Wrong then Right (A Love Happens Novel Book 2)

by Jodi Watters

  “Thanks for that,” Beck said to Nolan, in a sarcastically droll tone. Because that little speech was guaranteed to send Mike back to the office with a hot lead on something fishy, promptly putting Grady on the case. “Jesus, what’s taking so fucking long? We should be in the air by now.” Glancing at his watch, he pinched the bridge of his nose and exhaled, knowing the clock was ticking.

  “What better things do you have to do with your time?” Ash asked suspiciously, not letting Beck’s poorly chosen words go. And though he expected an answer, Beck wasn’t touching that question with a ten foot pole. “You got a hot date or something?”

  He didn’t have a date, but he did have somewhere to be. It was approaching dusk in Bogota, but only late afternoon in San Diego. And it was Saturday. The day Hope decided to lose both her mind and apparently, her goddamn top. Rather than flashing her killer smile while she served up hard liquor on the floor, she was flashing her tits and serving up surefire hard-on’s while working the stage. And according to her, there would be oil involved. The edible kind.

  So, fuck yeah, he had a hot date. To get the boss man’s kid sister off the pole.

  Christ, he needed the hell out of this country. And it had less to do with twenty-seven days sans alcohol and more to do with two days sans Hope. The girl was getting to him.

  Stretching his legs out in front of him, he closed his gritty eyes to Ash’s searching look and leaned his head back against the roughly hewn timber wall, thoughts of their last encounter running through his mind. Once she’d made her exit from the kitchen, leaving him with visions of her lush mouth licking sugary cream from her finger and the lingering feel of her body brushing his, he knew sleep would elude him. Didn’t matter, really. If he got lucky and dozed off, his dreams would be filled with her, anyway.

  Lying there, alone in his king size bed, without a willing woman or a lowball of whiskey to occupy his time, he’d stared at the shadows playing on the coffered ceiling and counted. Counted the time since his last drink. In days. Then hours. Then minutes. Counted the number of steps it would take to walk to the pantry and grab his bottle of Crown Royal. The seconds it would take for the poisonous liquid to go from his lips to the bottom of his gut, burning as it flowed down, soon followed by another, less scorching mouthful. Always with the promise of a blissful numbness after the fourth or fifth gulp.

  But the guilt would come, too. And the relentless feeling of failure that lived deep in his belly would show an alternate face, becoming more about his lack of control around the bottle and less about watching helplessly as his best buddy lost a life sustaining body part right in front of him, in graphic horror-flick technicolor. No matter how much money the big name movie companies threw at their special effects directors, they always got the blood and brain spatter wrong.

  Swearing under his breath, he’d given up on sleep and propped himself against the pillows, grabbing his trusty racquetball from the nightstand. Practiced at shaking off the disturbing images, he’d spent the next several minutes doing what he usually did throughout the long hours of the night. Raising his right arm, he bounced the blue ball against the wall opposite the bed, the white paint smudged and worn smooth in the spot he’d hit numerous times before. The diffused light from a floor lamp made it easy to hit the mark, the hollow echo centering his destructive thoughts. As the ball rebounded back to him, he tossed it again, counting the number of hits.

  One. Two. Twenty. Then thirty.

  He counted the number of steps to his guest bedroom, the ping of the ball against the wall keeping time with his mental count. Going to her wouldn’t solve his problems. It would only expose them. And him.

  Beck wasn’t a math wizard, but for some psycho-babbling reason, numbers helped. Much like a child counting aloud before seeking his hiding playmates, he’d made it past many a near raging booze binges, many a mental breakdown solved only with the passage of warm liquor or chunks of white-knuckled time, simply by counting. Some nights, it seemed he’d counted to a fucking trillion before the compulsive desire to drink would pass through him, leaving tempered relief and a new day in its wake. It was always there, though. Lurking darkly in the shadows of his mind. Breathing fire down the back of his neck.

  The wave of desire would come back, of that he was sure. And his response to it, his decision to drink or not drink, was as fluid as the wave itself.

  “Is that necessary? Playing catch with yourself in the middle of the night? When people are trying to sleep?” Hope stood in the doorway of his bedroom, her sarcastic presence catching him off guard. Quickly reaching down, he made sure a corner of the bed sheet covered the critical part of his naked body.

  “Thought I told you not to come up here.” He barely glanced at her, tossing the ball against the wall once again, starting over at one.

  Damning his memory retention, he blocked out the fact that she was wearing a loose white t-shirt, the stretched hem barely reaching the tops of her thighs. The shadow of her nipples, and the fact that they were hard, was plainly visible in the lamplight.

  “I’m serious, Beck.” Taking a few steps into his private lair, she assessed the space as she spoke. “That thumping is enough to make me loony. Why aren’t you asleep like a normal person?” Looking around in surprise, she made a disappointed sound. “And this is just a normal bedroom. With a regular bed. I thought you were hiding something good up here.”

  His eyes betrayed him as he stared at her, standing at the end of his bed, in his bedroom, with her hair messy and a pout on her face, looking like she belonged here.

  “What were you expecting?” He tried to see the room from her perspective.

  Typical furniture filled the large master suite. The bed might be massive, but the tall walnut headboard was a basic Craftsman style that held no ornamental details, starkly masculine in its design. The nightstands and dresser were from the same set, simply because it had gotten him out of the furniture store in under fifteen minutes. The sixty inch flat screen centered on the wall opposite the bed was the only thing he really payed much attention to. That, and the target on the wall next to it where he regularly tossed the racquetball.

  “I don’t know what I expected,” she said, with a girlish grin. “Knives and guns, maybe. Or velcro and hand grenades?”

  “I can assure you there’s no velcro in here.”

  Her eyes widened and she choked out a laugh. “Good to know. I won’t pull any pins out of little round objects while I’m in here.” Her gaze snagged on the open doorway leading into the master bathroom and she gasped, pointing toward the lavish, spa-inspired bathroom with her mouth agape. “Hey! You have a claw foot bathtub in there!”

  The accusation couldn’t have sounded more condemning if she’d accused him of being the devil himself, and Beck felt a little slighted that she hadn’t noticed the fancy double vanity and enormous walk in steam shower, both of which had taken a decent chunk of his money and his valuable time. He’d spent two weeks laying every honed piece of travertine himself.

  “And that’s a big deal, how?” he asked, confused on the tub’s behalf.

  “I don’t care what you’re hiding up here, whether it’s velcro, or grenades, or... or a woman in a cage,” she stuttered, sounding outraged. “I don’t care. But, I can’t believe you would hide a fully functioning bathtub from me.” Padding into the bathroom, she assessed the tub with a look that could only be described as reverent, clasping her hands together as if afraid to touch it. Tossing her flowing hair over her shoulder, she glanced at him. “Can I use it? I have bubbles.”

  Hope Coleson, completely naked and slippery wet with bubbles, in his claw foot tub only twenty steps away from his bed? “Negative.”

  “What?” She rolled her pretty blue eyes, putting her hands on her hips. “Why?”

  The annoyed pose pulled the t-shirt tighter across her chest, raising the hem just enough that the sheet over his lap began to lift involuntarily. His brow rose as he blatantly assessed her from head to toe, stopping to
stare at her nipples, which were definitely harder than before, and the tempting, barely covered juncture of her thighs, which was making him harder, too.

  “Ohh,” she said slowly, sexual understanding lacing the one word reply. Then she smiled. Not a nice girl smile, but a naughty girl smile, sizing up his problematic sheet situation. This was going from bad to worse, fast.

  “You need to leave. Now. Go back downstairs and reacquaint yourself with the rules. Don’t come up here.”

  “Whatch’a got underneath that sheet, Beck? Are you rockin’ a Donald Duck look? You know, no bottoms?”

  He smiled before he could think better of it. “Minus the shirt and tie.”

  Her grin widened and she bit her bottom lip, staring at his lap. Much more of this and she was in for a real show. Rising up on the balls of her feet, she pivoted to leave, her hands pulling down on the hem of her t-shirt. “I’ve got more of a Winnie the Pooh thing happening myself. I’m not a fan of bottoms, either.” Smiling, she turned and was out the door, her parting shot coming from the stairway. “You can go back to playing with your balls, now.”

  It was only a few hours later, as he was leaving for work knowing he’d be in Columbia by the end of the day, that he entered the guest bedroom on silent booted feet. Hope was asleep on her side, wrapped up in the raggedy pink blanket that had seen better days. Lifting a corner of the plaid fabric, he peered up the long length of her bare legs, fact checking her claim of no underwear. Jesus God, he thought, lightly dropping the blanket back in place and grabbing her cell phone off the nightstand. She hadn’t been kidding. Entering her number into his phone, he quickly added himself to her contact list—under the name P. Charming—and laid the phone back down. Then, letting his gut instinct and concern for her well being dictate his actions, he picked it back up and scrolled through her text messages, looking for more threats.

  Surprisingly, there were none. The last one was sent the first night she’d spent in his house. She might not realize it, but that was no coincidence. With a long look at her stunningly pretty face, he laid the back of his hand against the downy soft hair near her temple for a moment, then left the house, grabbing his duffel and locking the door behind him.

  Smiling now because he couldn’t help it, he opened his eyes and reached for his phone, tapping out a quick text. Ignoring the hole Ash’s piercing eyes drilled into him, he hit send and waited, wiping his face of all expression.

  You better not be in my fucking tub.

  He wasn’t sure if she’d already left for work or was still at home.

  At home. Why that thought didn’t make him break out in hives, he wasn’t sure, but it was easier to ignore the feeling than delve deep into his psyche to find out why it felt just a little too natural. Too right. Only a few minutes passed before his phone beeped a response.

  P. Charming, huh? As if. And you swear as much in texts as you do in person. Maybe I am in your tub. What are you gonna do about it?

  Quickly typing, he hit send. I’m gonna do you. Every which way I can. Are there bubbles? Please tell me there are bubbles.

  The responding alert came almost immediately.

  Beck? Beckett Smith? Hot, grumpy man who lives upstairs and doesn’t sleep? The one who told me we can never have sex again? It can’t be. I’m reporting this phone stolen.

  She’d added a smiley face to the end of the text. In all of his thirty-three years, he’d never once gotten a text that included a smiley face.

  “Transport’s here. Let’s move,” Ash said without warning, grabbing his gear.

  The whirring of an approaching plane sounded a few seconds later, the unmistakable thwacking of propellers increasing in decibel as the aircraft’s altitude lowered, preparing to land on the short runway. Stopping, however, was subject to how fast the four of them could get their asses into the open hatch while at a dead run. Hustling, Beck hit send on his responding text to Hope before he could think better of it and pocketed the phone. Anyone in the surrounding jungle, animal or human, was now alert to their location, and aware they were getting out of dodge in the not so conventional way.

  Stride for stride with Ash, he did his level best to wipe the stupid grin off his face. Based on the look Ash was throwing him, he failed.

  God help him, he was in deep shit with this girl. And truth be told, Beck hadn’t looked to God for anything in several years. Religion might be the cause for many wars, but once blood was shed, it no longer had any damn place in it. When you had a proverbial army of enemies, he was convinced God had jack shit to do with keeping you alive, anyway. It was his brain, his body, and his brothers, along with sheer fucking luck, that had kept Beck alive. And now he was about to tread all over one of them. Worse than the threat of any hell bent enemy, the woman living in his house right now had a brother who just might murder him in his sleep. And he wouldn’t make it a swift and merciful death, either. Ash would have his crudely severed head on a hunting spear, propped in front of a raging bonfire that used to be his home, once this was all said and done.

  Because Hope had a twinkle in her blue eyes that said she was looking to do some serious sinning. And the wrath of Asher Coleson be damned, because Beck was done pretending to be a saint.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Oh, snap! Somebody’s got her party boobs out.” There was a compliment somewhere in Bridget’s joyful statement, but Hope heard only the words boobs and out.

  “Well, they’re not much, but when I face plant because of these shoes,” she replied, lifting her foot to give the five inch heels a dirty look, “they’ll cushion my fall.”

  Hope stood backstage, staring at her reflection in the full length dressing room mirror, her ribs tight and her breathing erratic. Her mind was focused on their carefully choreographed dance, determined to nail the fast paced routine, barely keeping the sheer terror at bay. Not because she was about to expose her body to a bar full of strangers, but because of the high likelihood she would trip and fall on her sexy black, patent leather platforms.

  Who knew stripper shoes were a real thing?

  Bridget stood next to her wearing a matching costume, looking like a million damn dollars compared to Hope, who might ring up at a measly hundred bucks or so. Not including a coupon.

  Taking as deep a breath as her tightly laced, cupless satin corset would allow, she did a slow, assessing turn, grudgingly admitting, if only to herself, that she didn’t look half bad.

  Decked out in several pieces of expensive black lingerie, it had taken Hope nearly a half hour and Marcia’s help to get dressed. Intentionally sized one cup too small, the black lace demi-bra was trimmed in silk ribbons and tiny feathers, with a front clasp for easy release. Her minuscule black lace panties covered her front nicely, but had an open, cage style back, the thin crisscrossing straps meeting at the top of her exposed ass in a sinfully sweet satin bow. According to Kiki, they were the new it thing in underwear and when she’d put the crotchless version to a vote, she’d been outnumbered two to one. But only because Hope had the good sense and quick thinking to bribe Bridget with a gallon of banana berry frozen yogurt. How the woman ate that stuff by the case without looking bloated and pimply was a cruel trick of the universe.

  Sucking in a deep breath so she could bend at the waist, Hope smoothed a hand over her satin garters. Clipped to sheer, thigh high black stockings topped with a band of lace, she ensured they were pulled tight. Five inch stiletto’s finished the look, complete with a cute ankle strap, in case she got a little overzealous with her kicks and sent an errant shoe flying into the crowd.

  At least she didn’t have to worry about beaning some poor guy in the head.

  Just the prep work alone, a tedious mix of waxing, exfoliating, and moisturizing, had been exhausting. Add in the heavy layer of make up and hot rollered hair, and Hope was seriously over it. Gorgeous smoky eyes and red stained lips aside, pulling this together was hard work. At least she had a consolation prize. Bubba had shelled out an asinine amount of money for their sex
y getup’s and while tonight would be the only night she wore it in public, it might be fun to crack it out once or twice for a special man. Like the one who’d left her hanging earlier in the day, with his shockingly explicit text message.

  You should know, I’m gonna fuck you in that tub. And everywhere else, too. I’m headed home.

  The visual of him doing exactly that had her tingling in her itsy-bitsy panties. And wishing Kiki had won the popular vote for crotchless.

  “Are you ready?” Bridget asked, meeting her eyes in the mirror as she dotted her face with powder. “This is gonna pad our pockets, Hope. And I might be able to waitress full time after this. Leave the stage for good.”

  Snapping the compact shut, she frowned at Hope’s lack of shared enthusiasm, her optimism usually contagious. Gripping her bare shoulders, she turned Hope so they were face to face, her megawatt smile reassuring. “Breathe for me, okay? Do you still want to do this? Because you can back out and nobody will be mad. Kiki and I can go it alone and it’ll take a load off Bubba’s mind. You’re like a daughter to him. It’s kinda sweet.”

  Shaking her head, Hope choked out an embarrassed laugh and gestured to herself. “After everybody worked so hard to make this happen? Marcia threw her back out.”

  It was only nerves making her hands shake. And Beck’s return, and that sexy text, making her heart pound like a jackhammer gone rogue.

  “Listen, I want to tell you something.” She’d never heard Bridget speak so gravely, the haunted look of a tragic life no longer banked in her heavily lined eyes. “You’re a complete knockout, Hope. You don’t see what I see. What others see. But that’s just on the outside. This job should come with a warning label. A disclaimer that reminds you not to get caught up in your own hype, because even though you’re scared out of your mind right now, you’re gonna be good at this. Probably too good. You’re gonna get up on that stage and feel powerful. Worthy. Alive. You might even want to do it again, just for the thrill, if not the extra cash. But no amount of finely made lingerie, or vanilla scented body glitter, or beautifully bare skin, can define you. It can’t place a monetary value on you. No matter how much Bubba dotes on us, or how much Marcia hugs us and makes us remember how good it felt to have a mom, this club isn’t who you are. It needs to be temporary. A means to an end. No matter how striking those sapphire blue eyes are, or how flawless your naturally tanned skin is, you’re bound for better things than this place. Your inside is prettier than your outside, Hope.” A hint of sadness marred her smile. “And it’s my wish that you always know that.”