Loverboy
Dartmoor Series Book V
by
Lauren Gilley
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Names and characters are the property of the author and may not be duplicated.
LOVERBOY
ISBN -13: 978-1537317564
Copyright © 2016 by Lauren Gilley
Cover photograph Copyright © 2016 by Lauren Gilley
HP Press®
Atlanta, GA
All rights reserved.
The Dartmoor Series
Fearless
Price of Angels
Half My Blood
The Skeleton King
Secondhand Smoke
Loverboy
Trigger Warning
Dear readers, welcome, at last, to Tango’s book. His is a story that has been simmering slowly in the background as the series progresses. It’s the book I’m most often asked about, and has without a doubt been the most emotionally straining to write. If you’re coming into Loverboy as a fan of the series, then you will know that this story will be difficult to read. PLEASE read the list of (potential) triggers below and consider them seriously.
This book contains mentions, suggestions, and a few scenes of: kidnapping, imprisonment, child abuse: emotional and physical, underage sex, non-consensual sex, sex slavery, rape, self-harm, drug use, addiction, and suicide. This book is intended for MATURE audiences, and contains scenes that are disturbing.
Throughout the novel, Tango struggles with feelings of self-loathing, worthlessness, and depression. Please note that all the characters’ viewpoints are clouded with strong emotion, and their thoughts and actions are not condoned, merely presented in a way that is true to life.
Please note, however, this isn’t a book about abuse and horrors. Rather, about surviving them, and emerging stronger on the other side. And I strongly suggest that anyone who has experienced trauma of any sort seek out appropriate clinical help. Thus forewarned, please enjoy Tango’s long-awaited time in the spotlight. He and I thank you for your readership.
~LG
LOVERBOY
One
The craving. It had transcended that small voice in the back of his head, grown beyond the itch, the pull. Now it was a full-fledged, snarling, beastly thing, gnawing at his bones, snapping up every other sensation until there was room only for the fix.
The blue door of the house at the end of the driveway beckoned him, tempting as neon. A long walk, a slow one, the way the ground seemed to shift beneath his feet. He shut his eyes and forced himself on. Finally his boots struck the porch steps, and he scrambled up them. He knocked three times, then waited, then knocked a final time.
Peter answered the door with what was becoming a usual frown. He sighed. “Again? Does your boss know you’re doing this shit?”
“You gonna tell him?”
“How do you even stay on your bike these days?”
“Are you gonna sell it to me, or do I need to go somewhere else?”
Peter made a face. No, he wouldn’t want that. As one of Ghost’s newly-inducted dealers, he couldn’t afford to lose business – even this kind of business, from one of his overseers.
“Whatever.” He went to the hutch that served as his oversized medicine cabinet.
It was a tiny house, but up to Ghost’s cleanliness standards. The tradition of letting dealers live how they wanted to had died with Fisher. Every ounce of product had to be hidden at all times. Regular inspections were held to ensure that the houses and apartments looked normal and well-kept. The goal was to keep suspicion to a minimum, and barring that, keep the police from turning the place upside down.
Peter’s cottage had warped, but well-scrubbed pine floors, rag rugs, secondhand furniture that had been trendy in the eighties, and a comfortable assortment of lamps and knick-knacks. Peter himself was on the thin side, and sometimes a little glazed like he smoked his own weed, but overall professional and clean-cut.
The hutch held several sets of dishes, a collection of cookbooks, usual kitchen things. But behind this were removable panels in the back of each cabinet, and that was where the weed, coke, and ecstasy was kept, all of it bagged and catalogued. There was also a small stash of heroin, and that was what Tango had come for.
Peter tossed a reluctant glance over his shoulder. “He’s gonna catch on, you know. Ghost. And when he comes and wants to put my head through the wall for selling it to you, what am I supposed to say?”
“Say it wasn’t your fault.” Tango’s palms itched and he curled his fingers up tight. “That’s the truth.”
Peter snorted. “In my experience, the truth don’t mean shit.”
~*~
The nightmares had started a few weeks after he was rescued from Don Ellison’s basement. He’d known they would, and stupidly, he’d thought he was equipped by now to handle them. What was a dream sequence compared to what he’d been through physically? Not just at the hands of Ellison’s men, but at the hands of all the men. The ones who’d shamed and ruined him since childhood. He hadn’t stood a chance, had he?
And so as the bruises faded from his skin, the nightmares had crept in, soft-footed and insidious. First the vague sense of panic, a weight across him in his sleep. He’d awakened tangled in the sheets, his t-shirt soaked through, clawing to regain his equilibrium. These had lasted for several months, and then the real night terrors had begun.
Particular memories, in vivid color and crystalline detail. The low bass thump of the music. Diego’s muffled voice over the speakers as he announced each feature and invited gentlemen to get out their wallets for special time in the back. The soft brush of the velvet upholstery on the couches in the private rooms. Stink of male arousal and sweat. Crackle of money against his skin. Clammy grip of a hand…
He woke screaming, almost always. The first time it happened at the clubhouse, Carter and Jasmine had come stumbling in from the dorm next door, half-dressed, eyes wild with fright.
“What is it?” Carter had asked.
Jasmine had made a move toward the bed, face concerned, holding Carter’s shirt closed against her breasts.
“Go away,” he’d told them, and hadn’t been polite about it. He couldn’t handle them, individually, or as a couple. He just couldn’t. If anything that even smelled like sex came toward him, he’d go into a full-on panic attack.
He couldn’t live in the clubhouse after that. He managed to scrape together enough to put a deposit on an apartment.
Maggie brought him a casserole the night after he moved in, took one look around the place, and her eyes had filled with tears. “No, baby,” she’d whispered. “Oh no, you can’t live here.” And she’d cried quietly while the massive water stain on the ceiling above her threatened to give way and dump the upstairs waste water line on their heads.
By some miracle, Mercy’s old apartment above the bakery downtown was available, and Aidan and Mercy had strong-armed him into moving into it one Saturday afternoon.
He owned a double bed, two sets of sheets, and a sad excuse for a sofa. But somehow a table, chairs, towels, dishes, and lamps appeared, like exotic plants sprouting in his landscape of blacks and grays. Maggie scrubbed the bathroom until it sparkled. Ava baked a chicken and they had a big family dinner at his tiny new table. Before they all left for the night, Aidan squeezed his shoulder and gave him an unsubtle look of assessment.
“You want me to stay over? We can get drunk and watch bad movies.”
Tango shook his head. “No. Go home to Sam and Lainie.”
The club was pa
ying his rent, he had no doubt. The girls kept forcing food on him. His brothers made too-cheerful overtures of friendship at every turn.
But he stood on the other side of a fine steel mesh. He could see them, hear them, smell their skin and shampoo. But none of them could touch him. And wasn’t that what he’d always craved? Touch?
Still nothing but a sex toy.
He was suffocating.
It had been inevitable, really, reaching for the needle again.
He sat down now at his table and opened up the shaving kit that held everything he needed to send himself to oblivion. The lights were off. A glimmer of neon from Bell Bar filtered through the window, sparkled against the kit’s zipper. He pushed his hands through his hair – it was long all over now, down to his shoulders, a tangled mess – and clasped his hands against the back of his neck. His pulse throbbed just beneath the skin, a tattoo against his fingertips.
He was going to die.
The knowledge came to him suddenly, heavy and certain. Maybe not tonight, maybe not the next time, or the time after that – but at some point soon, he was going to put the needle in his arm, and it was going to kill him. Because he knew himself inside and out, with an intimacy most men never dreamed of. He knew a little bit was never enough. He always had to have more. Always, always.
What was he doing here? Besides delaying the inevitable.
Time unspooled; glimmered faintly in the dim kitchen, a long rope of habit and repetition laid out before him. Heroin. Crippling, toxic sex. And wanting. Craving.
Craving, craving, craving.
His phone was in his hand before he made the decision to reach for it. Whitney picked up on the second ring.
“Kev.”
Oh, God…her voice. He hadn’t remembered the beautiful soft tone of it. Hadn’t thought it would hit him hard as a punch.
His eyes filled with tears and he shut them.
“Kev?” she repeated, worried now. “Are you there?”
He took a deep breath. “Yeah. I’m here.”
A pause, but a warm one. He swore he felt her sweetness through the cell connection.
It was two in the morning and he hadn’t talked to her since the last time he’d made one of these sad, desperate calls a month ago. She would have been within her rights to hang up on him. But instead she said, “How’ve you been?”
“Fine.”
“Well that’s good. But you don’t sound very fine.”
“What are you doing? Did I wake you up?”
“No. I’m painting.”
He went back to the basement in his mind, the cold concrete and the comforting press of her hand against his. She’d told him about her painting then, when he’d been foggy with pain and would have listened to her give the traffic report for eight hours straight.
“Oils,” he said. “Right?”
“Uh-huh.” She sounded pleased he remembered.
“What are you working on?”
“A landscape.” She went on without prompting, like she knew he wanted to hear. “It’s a photo I took last winter, when we had snow on the ground. There’s a farm about a mile from my brother’s house and” – her voice caught at mention of her brother, killed by Ellison’s men a year ago – “they have this old fashioned big red barn.” Deep breath, and she pressed on. “I’ve always wanted to paint it, and I couldn’t sleep tonight, so…”
“Why can’t you sleep?”
He heard a sad smile in her voice. “You’re not the only one who has nightmares, Kev.”
“Right.” He’d tried to spare her that. He’d taken the physical punishment, and she hadn’t been touched. He’d kept her safe, yes…but he’d hoped he’d kept her mind easy, too.
“I go back there sometimes, when I’m dreaming,” she said, quietly. “And I remember–”
“Don’t remember,” Tango said. “Just don’t. Wipe it out of your head. Stop thinking about it.”
“Like you did, you mean?”
Had she been anyone else, he would have hung up on her. Instead he gripped the phone tighter and took a deep breath, tried to calm his racing heart. “That’s different.”
“How? Kev, you’re torturing yourself. I know you are. It isn’t healthy.”
“You’re twenty-one. What do you know about healthy?”
“I know it doesn’t look like you,” she shot back, firm, but caring. Like Maggie. Or Ava. Like one of the tough girls in his life.
Desire spiked in his belly. A hard kick of longing and sexual frustration. With his eyes closed, he could envision what she must look like now, up late painting in her pajamas. He wanted to peel them off of her, feel her skin against his hands, find out how warm and wet it was between her legs. Wanted her to hurt him, dig her nails into his shoulders and bite the jagged scars down his ear.
No! He couldn’t want any of that. Wouldn’t allow himself to direct his insatiable urges toward Whitney, who was sweet and wholesome and had never been with a sexually deviant junkie like him.
“No what?” she asked, and he realized he’d said it aloud. “Kev?”
“I can’t,” he said, and disconnected the call.
“Wait–” she was saying before she was cut off.
Tango cupped a hand to his mouth and breathed through it, air whistling between his tattooed fingers.
No, no, no, no, no. He couldn’t think that way about Whitney. It made him feel vile. She was just a kid, and a good, decent, sweet one at that. Who’d comforted him, and held his hand.
Just like Ian had, all those years ago at The Cuckoo’s Nest.
For him, the sexiest thing in the world had always been shared trauma, and the comfort traded back and forth in the aftermath.
Because he was fucked up. Wired incorrectly.
And now he was going to fuck Whitney up. He could see it unfold before him, her future, if he stayed a part of her life. She would have a weakness for him; she would let him in, stroke his hair and tell him she cared. And he would poison her, and take away every shot she had at a substantial life.
His many ghosts crowded around him in the dark kitchen where Mercy and Ava had cooked for each other right after they were married. His father. His clients. Miss Carla. Ian. The other boys. His brothers. Whitney. A cacophony of voices, competing and shouting to be heard above one another.
It was Carla’s voice that finally broke through: “He’s damn pretty.”
Oh, if only he’d been born an ugly child. If only…
In the bathroom, he flipped on the lights and caught a glimpse of his achingly feminine face in the medicine cabinet. His big, dark-lashed blue eyes; slender jaw; narrow, sharp nose, the curve of his mouth.
He opened the cabinet, pushed aside the shaving cream, and found the razors.
~*~
Whitney didn’t stop to consider the wisdom of her reaction until it was too late and she was knocking on Aidan and Samantha Teague’s door. She’d stared at her half-finished landscape for five full seconds after Kev hung up on her, and then she’d made a decision. She knew the note in his voice; the same note she’d heard in her brother’s voice before he’d plunged headlong into total addiction and eventually gotten himself killed because of it.
She’d dunked her paintbrushes in the water cup, tugged on clothes, and dialed Kev five times on the harried drive through the deserted streets of Knoxville to get to Aidan’s.
“Please be home,” she murmured, and knocked again.
The apartment was a walk-up in a semi-sketchy part of town, and wind funneled up the concrete stairwell, plastering her jacket to her back. She shivered and raised her hand to knock again.
But the door swung open on Aidan in his boxers, scrubbing his hair, still half-asleep. She got an eyeful of ornate tattoos across the entirety of his torso, and then heard the high thin cry of a baby from behind him.
She winced and wanted to kick herself. But there was no help for it. Kev trumped babies and sleep right now. “Hi, I’m sorry it’s so late, but–”
; He’d been staring at her blearily, but now his eyes flipped wide. “Shit. Whitney? What are you…?”
“It’s Kev,” she said, and his mouth snapped shut. “He called me just a little while ago, and he sounded wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“Upset. He cut me off and he…” She had to swallow a rising panic; it got caught in her throat and she blinked furiously. “I think he’s going to do something, Aidan, and I’m so sorry I showed up like this, and I know you don’t owe me anything, and I’m sorry I woke your baby, but he–”
“No, you should have come.” He came fully awake then, shivering.
“I don’t know where he is, but I figure you do.”
“Yeah.”
Aidan’s wife, Sam, appeared behind him, glasses perched haphazardly on her nose, long dirty blonde hair cascading down her back; fresh from bed and worried. She had the baby in her arms, patting her back and shushing her quietly.
“What’s going on?”
“Tango,” Aidan said, and Sam’s face echoed his panic.
“Oh.”
He turned from the door. “I’ll go get him.”
“I’ll come with you,” Whitney said.
“No.” Aidan paused and sent her a hard look over his shoulder. “You’ll wait here with Sam.”
“He was talking to me. I want to go.”
“You want to see the mess?”
Her stomach quivered and her panic ratcheted another notch. “I want to see him. Make sure he’s okay.”
His eyes flashed – admiration? – but he shook his head, and she knew he wouldn’t budge. A firm man, Aidan, like his father, who scared the hell out of her. “No, kid. Stay here with Sam, and I’ll let you know when I’ve got him safe.”
“Come on in.” Sam pushed the door wide and waved her in, holding the baby in one arm. “I’ll make us some tea.”
~*~
Three weeks from her due date, Ava couldn’t sleep for shit. The baby, so sedate and calm thus far, had decided that she was ready to come into the world, and seemed to be doing somersaults in the womb, kicking at her kidneys and making her belly heave in the dead of night. She lay on her side, facing her sleeping husband, hands pressed to her belly, willing the little bean to quiet down. She was exhausted and restless and more or less miserable. I want to meet you, too, she thought. But let’s get some sleep, okay?
Loverboy (Dartmoor Book 5) Page 1