helping the dumbass Drummond who’d started all of this.
“I gotta go over there and stop them before they actually kill him,” I grumbled as I pushed my bare hand into Sin’s bare back. God, I wanted to run it all along the length of the muscles. Trace the beautiful tattoos that ran down the length of his back. Preferably with my tongue. “Or they’re gonna notice I did nothing.”
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