by Karla Doyle
The front door chimed as Ginger arrived at the desk. Right on cue, Paris and Roma initiated their sexy show—but always with one eye on the entryway.
“Forget it, he’s not for us,” Paris said, pulling away from her partner as the first customer of the day approached the reception desk.
Oh, no.
Candace hadn’t looked at her phone sending him the goodbye text. Judging by the scowl on his face, she should have. Now she’d have to deal with the fallout in public, as Candy. Shit.
She rose from the couch and crossed the room. “Hiya, handsome. Didn’t think I’d be seeing you again.”
“You couldn’t keep me away if you tried.” In the past, he would’ve made a comment like that with a sexy grin and twinkle in his eye. Today, both things were absent.
“Let’s grab a room so I can put a smile on your face.”
“I don’t want a room,” he said, stopping her with a hand on her bare waistline. “I want to take you somewhere else.”
She slid her fingers beneath his and used their clasped hands to tug him toward the massage rooms. “That’s sweet, honey, but I don’t need romancing to get in the mood for you.”
Jake stood his ground, shook his head. “Offsite. The full day. How much will that cost me?”
“This is a massage parlor, not an escort service. There’s no price because we don’t do offsite massages. Or full-day services.”
“You do now.” His gaze narrowed, hardened. “Unless you’d like me to come back while I’m on duty to check that all your licenses are on the up and up.” Apparently, Jake was capable of acting too. Acting like a demanding, entitled dick.
“For fuck’s sake, Candy, do what the man wants.” Paris’s eyes couldn’t open any wider. She’d seen Jake in uniform, the day he’d refused to leave without getting what he wanted, which at the time had been talking. “If you don’t go with him, I will. Hell, I’ll even give up a day’s pay and do it for free, but I am not getting busted because you have some stupid moral code.”
Jake glanced at Paris, then returned his attention to Candace. “You should listen to your friend.” To the other women, his statement probably sounded like a threat.
Candace knew otherwise. Or maybe she didn’t. Maybe he would make a call to his on-duty fellow officers. After last night and her text this morning, he certainly didn’t owe her any breaks.
“Looks like this is an offer I can’t refuse.” That ought to settle things as far as her coworkers were concerned. “I’ll get some things together and meet you around back.”
“Done.” He nodded, then turned toward the main entrance.
“Um, not quite done,” Ginger said, as he began to walk away from the front desk.
Jake stopped. “Excuse me?”
“You haven’t paid yet.” The ginger’s fair complexion grew deeper pink with each second. “You need to pay. For today.”
Hands braced on the countertop, Jake stared her down. “I think that’s for Candy and I to work out.”
Ginger shrank a little at Jake’s authoritative presence. “Well, yes, if, um, you were staying here, because Candy turns in the room fee after each massage.”
“Room fee?”
“The parlor’s portion of the massage fee. And since Candy won’t be here to turn the money in, I think my boss would want me to collect it upfront.”
“I see,” Jake said. “And how much is the room fee?” Whether part of an act or genuine impatience, his tolerance for Ginger’s silence only lasted about five seconds before he growled, “How much?”
“The house gets twenty-five dollars for each client,” Ginger said, fumbling through a ledger book she’d retrieved from beneath the counter. “I’ll figure out how much Candy usually submits in room fees on a Friday. You can pay that here and give the balance and the tip to Candy, when you’ve, um, worked out the details of your um, massage.”
“Sounds fair,” Jake said, while looking over at Candace.
Her throat tightened. Hopefully the new receptionist had atrocious math skills. The bottom fell out of Candace’s stomach when Ginger brought out a calculator. Fridays had always been Candace’s busiest day of the week. Any moment now, Jake would know exactly how busy.
Ginger calculated a few pages, jotting numbers on a scratch pad. She circled one and met Jake’s waiting gaze. “Two hundred and fifty dollars.”
“How much of that is room fees?”
“All of it.”
“All of it,” Jake said, and Ginger nodded. He withdrew his wallet, counted out bills and handed them across the desk. “We’re good to go now?”
“Yes, sir. Enjoy your day.”
He ignored Ginger, ignored Candace too. Just headed for the front door without looking back.
Jake
A car honked at Jake as he stepped off the curb. He didn’t make eye contact, didn’t give a wave of apology. Hell, he probably couldn’t have seen the driver if he’d tried. His vision was too filled with red. Red to replace the rose-colored glasses he’d obviously been wearing the past several weeks.
Two hundred and fifty fucking dollars in room fees. At twenty-five bucks per half hour, that meant Candace had ten customers during one day. On an “average” Friday. That was a lot of happy endings. The likelihood her day consisted strictly of hand jobs was pretty damn low. Multiply that daily average by five days a week and it totaled some nasty fucking math.
He settled on the driver’s seat and slammed the SUV’s door. Yeah, he’d known what she did since day one. She’d made no attempt to sugarcoat it. The opposite, in fact. Hell, this was the reason last night had gone up in flames. The reason she’d sent him that text this morning. He’s the one who’d kept brushing it off as if it were no big deal. But the number of men…Christ.
She’d probably be at the back door by now. Waiting for him. He couldn’t go, not yet anyway. He needed a few minutes to process.
The buzz of his cell phone pierced the silence. He dug it out of his jeans pocket and swiped the screen.
I’m waiting out back, if you still want to do this. I’ll wait for two more minutes.
There’d been no ultimatum. There didn’t need to be. If he didn’t get his ass around back in the next two minutes, she’d be gone, and not just for today.
He stared at the screen until it faded to black. Then buckled his seatbelt, started the SUV and headed around back of the building.
Candace stood near her small, red car. She’d covered her bikini top with an oversized hoodie, which, by default, covered most of her miniscule cutoff jean shorts. Her legs remained bare though. All the way down to the fuck-me heels she wore.
He lowered the window as he stopped in front of her car, blocking it in its parking space. “Get in.”
“Only if you want to complete our transaction.”
“There is no fucking transaction, Candace. Get in so we can talk.”
“We have nothing to talk about.”
“We have everything to talk about. And we could’ve talked about it on the phone, or arranged to get together and talk later, if you’d answered when I called this morning.”
“I didn’t need to answer. I explained why we can’t be together in my text this morning. The expression on your face when Ginger told you how much money I bring in for the parlor proved that I was right.”
Goddamn it, he wanted to tell her she was wrong. “I don’t want you to be right.”
The defiant mask fell away from her face as she sighed. “That doesn’t change the fact that I am.” She opened her bag and dug inside, withdrawing her car keys. “I’m going to the bank to get your two hundred and fifty dollars. You can follow me or wait here.”
“I don’t want your money.”
“Fine.” The mask slid back into place as she stared at him through the windshield while walking around the vehicle. By the time she joined him in the front seat, she looked like Candy again. More so when she stripped the sweatshirt off and tossed it to the floor. “In that case, I’m all yours, h
andsome.” A simple snap at the back of her bikini and it fell away too. “Pull into a parking spot so I can give you your money’s worth. You paid for a lot of Candy, and I’m going to make sure your sweet tooth is satisfied, once and for all.”
He couldn’t help staring. Groaning at the sight of her incredible tits with their perfect pink nipples. “Stop,” he said, stilling her hand midway through the unzipping of her shorts. “I’m not having sex with you in this parking lot.”
“Fine, you pick the place. But unless you’re ready to drive me to an ATM so I can replace the money you dropped a few minutes ago, we are having sex today. I’m a lot of things, and a whore is one of them. You’ll get what you paid for.”
“You’re not a whore.”
“Sex acts for cash, that’s the definition of a whore, and it’s what I do.” She leaned across, cupped her hand over his fly and squeezed his erection. “Your cock is begging to find out just how good I am at my job.”
“Wrong. I’m hard because I want you, Candace. You.” He shifted to face her. “Not your Candy persona.”
“One and the same.”
“Bullshit. Lie to your customers, but don’t lie to me. I can accept a lot of things, including knowing the specifics of your job, but not your dishonesty.”
“Look who’s lying now.” Withdrawing to the passenger side of the vehicle, she snatched her hoodie from the floor and pulled it over her head. A sigh slipped through her lips. “You can’t accept my job, Jake. I believe that you want to, and that you tried, but it’s too much. And I understand that, because it is too much to accept. You suggested that we be ourselves and see where things led. Now we know. That path leads to disappointment, confrontation and anger. We both deserve better. My daughter deserves better. You should leave, and this time, not come back.”
“Is that what you want? The truth, Candace.”
“What I want doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
“Why? It’s only been five weeks. You barely know me.”
“I know enough, and I like all of it. All of you.” Reaching across the front seat, he captured her hand, brought it to his lips and pressed a kiss against her knuckles. “I want to know more. I want to know everything.”
“Not everything,” she said, sliding her hand free. “The look of repulsion on your face when Ginger told you how much the house earns from my customers proves you don’t want to know everything.”
“I’m not going to like everything I learn, but I still want to know it.”
“Why, so you can lose your shit again? Or I can lose mine, the way I did last night? I can’t do this. It already hurts too much.” She tucked her chin into the neckline of her hoodie, then wrapped her arms around herself.
Hugging her should be his job. At this point, he’d be lucky to get another opportunity to hold her in his arms, for any reason. Even for a goodbye hug.
This wouldn’t be goodbye. He wouldn’t let it be.
He maneuvered the SUV into a nearby parking space, turned off the engine and shifted sideways in his seat. After gently peeling her fingers from their grip on her upper arms, he clasped their hands together in the space between them. “I know there’s not a damn thing I can do to take back how I reacted, but it won’t happen again.”
“It will, Jake. Not this exact scenario, but as long as I’m doing this job, there’ll be things that will infuriate and disgust you. And I don’t blame you for feeling that way, not for one second. You should feel that way. I certainly do. God, do I. But for now, this is my reality.” She sighed. “If only we could’ve met a year from now. So many things would be different. We would’ve had a shot at a nice, normal relationship, not this twisted-up attempt that doesn’t stand a chance.”
Everything he needed to know, right there. Her feelings about him, about them. Her plans for the future.
“I’m glad we met when we did, Candace. Because now that I know you, I can’t imagine going a whole year without you.”
“God, you’re smooth,” she said, shaking her head, yet making no attempt to hide her cautious smile.
Victory. A small one, anyway. Time to go for the big score. “Forgive me for being a jackass. Give us another chance.”
“I wish I could.”
He heard the unspoken but that followed. Since she hadn’t said it aloud, he wasn’t acknowledging it. He was a jackass, not a dumbass. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Forgiving me. Giving us another chance.”
Her delicate eyebrows rose above her beautiful blue eyes. “What makes you think I’ve done either of those things?”
“You said you wish you could. I’m taking that as a soft ‘yes’ and running with it.”
“You really are relentless.”
“It has a ninety-five percent success rate.”
“Ninety-five? I thought it was ninety-two.”
“Everything about me rises when you’re involved.” He winked, starting the SUV’s engine when she laughed and rolled her eyes. “Where to, sweets? I’m game for anything—exciting or relaxing, fast or slow, XXX-rated or completely innocent, as long as I’m with you.”
“Do you mean that?”
“You know I do. One hundred percent.”
“Then our first stop is the bank, so I can repay the money you spent in there,” she said, gesturing toward the back door of Lucky’s.
“I don’t want the money.”
“You can be Candy’s customer or Candace’s boyfriend, but you can’t be both.”
“I’m not your customer. I gave money to the parlor, not to you.”
“You paid money to spend time with me. That makes you my customer.”
“Paying money to a business establishment so that I can spend time with you, even though I haven’t given you a dime directly, makes me your customer?”
“Yes.” She clicked her seatbelt into the buckle as he shifted gears and drove away from the building and out of the parking lot. “I don’t need to go to a specific bank, any machine will do.”
“We’re not going to a bank.”
“Jake.”
“Use your stern voice all you want. You’re not giving me money.”
She reached across the center console, slid her palm up his thigh to his lap. Gripped his cock through the front of his shorts and stroked. “Then I guess you’ve chosen to be with Candy.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it.” He lifted her hand off his fly and set it on her knee. “If I took you out for dinner and paid the check, I’d be paying money to spend time with you. If I took you out to a movie or a ball game and paid for the tickets, I’d be paying money to spend time with you. It’s the same damn thing.”
“It’s not the same. Not to me.”
“And that’s all that counts? How you see the situation?”
“In this case, yes. If you don’t let me pay you back, we can’t be together.”
Fucking fuck. If he let her pay back the two hundred and fifty dollars he’d forked over, she wouldn’t just be out her portion of the day’s earnings and tips, she’d be in the hole. Large. But what choice did he have?
“Fuck.” He jerked the steering wheel hard left, into the parking lot of small plaza. He took a spot directly in front of the bank’s door and threw the shifter into park. “I hate this. I’m only doing it because it’s important to you.”
“Thank you,” she said, clicking her seatbelt open. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
He grabbed her hand as she reached for the door handle. “Do what you have to do, but know this—inside Lucky’s or out, whether money has changed hands or not, I’ve only wanted to be with you, Candace. Since the first day.”
No answer, she just sat there and stared into his eyes. “Okay,” she said, finally, then pushed the door open. After stepping out of the SUV, she stopped, exhaling while shaking her head. “I didn’t plan for this.”
He followed her downward gaze. The sweatshirt covered her cut-off shorts en
tirely, and she still wore high heels. Sexy-as-hell bare legs filled the distance between the two items. Probably not how she wanted to walk around in public.
This could be his saving grace. His get-out-of-the-bank-free card. Or he could be the man she needed him to be.
“I can take you to another bank, one with a drive-thru machine.”
She shook her head.
“Want me to go in with you? Glare at anybody who looks in your direction? Because I can do that. Here and now or anytime.”
Again, she shook her head.
“Or I can take you home to change clothes, then to a bank. Whatever’s best for you.”
Yet again, she shook her head, this time while getting back into the SUV. “You are, Jake.”
“I am what?”
“You’re what’s best for me. The way I feel when I’m with you, how I feel about you—that’s what I didn’t plan for. I didn’t think it was possible.”
He sure as hell hadn’t seen that answer coming. But he’d take it. “Glad you finally figured it out.” He caught her wrist when she reached across to give him a playful shove. “Come over here, I want to tell you something.”
“Can’t you tell me from there?”
“Could, but I’d rather have you closer.” He half expected her to argue. Sure was happy she didn’t though, because watching her wiggle past the center console, inhaling the scent of her hair as it tickled his face, feeling the pressure on his cock as she straddled his lap—those things were the stuff of dreams.
“Here I am.” Her touch on the back of his neck was as soft as her voice. “What did you want to tell me?”
“No more pulling stupid shit, and that goes for both of us. No more arguing about stuff that’s not going to matter a year from now. Whatever you need me to do to be the best man for you, I’m in.”