Provoked

by Riley Murphy

  By the time she reached the terminal and saw her mom, she was ready to put Neil and their non-relationship breakup behind her.

  “Did you catch him?”

  Charlie slid into the seat beside Cat and shook her head. “No. I’ll call him when we get back.”

  But she wouldn’t because he didn’t want her to.

  She’d blown it.

  God that hurt.

  Chapter Twenty

  Charlie lined up the green peas on the porcelain dish in a series of five by five rows. She examined the neat pattern, deciding there was definitely something wrong with her. Her mother was on the mend. In fact she hadn’t looked this well in a while and her dad was a new man because of it, so Charlie should be jumping for joy, but she couldn’t. After spending nearly two weeks in Arizona at the clinic and coming home to find out that Regina had disappeared and the police didn’t seem to care about it, Charlie didn’t feel like being patient. She didn’t agree with letting them do their jobs either, because they weren’t.

  “You heard what Dad said.”

  “Are you still angry that he told Jude all about us?”

  Cat sighed. “Jude Wilde doesn’t matter to me anymore.”

  “Well, I’m mad at Dad.” Charlie thought about how many times he spoke with Neil over that two week period and had shared none of their conversation with her, and said, “I’m really mad at him.”

  “Why? Because Dad doesn’t want us going anywhere near Sharp ever again?”

  “Exactly.”

  “That’s the bitch of it. Even though I agree with you on some points. I mean we both know that Sharp’s involved in your friend’s disappearance. It isn’t Dad withholding info from us though. It’s dickwad and his new bestie you should be mad at. They won’t give us any info. Zilch. Nada. And they have info. I know it.”

  “Why do you call Jude names and you don’t extend the same courtesy to Neil? He was being equally stubborn about not sharing information.”

  “Call it like it is. They flat-out ignored us. But Master Neil is my people. Jude Wilde isn’t.”

  “Your people? That’s insane. And since when am I the risk taker? You’re usually the one to jump all over getting into trouble.”

  Cat shrugged and drew up her legs to curl underneath her on the couch. “It’s not time yet. I’m not feeling it.”

  Charlie stopped pushing the peas around on her plate. She wasn’t hungry anyways. “You usually feel it?”

  “Don’t you?”

  She thought about that question. To a certain extent she figured she did feel things. She certainly felt something wasn’t right when that shipment had gone missing two years ago. Enough that when Regina was hired by the museum and then approached her about doing an investigation on it, Charlie had agreed to do what she could to help. “I guess I do.”

  “So,” Cat swirled the wine she was drinking around in the glass and then saluted her with it, “are you feeling like you want to go over to Jude’s house because you know he’s the closest link you might have to the guy who dumped you? That’s why you’re staying here in the city with me, isn’t it? To be closer to him?”

  “No.” Charlie kicked the table leg a couple of times with her big toe, and grumbled, “I never should have told you what happened that night.”

  “Why not? It combined the two things I’m most passionate about. Sex and cars.”

  She threw down her fork and pushed her plate aside. “I shouldn’t be thinking about him at all. We have a long lost sister somewhere out in the world and my friend is missing.”

  “Ah, you gotta love guilt.” Cat downed her glass of wine. “It’s almost as good as self-loathing. Why can’t you be happy that Mom’s on the mend, Dad’s working on finding our sister, and Wilde and his BFF promised to bring Regina home?”

  Those were damn good questions. “I don’t know.”

  Her sister got up and poured herself another glass of wine. She also poured Charlie one, handing it to her. “I know why. None of those things involve Master Cannon.”

  “First he says that I disappointed him. And then he says I blew it.”

  “The guy’s good. I can’t fault him in the ‘teaching your woman how to behave’ department.”

  Charlie ignored that as Cat plopped back down on the couch. This was serious and all her sister seemed to do lately was make jokes and one-off comments. She knew this was Cat’s way of dealing with stress and pain, but enough was enough already. “Can we focus on you tonight? I think I need a break.”

  Cat looked over the rim of her glass and made a face behind it. “Whatever.”

  “What’s wrong with you? Have I done something?”

  Her sister was so antsy lately. One moment she was sitting staring daggers and the next she shot up and walked to the window. “Oh no. You never do anything. Perfect Charlotte.”

  That was it. Charlie plunked her glass down and said between tightly clenched teeth, “What? You’re not going to finish your favorite phrase? Perfect Charlotte, smells like a harlot.”

  Cat laughed. “We were kids. It was funny, okay?”

  Charlie wasn’t letting this slide. “We were teenagers and I had a sweating situation that summer that you didn’t help me out with. Would it have killed you to say, ‘Hey sis, put down the cologne it isn’t fooling anyone, and roll some BO chaser under your arms’? Instead you made fun of me behind my back with all the other kids.”

  “I did not make fun of you.” Cat came to the table and sat in the chair opposite her. “I swear.”

  This was the second time since they’d sort of made up that Charlie was given to wonder what the hell they were doing. They had so many important things to talk about and here they were arguing over underarm deodorant. What were the two of them so afraid to talk about that they had to fill up the quiet space with white noise?

  She knew what it was.

  She stared her sister right in the eyes, and asked, “Do you hate me?”

  The oven timer ticked at a steady pace. The refrigerated compressor hummed relentlessly. Even the crickets outside the patio door could be heard over Cat’s silence. And it was too much for Charlie. All of it. Every ache, pain, worry, fear, and joy she’d experienced over the last few weeks crashed together. Suddenly there she was hyperventilating. She couldn’t breathe. She needed to get out of here. She needed space and when Cat stood, reaching for her, she realized her twin was the last person she wanted consoling her, which broke her heart even more because she didn’t understand why.

  *****

  Neil had spent the last few weeks trying to figure out how all this happened. One minute his life was calm and he was in control of a volatile force in the club circles, and the next his life was turned upside down and that force was once again free to do as he pleased. The bitch of it was, eventually he’d deal with Kelli, that was a given, it was Charlotte who was taking up most of his brain space these days.

  He’d examined all aspects of how her brief arrival in his life had changed everything for him. Problem was, he thought he had everything he wanted in life before he met her, but it wasn’t until he had met her that he really understood what he’d been missing out on. He’d only been functioning. Living. Existing. And then what happens? She arrives on his radar and lights up the damn thing.

  That screen had been dark for two perfectly good years.

  Good, yeah, but not phenomenal and that was the crux of the problem. He’d unwisely opened himself up for the first time in years with a woman and look where it had gotten him. The steel heart he’d bragged about having? Oh it may not have broken, but it sure as hell felt like it had melted a little and that made him angry. Furious. Disenfranchised with, maybe not the female population as a whole, but definitely with her lying-thieving-twin-sister-switching ass. Who was she really? She had him questioning everything he believed in. All his rules and rituals may as well be nothing if he chose to bend on his decision about keeping his distance from her. It wasn’t that she’d broken one of his rule
s. It was that she’d violated the most important ones.

  He stalked into his living room and rummaged through his coffee table trunk for a distraction. All the while thinking.

  The first week, after he’d found out how she’d played him, he was adamant that she’d be out of his life and thoughts for good.

  Then he started waffling. He never waffled about anything until her.

  One moment he wanted nothing to do with her and the next he was thinking up all kinds of nasty things he really wanted to do with her.

  One day he’d decided he couldn’t live with her on any terms.

  And in the next he concluded he couldn’t live without her, screw the terms.

  It was almost as if he was two people. The way he saw the split in a plain analogy? There was the correct and responsible individual who paid the bills when the money came in, and then there was his idiot cousin who took the cash and purchased lottery tickets hoping to hit the big-time. Neil needed to be the responsible individual, not the idiot cousin because just like those long shot lottery tickets, a relationship with Charlotte would no doubt be a bust.

  He couldn’t back down now. He’d already told her she blew it.

  You miss her.

  Yeah he did.

  Probably why he stopped counting the days since he’d seen her. And too, why he pushed himself during work hours, and then even more at night when it came to digging for information about Kelli and the auction. The success he’d reached with the latter was the reason he and Jude had all the info they needed on the man’s operation ahead of schedule. He should have been happy to be abreast of the situation. Unfortunately, that head start put him in a bad place over the last week. He hated being in a holding pattern, but in terms of finding Pearl they’d done everything they could. Now it was only a matter of waiting for Wilde’s text with the go-ahead.

  So this was the third night in a row he sat down and broke out a puzzle. He always started the activity with the best of intentions in mind. It was only after he’d completed the border and began the fill-in that things usually went south. He was halfway done, pushing a red piece into the body of the automobile image that the completed puzzle created, when his mind started to wander. Again. Like it did every other night. It meandered right to thoughts of Charlotte.

  Damn.

  He fit a black piece into an area of the tire and instantly remembered her staring up at him when they were at the ranch. There’d been dirt and grime on her face. She was— No, he wasn’t going to think about her.

  He plucked up another piece. It was silver. He knew where that went. He leaned forward and worked it into the puzzle area of the review mirror, thinking about the color of her eyes the night she was sprawled on the hood of his car. They shined like—no. He wasn’t going to think about her.

  Fucking hell.

  He sat up straight and gave himself a shake, grabbing up a blue piece. Finally, one of the three pieces he needed for the sky above the car. The clouds were almost completed. He pushed the jigsaw piece into the only place it could fit, given the shade of blue it was. He pushed it, turned it, pushed, turned, turned, turned, turned it—

  “Jesus!” He threw it across the room, watching as it skidded over the Carrera marble sill at the foot of the fireplace. The puzzle piece only had four sides. What the hell was he doing? His gaze traveled upward from the marble to the wooden mantle and he knew what he was doing. He was eyeing the tequila bottle he’d left there yesterday. Yeah, he and Patrón had been great friends the last couple of nights. Maybe they needed to hookup again?

  Ding dong.

  Maybe not. He certainly hoped whoever was calling brought something more interesting to the table than a jigsaw puzzle and a bottle of booze. He swung the door open and looked down.

  “Hi.”

  Charlotte looked great. Better than in all the images he was just imagining her, which was a real pisser. “How did you get through the community gate without being buzzed in?”

  “1966.”

  He’d been meaning to change that. “Shouldn’t you be at the ranch while your mom recovers?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve been at Cat’s since yesterday. Mom’s doing so much better. We never realized how sick she was until she wasn’t anymore. Once they corrected the artery she was a new person.”

  “I’m glad, but what are you doing here?” She leaned forward in a silent bid to come in and he didn’t budge. If he let her by there was no telling what would happen. He wasn’t happy she was back in the city either. There was going to be trouble and he didn’t want her near it.

  “I could beat around the bush,” she looked him up and down, “but I think we’re beyond that. I want to get laid.” She held up a hand and stared at his chest as she went through the speech she’d apparently worked on. “I know what you’re thinking.”

  If she did she would have stopped talking.

  “I could choose any stranger at a local bar and ride him until I’m screaming so loudly the glass in my car windows shatter.”

  He really wished she’d shut up.

  “But I don’t want to do that because I’ve been shown the goods, and never got the service. I want service.”

  Now she looked up at him and he stared unblinkingly down. “Charlotte, I thought I already explained I don’t like euphemisms. ‘Goods’ I’m guessing is a reference to my cock and ‘service’ I imagine is me sliding it into you?”

  She put a hand on his chest and grinned. “How do you feel about idioms? As in, ‘don’t let the grass grow under your feet.’ I’m ready to be serviced.”

  He knew he was glaring, but it couldn’t be helped. “You’re ready for something from me, but I don’t think it’s being serviced.”

  The pressure of her hand, the palm on his chest, turned intimate and he didn’t know how she managed it. Maybe he’d only imagined the change? “Okay. I’ll take whatever you got to give. Whatever. I mean…anything. All of it. The big shebang. The whole kit and caboodle. The—”

  “Please stop talking.”

  Her hand fell away and for the first time since she’d arrived on his doorstep she appeared to be lost. “I can’t. You know when you said before that your time was too valuable to waste it on me? That me, wasn’t me. Not completely. You have to give me another chance.”

  His heart went out to her. He knew how difficult this was. He was feeling it too. “Why?”

  “Because my time is too valuable to waste on trying to find a small connection with any man out there,” she hiked her thumb over her shoulder indicating to the world behind her, “when I made a big connection with the man I truly want right here.” Her hand came down like a hatchet and her index finger landed in a poke against his chest.

  The way Neil saw it, he had two choices. Continue to verbally spar with her out in the open and court being put on notice again. After the anonymous note he’d gotten in his mailbox from a disgruntled neighbor the last time she was here, he figured he’d better invite her in. Apparently the Neighborhood Watch didn’t take kindly to a guy leaving his garage door open and going at it on the hood of his car with a beautiful woman. “Why don’t you come in so we can discuss this big connection you think we’ve made?”

  After she sauntered by him, he scowled. “Why aren’t you wearing a jacket? It’s cold now and it’s only going to get colder.”

  “I left Cat’s in kind of a hurry.” She sat down on the couch, picked up a piece of the puzzle and fit it right into one of the sky spots. Damn. “You must really like these. Come to think of it, though, I used to do these all the time when I was a kid.”

  He did too, but if he told her that she’d be grasping at that common straw to build whatever it was she was looking to create between them. He sat on the arm of the chair and sighed. “You seem to leave a lot of places in a hurry, Charlotte. It’s a wonder you can connect to anyone or anything given the habit.”

  With slow precision she put the second to last sky piece in the puzzle and then looked up. “I pref
er my friends to call me Charlie.”

  “Is that what you think I am? A friend?”

  She shook her head. “That’s why I want you to call me tiger.”

  He needed to end this right now. “I have no idea what you want. What your likes or dislikes are. The risks sheet I read and lived by was for your sister. If you knew how careless and dangerous—”

  “I know,” she growled and flopped back on the couch staring at the ceiling, “we already went through that.” She lifted her head up enough that their gazes met. “Didn’t we?”

  He wasn’t sure what her question was. His train of thought stalled when she interrupted him and then completely derailed when he heard her disrespectful tone. Which only highlighted their differences even more. “You are vanilla and I’m—”

  “Holy shit on a salty cracker!” She sat straight up and smacked her knee. “I hate that word. I don’t want to be vanilla. I’d rather be butterscotch. And don’t give me that look. I’m not crazy. The word is demeaning. It’s devaluing. It’s…it’s…”

  “The truth?”

  “It’s not the truth. But there’s no counterpoint. You’re not chocolate. That’s the counter to vanilla. If I’m vanilla what does that make you? Kinky? How does that work?”

  “Vanilla means conventional.”

  She threw up her hands and made a pfft sound. “And this coming from a guy who has excommunicated euphemisms?”

  Neil blinked, and then blinked again as an image of her the night he’d had her in handcuffs came to him. He recalled the moment he’d questioned her about the plug and she was quick to tell him that bullshit about how it was on her hard limits. When he’d pressed her she’d tried to use the excuse that she had changed. This debate was no different. She was looking to make a point, but what was it?

  “Okay, butterscotch, you obviously have something on your mind. You tell me what you’re thinking and then I’ll tell you where I stand—without being interrupted.”

  This time when she sat back, there was no flopping. “That sounds fair, but I can’t guarantee I won’t interrupt occasionally. It’s a bad habit of mine.”