Wrong then Right (A Love Happens Novel Book 2)

by Jodi Watters

  He traced that tempting line again, then down along her seam, debating when it was exactly that he’d lost all his fucking marbles. Probably somewhere around the time he’d started giving this woman keys. To his room. To his house. And the devil only knew what next. His black heart, maybe? Or his even blacker soul? Choosing to ignore the ramifications, he opened her with his fingers, swiping one through her significant wetness, the tip of his middle finger teasing her entrance before moving up to rub her in small circles. Wincing at the throbbing pressure against his zipper, he leaned over, gripping the iron headboard with his free hand as he bent down to lightly kiss the pebbled peak of her breast. She smelled warm and sleepy, and like green apples.

  This was a bad fucking idea. Hadn’t he given a reasonably convincing speech against this very thing the first night she’d crashed here? And within the space of a few days, he was blatantly breaking his own damn rule. He might be out of his right mind, but he had enough functioning brain cells to know this was a can of worms that once opened, couldn’t be closed. Then his eager dick chimed in, happy as hell to remind him that the worm can had already been blown wide the fuck open in a hotel room a month ago. And much like coming upon a horrible car accident on the freeway, when there was a naked Hope Coleson in your line of sight, you just couldn’t look away.

  Her breath caught on a low moan and she reached for him just as his back pocket rang. A normal, non-annoying ringtone. And his hand stilled at the timely wake-up call.

  “Ignore it,” she said, whimpering. “For the love of God, Beck, ignore it.”

  It took a supreme will for him to turn his attention away from her, backing up a step.

  Huffing out a playfully irritated breath, she sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. “I can’t believe you just did that. You’re terrible at following directions.”

  “You’re the one who said no lip kissing, princess.” He grinned at her look of outrage and glanced at the screen on his phone, showing a missed call from Ash. And immediately felt like he’d been splashed in the face with a ten gallon bucket of ice water. The guilt made him mean. “And I’ve got somewhere more important to be.”

  Standing, she yawned before padding toward the bathroom, the swing of her hips almost hypnotic. “Then do what you do best, Prince Charming, and disappear. Ride off into the sunset on your white horse.”

  There was no heat in her words. Just mild amusement and a touch of exasperation, but before he could respond, the twinkling of Jingle Bells interrupted him. “You need to do something about that obnoxious ringtone or I’m gonna use your phone for target practice.”

  “It’ll stop in a second,” she called out, from somewhere inside the bathroom, and he heard the shower turn on.

  He also heard her mumble the word Grinch before an electric toothbrush began to buzz. At least, he assumed it was a toothbrush. Hell, it could be the whirl of a vibrator for all he knew. Oh, fucking great, he thought, closing his eyes on a deep exhale. That was a visual guaranteed to keep him from sleeping a goddamn wink tonight.

  Unable to endure it any longer, he swore under his breath and grabbed her jingling phone from the nightstand. Tapping through the screens, he saw a handful of unopened texts from the same blocked number, the most recent one sent a few seconds ago. Knowing it was an invasion of her privacy but not caring, he tapped on the message just received.

  Stupid Bitch. You need to learn your place.

  What the fuck? Swiping down the screen, he thumbed through each unread message, a total a four sent since late last night.

  Don’t ignore me. It won’t make me go away.

  Poor little rich girl. Such a disgrace.

  You’re nothing but a common whore. Just like Mommy.

  The last text had a high resolution photo attached. A zoomed in shot, clearly taken while she was working, showing a beer-bellied man with his meaty hand on Hope’s leather clad ass. She was smiling but it was strained, the tray in her hands loaded with drinks. There were dozens of other texts sent from the same blocked number, the chain of messages too long for him to read through without taking several minutes. He didn’t need to see anymore, though. The sender’s hostility came through loud and clear.

  “Hope, what the hell is this?” Walking into the steam filled bathroom, he abruptly slid the glass shower door open a foot. She yelped in surprise, her head under the spray and a buzzing toothbrush in her mouth. He held up the phone, not bothering to school his voice. “What are these texts and who the fuck sent them?”

  Her eyes widened in surprise, either at his barely restrained anger or his blatant audacity to read her private messages. Glaring, she pulled the humming brush from her mouth and pointed it at him. “You searched through my phone?”

  Okay, it was the latter. “No, I was silencing Jingle Bells. And on a side note, I’d like to point out that it’s barely July. Now do you know the person sending this crazy shit? Because there’s a hidden message in these, not to mention the threat of violence. They don’t seem to like you very much.”

  Clucking her tongue impatiently, she turned both the brush and the faucet off and reached around him for a towel hanging on the rack, not caring that she flung droplets of apple scented water on his shirt. He stepped back, distracted by all the slick naked skin in front of him.

  Wrapping herself in the fluffy white towel, she moved toward the vanity, shrugging nonchalantly. “I don’t know who’s sending them and I don’t care. I just ignore them.”

  “Yeah? You ignore them?” He held up the device, but didn’t let go when she reached out to grab it. “How’s that working for you? Because the sender doesn’t seem deterred. In fact, it seems to be pissing him off even more.” He leaned his backside against the counter and their shoulders brushed as she looked at her reflection in the mirror. Tapping the screen, he scrolled down the chain of messages again, talking more to himself than her. “There’s gotta be fifty messages here, honey. How long ago did this start?”

  She froze in the act of applying some sort of white goop to her face. “Did you just call me honey?” Smiling, her forehead crinkled like she might start crying. “Aww. I like that, Beck. I like it a lot.”

  He rolled his eyes, covering up his unintentional slip. “Don’t read into it, princess. I call Nolan honey, too.” He held up the phone. “Now tell me more about these. When did they start?”

  Beck had to give the girl her props because she was quick. Before he blinked, she grabbed the phone from his hand and held it behind her back, a scowl marring her freshly washed face.

  “Who’s Nolan? And you better not say a woman.” Her frown line deepened. “Wait, I don’t think I want it to be a man, either. Is Nolan a dog? Nolan better be a dog.” Then she snapped her fingers and pointed at him. “Or a goldfish? You seem like a pet fish kind of guy to me.”

  Make-up free, with her skin scrubbed pink and her long hair hanging in wet ropes down her back, she was by far the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Probably the most sarcastic and inconvenient one he’d ever come across, too. A heavy weight settled over his chest as he stared into those laughing blue eyes, followed by a distinctly loud warning in his head.

  Run, dumbass. As fast and as far as you fucking can. Because this girl is trouble.

  His pocket rang again and Beck knew it was Ash. Probably on his way over right now, with a Sig Sauer 9mm strapped to his side and his beloved weapon of choice, a painstakingly cared for M4 assault rifle, sitting on the passenger seat of his beat up Jeep.

  It was a good thing Beck had his own sources of defense, and in this particular case, his best ones were his sparkling personality and a fair amount of denial.

  “Wear clothes in this house. At all goddamn times, you got me?” Moving toward the door, he pointed to the phone she held, his menacing voice brooking no argument. “And I wanna know when more of those messages come through. I’m gonna get to the person sending them.”

  Because this wasn’t a cut and dried case of cyber-bullying. Whether Hop
e knew it and was simply playing dumb, or truly oblivious to the underlying threat in the messages, somebody was trying damn hard to scare her shitless and they weren’t happy with her passive behavior.

  “Whatever you say, honey,” she said, emphasizing the endearment sweetly, then laughing as he walked out of the room. “Oh, I do love the sound of that. I might try out darlin’ or pooh bear on you later, so just remember that you started it,” she called out, her voice carrying through the house as he walked out the door.

  He was halfway to work before he realized there was a stupid smile on his face.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “So. I, uh...” Beck ran a hand across the back of his neck, watching as Nolan leaned so far back in the office chair, it was dangerously close to tipping over. Or breaking in half. “I fucked up pretty badly.”

  “Yeah? What did you do? Wash your whites with colors? Have eleven items in the ten or less line at the grocery store? Sleep with a married chick?” Nolan chuckled to himself at that last part, knowing Beck wouldn’t stoop to something so low as adultery.

  “I slept with Ash’s sister.” The stunned look on Nolan’s face would’ve been hysterical, if Beck had been talking about anything even remotely humorous. When the man remained mute, staring at him as if he’d grown another head, Beck couldn’t help himself. “Only we didn’t sleep.”

  It was a full three seconds before Nolan blinked. “You’re gonna die.” The somber statement of fact was barely more than a whisper.

  The chair springs screeched in protest when he stood abruptly, walking to the open doorway of Beck’s office and looking up and down the hallway. His paranoia at being overheard was justified, but not necessary. Beck wouldn’t have said those words out loud if there was a snowball’s chance anyone else was within fifty feet. It was unusual for the two of them to be alone in the posh digs of the Scorpio Securities office in the middle of the afternoon, but Mike and Grady were out on assignment together and Ash was at the shooting range—the irony of which wasn’t lost on Beck, but he was trying not to think about it. Sam was still in Venice, getting laid day and night, Italy style. And Caroline, a busybody that was frankly less prone to juicy office gossip than Grady, was home with her littlest son, who according to Mike had gotten some kind of common baby virus that Beck had never heard of before and couldn’t recall now if his life depended on it.

  “When you say sleep, you mean just a little over the shirt action, right?” Nolan sat back down, this time with his elbows braced on his knees, his hands folded in prayer position.

  Beck nearly laughed at the unconscious gesture. “No.”

  “Like, a little in the pants action, then?” He sat back in the chair and looked skyward. “Jesus God, tell me that’s all it was, man.”

  He slowly shook his head. “She’s the girl from the Vistancia.” At Nolan’s confused look, he looked skyward himself, impatiently adding, “At Sam’s wedding. Christ, you have the memory of an eighty-year-old man.”

  “No shit?” His brows shot up when Beck nodded and he looked around the office, at a loss for words as he absorbed that information. “Whoa. Are you serious?”

  “Do you think I would joke about this?”

  “So, did you...” His face scrunched up in uneasy disgust and he glanced toward the open doorway again. “Did you do her?” Beck’s guilty look must have confirmed it, because Nolan didn’t wait for the answer. “Christ Almighty, Beck! His sister? I thought you were only with her for an hour.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Nolan, I didn’t know who she was then. And you can accomplish a lot in an hour when there’s no talking happening.”

  Not one for crude locker room talk or macho pissing contests regarding his sexual proficiency, Beck hadn’t shared the finer details of that night with Nolan. But he’d left Hope in that disheveled hotel room bed, looking utterly fuckable and oddly vulnerable, and headed straight for the lobby bar. Where he’d remained for several hours, his foolish ass planted on an uncomfortable barstool, racking up a doozy of a tab while powering through several tumblers worth of Jameson. Turned out applying Irish whiskey to a guilty conscious didn’t work for shit, but it could make you look like a chump when you called your best buddy to come pick you up because you couldn’t drive your sorry self home. Beck wasn’t completely sure what he’d told Nolan about Hope during that vomit-inducing ride home, but since he’d made a vow to God and the devil himself never to tell another soul about his transgression, he assumed—even in his inebriated state—that he’d kept his culpable mouth shut.

  And this was before he knew she was a Coleson.

  Beck had broken a promise to Ash that night and it had nothing to do with screwing his sister, but carried the same amount of dishonor. Hell, probably more. Beer was it, he’d sworn to Ash three months ago, draining all the booze in his house as the big man watched with all the compassion of a brick wall. Beer, and nothing more. He could handle it. It wasn’t beer that made the nights tolerable, anyway. It was the pipe burning, memory crushing flow of smooth liquor that did the trick. And staying away from it, Beck had stupidly thought, was cake. How hard could it really be, he’d scoffed to Ash, in response to his subtle but unmistakable mention of rehab. Not as hard as six months of BUD/S training, the first eight weeks of which were so grueling, you lived in a literal world of hurt. Not as hard as running dozens of life and death missions across four continents and countless countries with the teams, some routine, others going sideways as soon as his boots hit the ground. And certainly not as hard as washing the dried blood and brain matter of your teammate off your gear, mad as hell that it wasn’t your own instead.

  Trained to be an instant decision maker and extreme action taker, particularly under the most stressful of situations, Beck wasn’t used to being wrong. It simply wasn’t in his DNA. And with all the swagger of a guy used to overcoming any obstacle thrown his way, used to succeeding—to winning—at all that he did, Beck had carelessly added booze to that list. And it had kicked his deaf, dumb, and blind ass. Alcohol, in any form, could take hold of him like a red headed stepchild, controlling him beyond reason. The best advice Beck had ever gotten was early on in his career and from his first Skipper, who’d walked the walk like nobody’s business. Liquor, women, and ego, he’d said, were a SEAL’s biggest enemies. And he’d do damn well to keep all three in check. He’d also told him not to have a joint bank account with his girlfriend, and/or wife, and/or latest piece of tail, because you didn’t want to get caught downrange when that sweet little thing you hide your dick inside grows horns and decides to take your truck, your house, your money, your kids, and your dog that she fucking hates, and give it to the next fool that comes along. All good advice and as such, Beck had followed it to the letter. Until last winter. When the alcohol started trumping everything.

  Ash had been right. And that bender he’d gone on after his night with Hope had been the last drop of alcohol he’d swallowed, beer included.

  No matter how confident, how full of blustery ego Beck had been on the day he’d drained the bottles with his boss supervising, his fight with alcohol was hands down the hardest one he’d ever been in. It was easy to eliminate an enemy. A damn sight harder to eliminate an enemy you needed as much as your next breath. There was a brand new unopened bottle of Crown Royal whiskey in his kitchen cabinet to prove it, too.

  Nolan finally found his voice. “Wait, this is that girl? The catering girl? The one who’s name you never got? And walked out on in favor of getting stone cold drunk alone? She’s actually Ash’s sister?” Astonishment laced his voice as he stared at the charcoal colored carpeting, not expecting an answer to the rapid fire questions as he struggled to wrap his mind around Beck’s confession.

  “You’re gonna die,” he repeated a minute later, with the same seriousness as before. “He’s gonna kill you.”

  “Jesus Christ, this isn’t the olden days. He’s not gonna show up on my doorstep with a loaded shotgun and a preacher, Nole.” At least, not the preacher part a
nyway. The shotgun was for fucking certain.

  “I’d consider witness protection, if I were you. I know you’re a mean son of a bitch and granted, there’s been many a radical insurgent meet an unlucky fate attempting to take you out, but let’s be real here. None of them were Asher Coleson.” He scrubbed a hand down his face and chuckled, his usual carefree demeanor returning. “Nice to know you’re a human being, though. Hanging out with a guy who never fucks up was giving me a complex. But in all seriousness, Beck, Wit Sec might be your best option at this stage of the game.”

  A soft bell rang out from the lobby, signaling someone entering the offices. The computer monitor on Beck’s desk displayed a live feed of the reception area, telling him who it was.

  Nolan leaned forward to see for himself, then stood quickly. Rapping the top of the desk with his knuckles, he said, “God be with you, my friend.” And with a shit-eating grin, headed toward his own small office, nodding as he passed Ash in the hallway.

  There hadn’t been time to tell him the rest of the story. That she was living in his house. And sleeping in his guest bedroom. And doing it naked as a fucking jaybird.

  “What’s that all about?” Ash mumbled, sitting down in the chair Nolan vacated, stretching his legs out and crossing his booted feet. As if he planned to stay awhile. He’d set his fully packed range bag down in his own office, one of the two executive suites at the end of the hallway, and Beck took it as a good sign that he wasn’t getting shot at today.

  Shrugging the question off, he waited for his boss to speak again, assuming Scorpio business was on the agenda. He was wrong.

  “I’ve been thinking. About this whole Hope thing.” He paused, his jaw tightening as he stared at Beck, his right hand clenching into a fist several times before he gripped the arm of the chair and blew out a breath. He looked uncertain. And Ash was never uncertain. About anything. Leaning forward, he fiddled with the zippered pockets on his faded cargo pants before clasping his hands together and sitting back again. Then he cracked his knuckles.