by Stacy Gail
She shook her head like she didn’t believe him but wasn’t going to take the time to debate the matter. “I don’t want that money. I told you that last night, but you went ahead and sent it anyway. And grabbing me and kissing me—”
“Don’t tell me you don’t want that,” he warned her, arms tightening. “I can feel how fast your heart’s beating. I still taste you on my tongue. I know you want it.”
She took in a slow breath. “Okay, yes. But the question stands. What are you doing? If this isn’t some weird guilt trip for getting rid of me back in California—”
“It isn’t.”
“Then what the hell is it with the touchy-feely routine?” she demanded, searching his eyes. “Did you… I don’t know…just figure out that I’m a female?”
At that he had to laugh. “Jesus, woman. Do I seem that fucking slow to you?”
“No, and that’s one of the reasons why I’m so confused. You’ve never struck me as a delayed-reaction kind of guy. You want something, you hit it hard and fast.”
“That’s exactly who I am. And in case you’re so confused you haven’t yet figured it out,” he added when she just made a sound of frustration, “what I want to hit hard and fast is you.”
Her look of horror was far from flattering. “Why now? We’ve known each other forever.”
“Timing.”
She blinked. “What does that even mean?”
“The timing was never right before. Now it is. We’ve got a new life starting here in Chicago, Sunny, far away from California’s reach,” he added when he could see she needed more. She wouldn’t be pacified with non-answers for much longer, but until he was sure they were on stable ground he wasn’t about to burden her with all the ugly truths that made up his life. “This time around, nothing’s going to stop me for going after what I want. Not your age. Not Ethan and what happened to him. Not some spying bitch of a producer or any other bullshit that’s been thrown in my path time and again. This time, not even the devil himself can stop us from happening. I dare him to fucking try.”
“This time? And what was that about Ethan? What are you t—”
“No,” he said simply and lowered his head so he could shut her up the best way he knew how. When his mouth captured hers, it didn’t escape his notice that this time she wrapped both her arms around him and hooked a leg around his, drawing him closer.
Damn, she was so frigging hot. If they weren’t in public…
The thought slowly sank through the layers of his consciousness even as he wallowed in the dizzying sensation of her tongue dancing over his. She was so delicious it took most of his strength just to lift his mouth from hers. But nothing could have stopped him from grinding his hard cock into her, letting her know that doubting him on whether or not he really wanted her was a thought she needed to get the hell out of her head.
When her kiss-swollen lips parted on an audible breath and her eyes darkened in a way that was hotter than any fantasy, he nearly dragged her into the nearest unoccupied tattooing booth.
“You don’t even know how magnificent you are, do you?” He was so absorbed in memorizing her heavy-lidded, turned-on expression that he barely knew he was speaking. Had her eyes always been so depthless? A man could lose himself forever in them.
Confusion rippled through her expression before a curtain of mistrust slammed down. “Magnificent? That’s a bit over-the-top, don’t you think?”
“Not even a little. You’re not ready to let your guard down with me yet, and I get that,” he went on before she could give him a list of why he was untrustworthy. “I’m shit at being patient, but for you I can do anything. Even wait.”
“Why?” She shook her head, and the stress in that one gesture shot right through him. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because I need to,” he said simply, then nuzzled his nose against hers to lighten the mood. “Why don’t we talk about what you want to do with your cut of the money from the Skull and Bones Ink sale over dinner at my place tonight? I’ll even cook.”
“I’m busy tonight. Family stuff,” she added before he could tell her to cancel. “My dad’s health isn’t the best, and… well. Let’s just say it’s not going to get any better, so family gatherings, like planned home-cooked meals, are very important right now.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” When genuine distress flashed in her eyes, the roar of lust eased while concern flowed in to take its place. “Tell me what I can do to make things better for you.”
“I don’t know.” She sighed as she eased out of his arms, and the sadness in that one sound hurt him in ways he couldn’t begin to explain. “Ten minutes ago I probably would’ve said that the one thing you could do for me to make my life easier is to not be a complication and just leave me alone.”
Shit. He deserved that. “It’s not ten minutes ago. What’s changed?”
“I felt your heart, too. And I can still taste you. So that means I don’t know what to do with you,” she admitted on a small laugh that had more to do with frustration than humor. “I just know one thing—life is more fleeting than anyone realizes, so we need to grab for whatever happiness we can get while we can.” She began to turn away, but hesitated just long enough to glance back at him. “I’m not doing anything tomorrow afternoon.”
“Yeah, you are,” he corrected, wanting to go to her because she looked like she needed the kind of hug that kept her from falling apart. But because it was obvious she was nowhere close to trusting him, he instead pulled the nearly forgotten envelope out of his shirt and tucked it into his back pocket. He’d find a way to get it into her hands one way or another. “You’re spending tomorrow afternoon with me, and you’re going to let me take care of you. I’ll call you to set up the time.”
Something lightened in his chest when a hesitant smile curved her lips. “Okay.”
“That wasn’t bad at all,” Hannah announced as she entered the kitchen. The lingering scent of the marinated fish Sunny had baked was fast disappearing as she stacked the last of the dishes in the dishwasher. “I can’t believe Matt asked for seconds, when he was even more wigged out than Claire was when he heard you were making fish tacos. Before we sat down for dinner, he actually said we should take you out of the Saturday night cooking rotation if you were going to experiment on us.”
“That wasn’t an experiment.” Sunny chuckled as she measured out the right amount of soap. “Fish tacos have been a thing for years now, so it’s high time you guys joined the rest of us in this particular decade.”
“I know, but I still think of it as California cuisine.” Hannah hopped up onto the kitchen’s granite-topped island while Sunny dried her hands on a dishtowel. “Do you miss it? California, I mean.”
“Not really. Certainly not as much as I thought I would.” And whether she wanted to admit it or not, she didn’t miss it nearly as much now that she knew Ice was in Chicago. Then she grimaced at the telling thought, closed up the dishwasher and pushed the button. “And considering how fast Dad’s health is deteriorating, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be than back home. Except…”
“Except?”
“It’s weird, Hannah. Or maybe I should say I’m weird,” she added, grimacing again. “Do you remember your first year in college, when you came home after being gone for so long, and everything felt off? Like you were just visiting, but you weren’t home?”
“Oh, do I remember.” Hannah nodded. “My first night back, I felt like I was at a vaguely familiar hotel where I had to make my own bed.”
“I fully expected to go through that awkward, not-sure-I-belong-here feeling when I first moved back home. And I did. The thing is, that feeling is still there. It’s never gone away.”
Her friend’s brows shot up. “You still don’t feel like you’re home?”
“I don’t know what my problem is,” Sunny muttered, shaking her head. “I know my mom’s happy to have me back, especially now. And I love that you and Matt are here as well, because I honestly
don’t know what we’d do without you guys. But it’s been almost a year now, and I still feel like I’m just visiting. Or maybe it’s more like I’m waiting.”
“Waiting?” Hannah’s dark brows came together in gentle sympathy. “Do you mean for your father…?”
Again Sunny shook her head. “I’m not waiting for Dad to die, Hannah. I think it’s more like I’m waiting for me to start living again.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“I had a purpose when I was in L.A., you know? A purpose and a passion. I had goals and dreams and all these plans on how to achieve them. There were days when I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning so I could set those plans in motion. Nowadays when I get up, all I can think about is how much I hate going to work in a place where people proudly display signs like Home Sweet Cubicle, and speak fluent LOL kitty, or whatever.”
“It’s LOLcat, and that would make anyone want to look for the nearest exit.”
“Which is why I can’t stay there,” she sighed, shaking her head. “I just can’t. I’m done punishing myself with a job I hate.”
Her friend stared at her. “Why would you ever punish yourself?”
“Because until very recently, I was furious with myself for once again believing in an unreliable person and trying to build a future that could never be.”
“You mean Ice, don’t you?”
She did, but she’d already revealed too much of what she preferred to keep locked inside. “What matters is that I’m now aware of what I’ve been doing to myself, and it’s got to stop. First of the year, I think I’m going to look for a new job.”
“Excellent decision. What about a new man? The way I see it,” Hannah went on while Sunny just stared at her, “if you want to find ways of looking forward to each and every day, having someone to share those days with could be the answer.”
“A man isn’t always the answer to that.”
“I know, and the feminist in me thoroughly agrees with you. What I’m talking about is finding someone—man, woman, whatever—who makes you look forward to seeing them. Someone who makes you smile, someone who gives you a feeling that you belong. Someone who could become your home.” When Sunny didn’t answer right away, her friend tilted her head. “Whatever happened between you and that guy, Dan Harper? You two went your separate ways around the time you got fired, right?”
Ugh. “Dan was a stupid mistake, and he had nothing to do with my getting fired.”
“But your split with him and you getting fired pretty much happened all at the same time, didn’t it?”
Sunny tilted her head, thinking. “Pretty much. Not that it matters.”
“It might, though. It could be why you’re still feeling so unsettled. You took a double-hit back in L.A. Maybe you’re instinctively guarding yourself against feeling anything right now.”
“A double-hit?”
“In just a short span of time, your relationship with that guy Dan went down the tubes and Ice fired you. So you come home to lick your wounds, only to find out your father’s much worse off than your mother was letting on, so that’s more like a triple-hit. If you’ve put your emotions on pause for a while, no one could blame you for that, hon. Any one of those things would upend most people’s emotional apple cart. Personally, I can’t figure out why you’re not a screaming mess.”
“Splitting with Dan wasn’t a big deal,” she said, tackling the one point that didn’t hurt. The others she couldn’t talk about without choking up, but the subject of Dan was small potatoes. “He was so beautiful to look at that I should have suspected he wasn’t what he seemed, especially in a place like L.A. Everyone is an actor with aspirations of being a star, from the UPS guy to the barista making your latte. I think I was the only person in my entire apartment complex who was actually doing what they wanted to do. I should have known a gorgeous tattoo machine salesman was, in reality, just another actor more interested in getting his mug on TV than dating me.”
“Wait, what?” Horrified, Hannah didn’t bother containing a snarl. “Are you saying that rat bastard was using you?”
“Yep.” It was a relief to discover it didn’t hurt to talk about it, and she smiled wryly at her friend. “Can I pick a winner, or what?”
“Don’t you dare go down that road, lady. I won’t have you beating yourself up for not spotting a shitty little asshole doing his best to fool you. Damn, I don’t know how you stopped yourself from knocking his worthless ass into the nearest cement mixer.”
“Sadly, there’s never a cement mixer around when you need one.”
“At least you kept the majority of your relationship with that dick off-screen. I’ll bet that pissed him off.”
“It wasn’t much of a relationship, to be honest. By our third date I knew something was off. He didn’t seem to know much about the tattooing machines he was supposed to be selling. From that point on, it went downhill fast.”
“What happened?”
“Dumb luck. I was going over some of the old videos I’d posted online when I first started up with Skull and Bones Ink. One of the commercials that popped up was for a tooth-whitening toothpaste. Guess what actor was in it?”
“Pretty-boy Dan?”
“Pretty-boy Dan. Funny how he’d never mentioned he was an actor with a string of cheap commercials and background roles in made-for-TV movies to his name.”
“Yeah, hilarious,” Hannah sneered, and Sunny wanted to hug her. A woman who got pissed off on behalf of her bestie was worth her weight in diamonds. “So that’s what did it? You confronted this D-list loser with his embarrassing string of crap, and he gave up the game? Or did he insist he wanted to make mad, passionate love to you, as long as it was on camera?”
“You know me better than anyone. Remember when I had to do that presentation on the Great Chicago Fire in ninth grade?”
Hannah blinked. “Uh, you mean when you almost set the classroom on fire to underscore the case of how easily a cow could have torched an entire town? I don’t think I’ll ever forget it, but what does that have to do with anything?”
“My point is that I take great pride in being thorough in my research. There was no way I was going to accuse Dan of playing me until I knew, for sure, who he really was. It took me about a week to find out he’d only worked for the tattoo machine company just long enough to legitimately cross paths with me. As soon as he did that, he quit. He didn’t tell me that, though. In fact, he often talked about his daily office grind, and how his dick of a boss insisted he had to meet sales quotas, and how he’d visited other tattoo shops that weren’t nearly as good as ours. The guy was a genius when it came to lying.”
“Sonofabitch,” Hannah announced, her sweet face filled with murder. “Sounds like pretty-boy Dan should be winning Academy awards instead of pushing online toothpaste like the loser he is.”
“Right?”Rolling her eyes, Sunny hopped up on the island next to Hannah. “I found out who his agent was, contacted her under a fake name, and booked a photo shoot with Dan for more toothpaste ad crap. When Dan showed up for his gig, I was there to greet him with all the facts he’d hidden from me. You should have seen the look on his face.”
“I hope he crapped himself.”
“Nice thought, but slick operators like Dan don’t suffer things like embarrassment or a guilty conscience. At first he tried playing the injured party because I had dared to look into him and not just blindly trusted all the lies he’d fed me. When I pointed out that it’s never the victim’s fault when they catch a conman in the act, he switched gears. He wasn’t a conman, according to him. It was true that he was an actor hoping to get a break on our reality show, but that plan went out the window the moment he saw me, and fell head-over-heels in love.”
“Oh, hell no.” Outraged, Hannah sucked in a sharp breath. “He did not play that card, after all the others he’d already tried playing on you.”
“That’s exactly what he did, and that was all I needed to hear. I told him that if he showed up at
Skull and Bones Ink, security would throw him out, and if I ever saw him again anywhere else, I’d call the cops. It was only a day or two later that Ice fired me,” she added with a shrug. “So in a weird way, that was one concern off my plate. Since I was no longer on TV, I didn’t have to worry about Dan hanging around me for a greedy grab at fame.”
“Damn,” Hannah murmured, eyes wide. “Makes me wonder what your horoscope was for that week. Talk about a string of bad luck.”
“I’m just glad all that craziness happened off-camera. It was enough of a blow to my ego that he was only interested in me because of his career. If Ice had seen that a man was attracted to me simply because I was on a reality TV show, I don’t know how I would have survived the humiliation.”
“Ice?” Her friend tilted her head as if trying to see a new perspective. “What does he have to do with anything?”
“Nothing.” The unexpected question made Sunny blink, and all at once she had the urge to move. Hopping down from the island, she grabbed up a dishrag and began wiping down the already-gleaming counters. “Forget I mentioned him. He doesn’t matter anymore, even if he’s living in Chicago now and showing up every time I turn around.”
“Holy shit.” At that, Hannah jumped down from the island as well. “Holy shit, are you serious? When did he show up? What does he want? What are you going to do?”
“Hannah, chill.”
“Don’t you tell me to chill. I can’t be chill because I know what most people don’t. I know you’ve been in love with that man since you laid eyes on him, and since you’re the most loyal person I’ve ever met, I know you’d never give up on that kind of emotion without a fight.”
“Relax, I may have crushed on him a long time ago, but I was a kid back then. I haven’t been in love with him for years.”
“Then why did you go and work at Skull and Bones once you graduated? You didn’t come home, even for a quick visit. You went straight to L.A. and Ice.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. A friend told me Ice needed help, so I—”