by Sophia Gray
The small amount of soft feelings he had gained by being legitimately apologetic vanished. Cora may have been a difficult woman, but she didn’t like treating the people who served you like they were, well, servants. “No,” she said with enough finality to have Finn looking up at her. She handed Titan the card, and he swept away. “I can pay for it myself.”
“That’s not the point.” He swept his hand through his dark hair with enough force to disrupt the neat style. “That’s not the point at all.”
“Then what is?” she asked. “Was this your grand plan for this evening? Ply me with drinks until I fell into your arms and begged you to take me? I’m sure that freshman tactic works for you on the average college girl, but I have a little more experience.”
“Woman, what is your problem?”
Titan brought the receipt back, and she signed off on it.
Finn made a strangled sound. “Did you just give him a five-hundred-dollar tip for two glasses of wine?”
“I also paid for Oliver’s pizza and the drinks he bought for his friends.” She lifted her chin and squared her shoulders. “But ultimately? Yes, I did. He was nice to me. He was honest. I greatly applaud honesty. I don’t play these high school games of chatting a girl up and showing off your Arthurian knowledge because you have ulterior motives.”
“What motive?” He flinched just enough that she knew she was right.
She narrowed her eyes at him and stuffed her card into her purse. “Do you know what I do for work, Mr. Marks?”
“No,” he said through gritted teeth.
“I spend my days talking with employees and managers about their work environments. It is my job to find out what is going on, why people are upset, and how to remedy that situation. It means that four days out of the week, I have thirty to fifty conversations with people. I’ve learned to figure out exactly when someone isn’t being completely honest with me. You? You aren’t hitting on me because you like the way my legs look. You would still be hitting on me if I had rotten teeth and leaking skin infections. So I was forced to ask myself why. And you wanna know what I discovered?”
“What?”
“You were genuine twice in this conversation.” She held up one finger to count her first point. “One, where you apologized for my mother being hell on wheels. From that I can assume your own mother is a real piece of work, too. Maybe that’s why you bonded so well with Oliver. The other time was when you talked about Oliver. You legitimately care about him. Fine, I can respect that. But I also know you think Oliver should stay here and join up with your little club. So I think you hitting on me is a byproduct of that. Weirdly enough, I am not turned on by that.”
She took a step back, and he wrapped his hand around her wrist, tugging her close to him. She was shocked to feel that he was rigid beneath those tight jeans. She could feel it plastered against her belly. The shock of it drew her breath out of her body in a short gasp. She looked up into his face. He was gritting his teeth hard enough that she could see the tiny motions of his jaw, but his eyes were dilated with desire.
“I might have reasons for hitting on you, Cora, but that doesn’t make the lust any less real.” His hand slid down her back. There were shocks everywhere that his fingers touched. It felt good. Another woman might have gone weak in the knees or fluttered her lashes.
Cora shook her head. She placed a single hand on his chest and pushed him back. “I’m going to say this as clearly as I can. I know you aren’t used to that, but try to keep up with me. You aren’t going to get anywhere with me, so stop trying.”
He shoved his hand through his hair again and sighed. “Fine. Can I give you my number?”
“What? Why?”
“Because that kid you are taking care of? He’s a handful and you may find yourself needing a little help.”
He shoved a card from his pocket into her hand. What kind of criminal had business cards?
“Finn’s Auto and Bike Repair?” she read.
“What? Did you think you were the only one to run a successful business in here?”
She shook her head. “No, I happen to know Wes does very well.”
She turned on her heel and called to Oliver. He shot her a glance and motioned to the nearly finished pizza. She frowned at him hard enough to make his eyes roll. Slowly the kid extricated himself from his friends and followed her out looking more like a belligerent puppy than a little brother.
Chapter 6
Finn
“Man, she shut you down!” Speed was laughing a few hours later. The pool hall was closed, officially, but Titan, Speed, and Finn were cleaning up. “It wasn’t even, like, a soft letdown or anything. You know? Like girls do sometimes because they don’t want to be mean. That was a hard shutdown. Man, she was all like, ‘No, I happen to know Wes does well.’”
“Shut up, Wes,” Finn snapped back.
Speed just continued to laugh. His eyes were sparkling, and he wrapped his slim arms around his middle as if his ribs hurt. Maybe they did. He’d been going on like this for the better part of an hour. “Oh man, I could have told you she wasn’t easy to get to if you had just come to me first.”
Finn picked up a chair, turned it over, and plopped the newly cleaned seat down on a recently scrubbed table. “Did you two ever date?”
Speed shrugged his shoulder. His laughter slowly subsided into giggles and then a lopsided grin. “Not exactly, man. I mean, check this. Like, we grew up close to one another, like three doors away, right? I knew her when she was just a little thing, all freckles and scraped knees. Back when she thought bugs and mud were cool. Those were good times.”
Finn had a hard time picturing Cora playing with bugs and mud. She wore a business suit like she was born in it. Who was this woman? She had all the markings of an upper-crust woman. The elegant way she moved. The cool way she had pushed him off her. She flashed her money easily and never seemed to lose her cool. All of it added up to a privileged woman. Yet, according to everyone who had known her way back when, she had been a tomboy with a bad-girl streak.
Where was that woman? he wondered. He’d really like to meet her. Was she hiding under those Armani suits and cool features? How did he help her let that out? Buying her drinks hadn’t worked.
“So what? Did you give her a cricket and say you were boyfriend and girlfriend?”
Speed ran his tongue across his teeth in amusement. “Naw, man. It wasn’t like that. See, we were in high school. This was back before she dropped out. We had crashed the homecoming game and were smoking under the bleachers when she just kissed me.”
“She came on to you?”
Speed shrugged. “As far as I could tell, Cora was never one for letting men come on to her. Got some control issues or something. She likes to manage things. Even when she was wild she liked to be the queen of the roost. So yeah, she just kissed me. I mean, I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t wanted it. She’s always been hot. Back then her hair was really long, and she put all these streaks in it. Like a raver girl. It was wild.”
Titan spoke up as he hauled the mop bucket out of the back room. “What happened then?”
“It was just…I dunno, man…it was weird. I know people say shit like ‘oh, it was like kissing my sister,’ but it wasn’t. It didn’t feel wrong. Just…I dunno, man. Empty. Like, when you kiss a hot girl there are supposed to be all kinds of tingles and your body gets all messed up and your head stops thinking. We didn’t feel any of that. I mean, if she had started stripping, maybe I would have jumped all over that, but…we just didn’t.”
Titan shrugged and thumped his hand against his chest so it vibrated. “It happens, man. Sometimes the heart knows better and stops a bad thing from happening.”
Speed nodded, almost solemn. “Yeah, man. That it does.”
Finn didn’t know about any of that. He’d never had a problem being with a woman. If she was willing, and wasn’t waving a knife in his face, he was pretty much up for it. One of the few times where his body had been
like “no, man, don’t do it” was with Cora’s mom. That had been awkward and uncomfortable. He still couldn’t figure out how a woman like Cora had come from that. Oliver, well, he could see that a little bit. The kid could get manipulative and liked to get his own way. It was shitty, but true.
“So what are you going to do?” Titan asked as he swept the mop over the floor, leaving a clean streak among the collection of dust and spilled drinks. “She told you to back off. Might be best to just leave it alone.”
Finn plopped the last of the chairs onto a table so Titan could get a good mopping in. He slid himself down in one of the booths and shook his head. “I don’t know. Letting her get in touch with her wild side again had been my plan. Get a couple drinks in her, let her feel a little bad. Man, it usually works.”
“Not this time,” Speed said, pulling out the register to count out the day’s earnings. “You are going to have to try harder than that if you want her.”
Did he want her? Before tonight she had just been the hot sister to one of his friends. A woman he had wanted to seduce in order to help get Oliver out of the situation he was currently trapped in. Oliver deserved better than to be under the thumb of a woman who flashed her money around and ruled over everyone around her.
“What do you know?” Finn asked. “She didn’t exactly jump into bed with you.”
Speed continued to separate the stacks of bills and the credit card receipts. “But I remember who she did jump into bed with, and I can tell you there were a couple of things I noticed about all of them.”
“Tell me,” Finn said.
“She liked honesty. That was a big thing. If a guy came up to her and gave her a lot of pretty compliments, she sent them packing. Cora could always spot a lie. Maybe it had something to do with her mom being a world-class phony. She never liked that.”
“So I have to be honest?” Finn couldn’t remember the last time he’d been really honest with a woman. He had never been a liar, or made a lot of pretty promises. He had, however, been more than willing to give compliments that stretched the truth fine enough to see through.
“Chicks dig that kind of shit,” Titan offered.
“She didn’t much like being called a chick either,” Finn remembered. Her eyes had done that thing where they turned into smoky ice. He’d kind of liked that. Would they melt when he touched her? “So what do I do? Wait for her to call me? Show up on accident?”
“It’s a small town. Y’all will see one another eventually.” Titan dragged his mop down the middle of the floor.
Finn’s phone rang. The dulcet tones of Johnny Cash hummed against his chest for a minute before he looked down at the number. He didn’t recognize it. But it was nearly two in the morning, so it was probably important.
“Hello?” he asked as he hit the Accept button.
“Mr. Marks?” The voice was clipped, but elegant.
“Cora?” he asked. The other two men in the pool hall perked up.
“Is Oliver with you?” she demanded, sounding just a little frazzled. He had wanted, just moments ago, to hear that voice of hers lose a little control. This was not exactly what he had pictured.
He glanced up. Titan and Speed were both looking at him. “No, Oliver’s not here. Why?”
“I just went to check on him, but the window is open and he’s gone. I thought he was going to bed. He promised he was going to bed. I believed him.” Her voice damn near quavered on the last part. Finn ignored the fact that it bothered him to hear the woman who had given him such a stern talking to was almost in tears three hours later.
“It’s all right. I’ll help you.”
“What?”
He stood up, already pulling his jacket over his shoulders. “I’ll help you find him. I know where he likes to hang out. I’ll bring him back.”
“No, you’ll take me with you,” she argued.
“Why?”
“If he does this again, I need to know where to look.”
It wasn’t a bad point, and he liked the idea of her having to cling to him on the back of his bike. She’d probably enjoy that. He knew he would. “Yeah,” he finally said. “All right.”
# # #
She was standing outside when he pulled up on his bike. Her hair had that fluffy look of being freshly washed. There was a natural curl to it so the red framed her face, making her look even paler than she already was. The deep green business suit she wore was nearly the same cut as the one she wore earlier today.
She looked like an unfinished doll. Still pretty, but not quite ready for the world. If he hadn’t known she was worried, he wouldn’t have spotted the tightness around her eyes or the rigid line of her shoulders.
“Hop on,” he said. His foot hit the ground to steady the bike.
She looked at it like it was made of explosives. “No, we’ll take my car.” She held up her keys.
Speed had been right; she liked to be in control. Fine, he’d hand her the reins for a while. See how it went. Besides, they didn’t have time to argue with Oliver out and about. There was no way he was doing anything good.
“Did he have his bike?” Finn asked as he parked and pulled his key out of the vehicle.
“No. It’s impounded and I told him he wasn’t getting it back until after he went to court.” She hesitated a moment before saying, “A boy that young shouldn’t have a bike. It’s dangerous.”
Finn let out a shocked bark of laughter. “I’ll bet he just loved that. Might have been what sent him out tonight.”
She used the button on her keys to unlock the door. “You think I caused this?”
“Not on purpose,” he said, eyeing her as she plopped down in the driver’s seat. “Are you planning to drive, too?”
“It’s my car,” she expressed, leaving no room for argument.
Finn figured there weren’t a whole lot of people that argued with her. Another time he might have pushed and seen how far her steely demeanor would keep her cold. He held up his hands in surrender and slid into the passenger’s seat. It was a really nice car. It had the dual climate controls, heated seats, a place for all the electronics to plug in, the On-Star crap, and a GPS tucked right into the dashboard. Everything about it screamed luxury. Yeah, he thought, Cora definitely likes things to sparkle. He noticed there was no backseat.
“How are you planning on getting him home when we find him? We can’t fit three people in this car.”
“How were you planning to get the three of us on your bike?” she shot back.
He couldn’t exactly argue with that. She was a sharp woman. He hadn’t spent a whole lot of time with sharp women. College girls who were just beginning to figure out their own minds and lonely women who weren’t so interested in wit as they were in what was under his jeans. All of them had been fun, but none of them had made him work so hard to get anywhere. He kind of liked it.
“Fair,” he said, letting himself enjoy the feel of luxury leather beneath him.
“Where are we going?”
“The pool hall was where I would have looked first. I was there when you called, but he wasn’t.”
“Still?” she asked, turning the key in the ignition. The car didn’t roar like old ones did. It purred. It was a monster slowly waking up. Was there anything better than a hot woman with a sexy car?
“I was helping clean up.”
“Isn’t that a prospect’s job?” She pulled out of the space, and her skirt rode up a few inches as she positioned herself in the driver’s seat. His eyes fastened on the scant few inches of pale skin. “Buckle up.”
He saw the way her fingers flexed along the wheel and decided it would probably be in his best interest to listen to what she said. He clicked the belt into place. “What do you know about prospects?”
She gave him a sidelong glance. “It would behoove you to understand there is plenty you don’t know about me.”
He couldn’t help himself. “Like your criminal record.”
She didn’t quite wince, but it was
pretty close. “Gee, how many drinks did you get into Wes to get him to tell you about that?”
“Not very many at all. But I’d still like to hear it from you.”
She threw the car into reverse with enough force to have him slapping against the leather seat. Her gaze was firmly on the road as she put it into drive and hauled out into the street. “I was young and stupid. There isn’t a whole lot else to tell you.”
For a minute, he didn’t know what to say. If she had been a ditsy coed, he might have flirted with her until she fessed up to her dirty little secret. But if she had been a coed he would have had her back at the pool hall. What was it Speed had said? Honesty? Yeah, he could try that.