“Of course I didn’t say anything. I told you I wouldn’t, and I meant it. Now, tell me what I can do for you.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it. I know you wouldn’t tell him. I’m just . . .”
“You’re nervous,” I supplied, as I placed a hand on his shoulder. He was shaking. “Hey, it’s going to be okay. Talk to me.”
34
Marcus
A possibility nagged at me.
One I stupidly hadn’t thought about before, but now it was like a warning light, beeping in front of me.
“What if they don’t believe me?” I blurted out. “I’ll just be showing up out of the blue and saying, ‘Hey, I’m your little brother. I was born in the pokey. We don’t even have the same dad, but isn’t it cool?’” I swung my elbows back and forth in mockery of a too-happy person. “I mean, my mom never told them. My dad never did. I don’t think they have a clue.”
Elle took a beat, like she was processing this, but she seemed to know right away how to handle this new wrinkle I’d found. “Show them your birth certificate. You have one, right?”
“Yeah, I have a copy of it,” I said, my gaze drifting to my feet, because that piece of paper was a cruel reminder of where I came from. It said I wasn’t like everyone else. I wasn’t like many people at all. “Says right there in black and white that I was born behind bars.”
Elle’s eyes were sympathetic. “There’s no shame in where you came from. We all came from different places. So don’t let a few words on your birth certificate affect how you see yourself.”
But they’d colored who I was for as long as I’d known the truth of my birth. And maybe that’s part of what had held me back from talking to the Sloans. The weight I carried with me. “I just feel like I’m blindsiding them,” I muttered.
“You’re just telling them the truth, but you need to be smart about it. And be prepared, because it is hard. Maybe that’s why no one was home the other time you went there. Maybe the universe knew you needed to have all the evidence before you went.”
She was right, and truth be told, the Sloans carried their own weights. I had to remember that. And I had to act soon. “I need to do it soon. The detective called about the reopened investigation. He wants to talk to me. I don’t want to talk to him though.”
She drew a worried breath, held up both hands, and backed away. “You shouldn’t tell me more on that. I can talk to you about the family stuff, but anything involving the case, I need to stay out of.”
The last thing I wanted was for Elle to be in trouble. I’d hate for anything to happen to her. I flashed a small smile. “I won’t. But thanks again. I think I’m going to rip off the Band-Aid. Do it tomorrow.”
She offered a fist for knocking. “Good luck. You’re brave.”
“Thanks,” I said, a knot of emotion tightening in my throat as I quickly added, “Because of you.”
It was true.
She was the first person who’d listened, when for so long no one wanted to.
35
Colin
A female Elvis impersonator with drooping breasts dangling out of her jumpsuit mugged for the camera on the street below. She draped her arms around two guys with sunburns and foot-long plastic drink glasses. With their free hands, both men mimed grabbing a breast. The Elvis outfit was made modest by pasties on her nipples.
The woman laughed, and so did the guys. Until one stopped laughing, started hacking, and promptly heaved into the nearby garbage can.
“And that’s all, folks, in today’s five p.m. Parade of What We Might Have Been,” said Kevin, my friend and mentor from my recovery group. The two of us stood on the elevated walkway at the corner of Bally’s, surveying the madness and mayhem of an early happy hour on the Strip. This was one of the many faces of Vegas—the city embodied glitz and glamour in its classy hotels, sex and sin in its nightclubs, beauty and class in the fountains of the Bellagio, but also the seedy and grungy in the late-afternoon crowds weaving up and down the sidewalks, drunk as skunks.
I held up my iced coffee and toasted. “Here’s to my best friend. Coffee,” I said, since caffeine was the one “vice” I allowed myself to have.
“Hear, hear. May it never ever be banned,” Kevin said, swallowing the last of his drink then returning to the conversation we’d started before She-Elvis had arrived on the scene. “So, the meeting with the detective and talking about the past, did that stir anything up?”
“Not really,” I said, quickly glancing at my watch, calculating how much longer until I saw Elle.
Kevin shot me a steely stare. “Really?”
Busted.
I forced my mind away from the anticipation of tonight, and back in time to my conversation yesterday with Michael at the base of the mountain after we’d met with John. I sighed, dragged my free hand through my hair, and shrugged. “Guilt. It brought back a lot of guilt.”
The other man nodded sagely. “That makes sense. But you need to keep working on letting go of that. Guilt—and I mean the misplaced kind—can eat you up. When you start to feel that way, the things that you think will take the pain away seem a helluva lot more appealing. Tequila looks a lot prettier the worse you feel.”
“Yeah. That’s true,” I admitted. The moments I’d been most tempted to crack open a bottle were when I felt the shittiest about myself.
“Just be aware that revisiting the past can mess with your head. Keep doing the things that make you feel centered. Your exercise. Your work. Your meetings. All of it. Okay, man?”
My gaze drifted to my arms, to the inked reminders of the man I wanted to be. The strong one, the kind one. The man who didn’t live a wrecked kind of life. Strength, love, passion, family, truth—they were my touchstones, my hallmarks, and my guides. “I will.”
“Because something this big could knock you off your game. Falling in love. Breaking up. Losing a shit-ton of money. Even good things, like landing a new deal. Hell, just getting news out of the blue. Anything can be a trigger. That almost happened to me a few years ago when I fell in love with my wife. You’d think falling in love would be this wonderful thing that would keep me straight. But I very nearly popped pills again because I didn’t know if she was feeling the same thing, and I felt so out of control.”
Kevin’s admission knocked the air out of my lungs. I’d never imagined falling for someone could have those kinds of consequences. “Seriously?”
Kevin nodded. “Love nearly kicked the shit out of me.”
“How did you deal with it?”
“I told her how I felt. I was honest with her. I spoke the truth, and she loved that I was open, and the rest is history.”
His words struck a chord. I’d delivered a world of pleasure to Elle, I’d proven I was a reliable, steady guy, I’d shown her I was patient.
But I’d only skirted the thorny ground of feelings.
Saying I like you so much, saying I’m crazy for you barely covered it.
There was one last thing to do.
Open my heart.
Of course I had some business to attend to first. After the meeting with Kevin, I swung by the Luxe for a brief chat with my sister, so we could catch up on how her shows were doing at Edge, her husband’s club.
“Customers are loving my dancers,” Shannon said, gesturing to the stage where her dancers performed her choreography. The club was quiet now. It would open in an hour.
“No surprise. You’re a rock star,” I said, then filled her in on some of the expansion plans I’d been working on for Shay Productions as the shows rolled out across Brent’s clubs.
As we finished, Brent strolled into Edge with Mindy, his long-time best friend.
“You still fraternizing with this guy?” I asked, teasing.
“Only so I can give him a hard time about everything,” Mindy said, then Shannon gave the petite blonde a hug.
I smiled, glad that my sister got along so well with her husband’s good friend. Mindy was practically family. She�
�d been at my grandparent’s house a few times now that Brent and Shannon were together.
“By the way,” Mindy said, “I’m glad to hear those guys at the community center were looking out for Shannon. The Protectors are the good ones.”
“That’s what we like hearing,” Brent said.
“I couldn’t agree more,” Shannon echoed.
And on that all-is-well note, I took off.
I hit the trails for a forty-five-minute pre-date trail run. I pushed myself extra hard with a punishing uphill route in the early evening heat. But I’d needed it, because Kevin was right. The challenging workout had helped settle my mind and heart, dislodging some of yesterday’s latent guilt and also strengthening my resolve to share my feelings with Elle.
Now, I stood under hot jets of water, rinsing away the remnants of the sweaty workout. I turned off the shower, dried off, and wrapped a towel around my waist so I could get ready for my date—at my house. The best kind of date. As I finished brushing my teeth, my phone rang, so I tossed the toothbrush in the cup holder and grabbed the phone from my bed in case it was Elle.
Rex was calling.
“Hey, man, what’s up?”
“Okay, here’s the deal. I am almost ready,” Rex said, stretching out the word. “I’m like ninety percent ready. And I just want to kill it on this test. But there’s one problem that’s making me absolutely batshit crazy.”
“Lay it on me,” I said, as I opened a drawer to grab a pair of boxers.
Rex rattled off the details, and I walked him through the steps to solving the equation as I pulled on black boxer briefs and hung up my towel.
“Awesome,” Rex said, relief and exuberance in his voice. “You are clutch, man. You are so clutch.”
I smiled at the compliment. “Need anything else?”
Rex cleared his throat, then said, “Um.”
Uh-oh. Rex never hemmed and hawed. The guy was the king of boldness.
“What is it? Just tell me.”
Rex sighed. “I hate to ask. But I need a ride tomorrow to the test. My mom is taking the car for a job interview, and Marcus’s ride is in the shop—the tires are being rotated. So he can’t drive us.”
“Us?” I asked curiously. “He’s taking the math placement test too?”
“Yeah. He’s a math whiz, though, just like you. He’s done all the studying on his own, and he’s aiming to place into calculus or some shit like that. He’s trying to find a ride, but I just figured I’d take the initiative and ask you. I guess I could take an Uber though.”
“No, you won’t take an Uber,” I said with a wide grin. I was so damn grateful to be hearing this—that both boys were eager and ready to learn. “Tell me where to pick you up, and I will gladly be your driver.”
Driver.
That word clanged loudly in my brain. My dad had been a limo driver and would have been proud of me—not for driving per se, but for helping the kids who needed it, especially when it came to math. My father had never gone to college, but he’d tried to work on his own skills with numbers during the last year of his life, taking accounting classes at night school. Maybe I had picked up where my father had left off, carrying on his memory as the numbers guy of the crew.
Rex gave me the address, and I wrote it down. “Got it.”
The doorbell rang, sending Johnny Cash straight out of an evening snooze and into a brief bark-fest at the door. I headed to the entryway and peered out the peephole.
Even through the tiny window, Elle looked edible.
I glanced down, realizing I’d only managed to put on boxers.
So be it.
I opened the door as I finished my call with Rex. “I’ll be there at eight a.m. That work for you?”
“Absolutely. You’re the best,” Rex was saying as Elle stepped inside my house and mouthed Wow as she raked her eyes over my barely-dressed body.
“See you then.” I hung up, tossed my phone on the entryway table, and kissed her.
A soft kiss for a mere few seconds.
Then a hard and furious one that had hands wrapped around bodies, and fingers diving into hair, and breath coming fast from both of us. We were a collision of lust and heat. We clawed at each other, grasping, grabbing, needing contact. Fierce and fevered contact.
She giggled, breaking the kiss.
I shot her a curious look, and she pointed downward. Johnny Cash was licking her calf.
“I think he likes my lotion.”
“Is it eau de filet mignon?”
“No. It’s satsuma orange from The Body Shop.”
“Mmm.” I pointed to the living room. “Go lie down, Johnny Cash.”
The dog obeyed, trotting to the rug in front of the gray couch.
She gestured to my briefs. “Nice boxers,” she said, and I followed her gaze. She was staring at my erection, a full tent against the cotton fabric.
I gestured to her. All of her. Her tight skirt, her heels, her blouse. “Nice everything.”
“Who are you meeting at eight?” she asked, as I reached for her hand and led her into the house.
“Rex. He needs a ride to his math placement test tomorrow.”
She beamed. Her whole expression lit up with the biggest smile I’d seen in ages. “That is so cool of you to do that. I’m so thrilled,” she said as she reached for my arm, running her fingers along my skin. “I love it when you help them. It kind of turns me on.”
“I’m taking Marcus too. Does it turn you on twice as much that I’m driving two of them?”
She blinked. Once, twice, three times. Her face seemed to freeze, and her smile fell. Her body was a statue.
I frowned, confused at the shift. “Are you okay?” She closed her eyes for a second, squeezed them hard, then pressed her fingers to her temple. “Elle. What’s going on?”
She opened her eyes, her brow furrowing like she was in pain. “Sorry. Sometimes I get these headaches. It’s nothing.” She waved her hand as if to dismiss it. Then she reached for my shoulders, grasped them, and walked me backward to the couch. “You know what really turns me on?”
“Tell me.”
“Thinking about you all day,” she said as we reached the couch. “I’ve been hot and bothered since I left you.”
She pushed me down on the couch then followed me there, sprawling beside me.
“Did you count down the hours?” I asked as I ran a hand up her bare leg.
She nodded as she settled back against a pillow at the end of the couch, her chestnut hair spilling across it. “It was pure torture.”
“Were you wet just thinking of me?”
“Yes. I ached for you,” she said, as I glided my fingers across the damp panel of her panties. My cock twitched against my boxers as I touched her. My delicious, wet, sexy Elle. God, I loved how much she wanted it. I loved turning her on. I loved touching her. Pushing her tight little skirt up to her waist, I groaned when I saw her panties—black lace with a tiny bow in the center.
“You need to be naked, right now. Completely naked,” I said, tugging off the panties and removing her heels too. The shoes were sexy as hell, but a plan was a plan. I needed her in her birthday suit when I went down on her for the first time. “Nothing on. Nothing but you, naked from head to toe, as I bury my face in this sweetness.” I slid a finger through her slick heat as she arched into me, wriggling out of her top at the same time.
She moved to her bra next, freeing her tits. My breath hitched. There she was, down to nothing but her beautiful bare self and the shimmer of desire evident in the flush on her skin. Her eyes, so dark and hungry, told me that she had indeed been one tortured woman all day long.
“I almost feel bad for making you think about me for nine hours straight,” I growled, as I pressed my hands on the insides of her thighs.
Her legs parted, and I groaned as I drank in the sight of her wet pussy. I wanted her more than I’d ever wanted a woman in my life. “But I can’t find it in me to feel bad when you’re this worked up already.�
��
She ran a hand through her hair and moaned. “I’m dying for you.”
Her words stoked the raging fire in me. It crackled and burned with rampant desire as I opened her legs farther, savoring the utterly intoxicating view of this beautiful woman arching her hips toward my mouth.
My dick ached. My erection throbbed against my boxer shorts. My mouth watered as I settled between her legs, hooked them over my shoulders, and at last, at long fucking last, kissed her sweet honey center.
Later, I would tell her how I felt.
Now I would show her.
36
Elle
It was like a match on tinder, igniting me instantly. I groaned, I moaned, and I cried out his name. I was a live wire, exposed, ready, and waiting. I’d wanted this for so long, had pictured it often, and had fantasized about it so many times with him.
It was a first for us, and if it happened right, it would be a first for me.
I’d never come like this, but this was my ultimate fantasy.
As he swept his tongue across me, I bowed my back, so ready to sing, to shout, and to scream. His lips were soft, his stubble was rough, and his tongue was insistent as he flicked it up and down along my swollen, aching clit. I grabbed his hair as if my hands were a steel grip and I couldn’t let go. I wouldn’t let go. I rocked into his face. Electricity crackled through me, lighting up all my nerves, sizzling my skin.
I cried out his name, and for a second, he broke contact to look at me—his eyes were heated, full of the same wild longing. That moment was like a thread between us, a tight, neat line that tethered me to him. To share in this desire for another person was the greatest high, the sweetest intoxication, and hell, did we have it. I wanted his mouth as much as he wanted to consume me.
“Tell me what you say when you fuck yourself,” he said in a dirty growl. “Talk to me like you did all the times I devoured you in your fantasies.”
My Sinful Longing (Sinful Men Book 3) Page 13