by Anne Marsh
I only need to ink another two hundred thousand cowboys or so to come up with the money to fix Auntie Dee’s house.
“If you need money, take mine.”
“There are so many things wrong with that statement that I don’t know where to start.”
“Try,” he whispers, nipping my ear. “You and I have gotta start talking about our shit.”
“So you’re back to wanting to give the relationship thing a try? You confuse the hell out of me.”
“I never stopped,” he says roughly.
“So last night’s hot-cold thing was a fluke?”
“Sometimes I need space,” he grits out. I twist my head so I can see his face, and the expression there is scary. It’s part self-loathing, part hatred, and I’m pretty certain I’m not misreading the need for violence. Angel wants to hurt someone or something, and while I know he’d never hurt me physically, it’s uncomfortable.
“Okay. Now tell me why.”
“No.” He doesn’t dress up his answer with excuses. Some genies don’t go back in the bottle once you let them out, and they damned certain don’t grant wishes. Angel is holding onto secrets that he can’t or won’t share with me.
“Then tell me this: was it what I told you last night?” I’m so tired of worrying about my past. Instead of holding on, I want to let go. I try to turn away from Angel, but he won’t let me.
“Nothing you ever tell me could push me away,” he promises. “I’m not leaving you. I’m in this for the long haul.”
“You left last night,” I point out, knowing I sound pathetic. Really, really pathetic. I wish Rory were here to kick me, but he’s disappeared inside the RV for what he calls a “siesta” and I label a “hangover.”
“I came back,” Angel counters calmly.
He officially drives me insane. “I can’t wait around for you to work through this come-go-stay bullshit.”
And… he nods. See? He’s messing with my head.
“It won’t happen again. Now tell me why I can’t give you money.”
“Jesus, Angel. For starters, because I don’t have any right to it. Secondly, I want to use it to fix up a house that you want to tear down. You don’t see the problem with that?”
“I don’t want you touching other men,” he growls.
“Too bad it’s in my job description.” I’m teasing the beast. I know this. “Most guys don’t find it kinky.”
That gets his attention. “Most?”
Yeah. Angel’s not happy about the caveat.
I shrug. “Some guys like the pain or the buzz of the needle. I don’t ask. I don’t look. As long as they keep in their pants, I’m cool with it.”
“For fuck’s sake, if you need to tattoo someone, tattoo me.”
And, hello opportunity knocking on my door. I’m not passing up my chance to mark Angel. If I could, I’d tattoo a no trespassing sign on his gorgeous ass, but I do have professional standards.
So I ask him: “What do you want?”
ANGEL
“Surprise me.” Fuck. My voice sounds gruff, like I’ve been smoking too much or crying too hard. Maybe scream. I know what men sound like when they’ve screamed for hours.
Rose nods, and pulls away from me. I let her go, because her attention’s still one hundred percent focused on me. She bends over the portable tattoo station, sketching something with a pencil. Frowns. Erases a line and starts again. It’s no surprise that I’m a work in progress.
Eventually, she comes back over to me, frowning. “You sure about this? I know you’re a control freak.”
She doesn’t have to point out that I’m letting her make the decision here. She’s going to be the one—temporarily—in control.
“Do it.” I hurt her last night. I didn’t mean to, but I was an asshole. Letting her ink me now is payback. She’s good at what she does—fucking brilliant—but that’s not the point. She chooses the design, she chooses where to mark me, and I take it. I drop onto the chair where her last guy sat.
“Wrist,” she says, thank fuck. Knowing Rose, it could have been my ass or my dick. I’d like to think I’d do anything for her, but I suspect I have limits. I cross my arms over the back of the chair, exposing my right wrist.
“You’re not gonna make me sign a waiver?” I may be an tattoo virgin, but I’m pretty sure paperwork is the part of any ink job.
She hesitates. “Can I trust you?”
Big fucking question right there. I give it to her straight. “Yes.”
She nods. “So let’s do this.”
She bends over my wrist and sprays the skin there with something cold and antiseptic smelling. Then she applies a stencil. That reminds me of the prize in the Cracker Jack box that my brothers and I fought over when we were little. Good to know she has a plan for my unmarked skin.
When she reaches for the needle, she hesitates. “Still don’t want to look? This is your chance at a temporary tattoo.”
“You trust me, I trust you,” I tell her. “That’s how this is gonna work.”
She’s not sold. “Maybe I’ll give you something really ugly. Or tattoo card verses on you.”
I’m not good at trust. People rely on me and not the other way round. Honestly? I don’t know that I can trust her. There’s no way to know. It’s like pulling myself up the cliff face, knowing that I go up or I fall off. Those are my options.
“I’ll like whatever you choose. You do fantastic work.”
She sighs. “And this is why you’re not going to end up with a pink cat on your wrist.”
And then she snaps on a pair of rubber gloves and gets to work. I’d rather have her touch me without the latex between us. Fuck, I feel that way all the time. It’s cute, the way she tries to keep me safe, when it’s my job to keep her safe.
When she picks up a thin needle and starts outlining my new ink, I keep my eyes on her face. I’ve been hurt before. This pain is a tickle, buzzing at my senses. She holds my wrist in place, her fingers pressing, pulling at my skin. I don’t do restraints. For a moment I tense up, before I force myself to relax.
“You okay?” She looks up, assessing.
“Fine.” As if I’d tell her anything different.
She must believe me, however, because she goes back to work. The bottom of my wrist turns out to be more sensitive than the top, but I really am fine. I watch the top of her, following the bounce of the crazy, messy ponytail she’s got going on. Her hair curls where it escapes from the hair tie.
“This next part is going to hurt,” she warns me a few minutes later. “I have to shade it.”
“I can handle it.” I touch her cheek with my free hand. Jesus. She’s soft. And I hurt her. I am such an ass.
“If you need to stop, just tell me.”
I’m wondering how bad it can really hurt and how much worse I deserve when she picks up a different needle and starts in. She’s right. This is different, deeper. This needle bites into my skin, filling up the outline with rich, dark color. The pain is there beneath the surface, but I focus on Rose. Not like it’s a hardship. She’s fucking gorgeous when she’s focused on her work.
“Done,” she announces and lets go of my wrist. It feels like Christmas when I look.
She’s given me a single, black eagle feather. My ink is about three inches long and one inch wide, but she’s packed so much detail into that real estate. It’s fucking gorgeous.
I tug her head down to mine. “Thanks,” I say against her mouth and then I kiss her, marking her in front of my cowboys, my brothers, and anyone else who’s watching. Rose is mine.
She’s breathless when I release her mouth. “Do you like it?”
It’s perfect. “Beautiful,” I tell her. “Kinda makes me want to let you ink all of me. Now tell me why you picked a feather.”
She sighs. “The next time you climb up a cliff without a rope, maybe you’ll remember that maybe you can’t fly, but you can fall.”
That’s when I know she cares.
ANGEL
Rose doesn’t come over to the house during the daylight hours for three days. Probably because she’s busy inking every loser in Lonesome. She talks when she works, a constant stream of chatter that I listen to shamelessly when I can. I learn which TV shows she likes and which bands. I also know what her dream vacation would be (hiking up to Machu Picchu because apparently she has a secret masochistic side), what she would name a horse (another thing that happens over my dead body), and where I can buy almost everything online. At night, though, she comes over to my place and we have sex. Lots and lots of amazing, hot, fantastic sex.
And then she gets up and she leaves my ass in the bed. I’m fairly certain she’s doing this to make a point, but I go with it.
I need to work on my nonexistent relationship skills, because when she’s not working and we’re not fucking, she disappears inside that RV of hers. I can’t tell if she’s ignoring me, ignoring us, or maybe she has some deadly bird flu and she needs me. Yeah. It’s fucking pathetic. Eventually, I lose patience and I go over to her “place.” The fucking not-good-enough RV she shares with Rory. I bang on the door and wait. And then wait some more.
The screen door stays firmly closed.
Okay then.
I knock on the door harder than is strictly necessary. Rory flings the door open. He’s wearing a pair of partially buttoned Levis. This means that I now know his nipples are pierced, as are his ears. Even through the tattoos decorating his ribs and scrolling over his stomach, the muscles are clearly visible. The look on his face is decidedly unfriendly, making it obvious that, despite the pretty decorations, he’d be happy to kick my ass for me. That’s fan-fucking-tastic, because I’m not feeling civilized myself. I could get away with murder because out here I’m a fucking king. I own the land, I run the cattle. My boys will guard my back and cover my ass.
“Where’s Rose?”
“Out.” Rory scratches his belly with a self-satisfied smirk.
I slap a palm against the doorframe and lean in. “Be more specific.”
He flashes me his middle finger. “Guess who’s not the boss of me?”
He makes me fucking repeat myself. “Where’s Rose?”
Rory waits a beat before he gives it up, but guess he’s into self-preservation after all because he finally does give me the information I need. “Rose is cleaning out at Auntie Dee’s.”
Information appreciated. I nod toward my truck where Dare’s got his ass parked in my front seat. “I’ve got her a second opinion on potential repairs.”
A skeptical look crosses Rory’s face. “You want to help her?”
There’s all sorts of shit I’d like to do to Rose and that’s the truth. “She needs a second opinion on the repairs to that house,” I say instead.
“She’s at the house,” he repeats. “You want her, you’ll find her there.”
Good enough. I head toward the truck and slam the vehicle into drive.
Dare crosses his arms. “Rose is a good kid.”
Fuck. The whole world’s on her side. I don’t need the five-minute drive to Auntie Dee’s to figure that out. Not being a flowers and candy kind of guy, I’ve traded romance for practically. Dare rocks at construction and there’s nothing he can’t fix.
When Dare and I roll up, Rose is standing on the sagging porch, picking at the ribbons of paint curling from the railing. She’s got a stack of architectural drawings pinned to the floor with a pair of flip-flops, but she doesn’t look defeated. That’s my Rose.
The local inspector is just finishing up. The guy leans into her in a way that makes me want to growl, walking her through a list of a dozen-plus code violations she needs to remedy before he’ll even consider giving her a certificate of occupancy.
Rose’s get-up today is clearly designed to torture me. A pair of itty-bitty denim cut-offs cup her ass and stop just short of covering her cheeks. As if those shorts aren’t impractical enough, the four-inch wedge sandals give her legs that go on for miles. I should worry about her breaking an ankle—I doubt Rose has health insurance and there’s no resident doctor in Lonesome—but instead, I imagine her legs wrapped around my waist.
Just like the damned contractor is.
Making her vision a reality won’t be easy. Money aside, Lonesome lacks the contractors she needs. The house also requires more major repairs than I have fingers. And yet her passion for her dream is infectious. For no good, understandable reason, she’s decided to turn Auntie Dee’s house into a tattoo parlor with an apartment for her to live in. If I could, I’d make it happen for her.
She pops right over to me when my boots hit her front porch. “Getting the bad news?” I ask her.
The last time we saw each other, we were both naked and I was balls-deep inside her. You’d never know it to look at her, though. She levels an icy smile on me.
“You expect me to fail,” she says.
Pretty much, but this isn’t really about her succeeding or failing. This is about the house, the property, the water, and the sheer impossibility of her living here. I go with the safe answer.
“This house needs major repairs.”
“But it can be fixed,” she argues. Rose lives to argue with me. She plops down on the top step of the porch. Followed by Dare, the inspector disappears back inside to “check one more thing,” even though I can’t imagine what the man hasn’t investigated already.
“It should be bulldozed. You’d need thousands of dollars.” I lean back against the porch pillar, crossing one booted foot over the other. “Tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Do you have that kind of cash?”
“I could try for a mortgage,” she counters stubbornly, crossing her arms over her chest. That defensive movement pushes her breasts up into luscious little mounds. Carrying her back to bed and making her forget all about this crazy dreams of hers shoots up my priority list. I can make the loss up to her. She’ll get over it.
“We both know a bank won’t lend on this place. There’s no value in a tear-down house.”
Plus, I pretty much am the bank in these parts.
“Auntie Dee’s place is not a tear-down.” Fingers rubbing her arms, she tilts her head back, letting it hit the railing. Maybe, with her eyes closed, she can’t notice the shower of paint flakes that catch in her hair. “Not to me,” she says, but now she sounds tired.
Yes, I think. That’s the plan. “Be reasonable, Rose,” I say instead, because I have no intention of answering her question. “Tell me what’s right about this house.”
She shakes her head as if she can’t believe I’m asking that particular question. “This was our home.”
“Four walls”—barely—”a roof. And a door. I don’t see anything so special.”
She could find a rundown wreck in any one of the fifty states.
“No, you wouldn’t. But Auntie Dee would sit right there”— she waves a hand at the two-seater swing behind us—”and I’d curl up right there beside her. You can see the sunset from here, and we’d watch the mountain go all pink and gold. Sometimes she’d tell me stories about places she’d gone, people she’d known before she settled down in Lonesome for good. Other times we’d just sit there together. It was my job to push.” She stares at the swing as if she can still see the woman who took her in when her mother moved away. As if that old woman really was the center of her world, even after Rose up and went, following in her mother’s footsteps.
“Every night,” she continues quietly. “We came out here and we sat and we smelled the roses. She said that mattered, taking that time together. She’d planted that rosebush when she first moved in here. She joked it took up more space on the porch than she did.”
The rosebush is a Lady Banks, which are known for moderation about as much as Rose is. The tiny yellow flowers climb over the roof of the porch, the sheer weight of the blooms threatening to bring the whole thing down beneath its canopy of green and yellow. Rose reaches out, stroking a soft petal, lost in thought. She doesn’t see just flowers. She sees s
omething more.
I have to wonder what it would take to make Rose Jordan look at me that way. We had sex and she was a wildcat in my arms. She came when I told her, and she gave it up like a dream. And then she killed me by opening up to me. She let me touch and taste her, and now she’s under my skin and I want more. I’m jealous of a fucking rosebush and a dead woman Rose can’t, won’t, forget.
Of course, Auntie Dee was a good woman. I’m the exact opposite of good.
“This place is mine,” she says, talking away even though I’m not answering, not with words. “I’ve spent months dreaming about it, drawing up plans for the renovations. This is my home and my chance at success, and I plan on hanging on to it. Even if it is falling down around my ears and I only own half of it,” she adds wryly.
“Start over,” I suggest, hoping she’ll listen. “My offer still stands. I’ll cut you a check, and you can pick out a place that doesn’t come with the largest colony of termites west of the Sierras.”
She opens her mouth, and I can just about see the refusal coming, when the contractor bangs open the screen door and joins us on the porch. Dare follows behind him more slowly, scrawling numbers on one of those notebooks he’s always carting around in his pocket. He’s never quite adjusted to the whole iPhone thing.
“Christ,” the contractor announces cheerfully. “She’s a tear-down, all right. Not sure why you’d want to put her to rights.” He shakes his head. “Thought you were putting a well in here, Mr. Mendoza, not doing renos.”
And cue the shit storm. I glare at the man, but the damage is done.
“The house already has a well.” Rose sounds confused. “It’s not dry.”
“We’re done here,” I snap.
The contractor nods, glancing down at the yellow legal pad where he’s jotted his endless notes.
“No, we’re not. You don’t call the shots here, Angel. Not in my house.” Rose flies to her feet, looking irritated. “Tell me why I need a new well.”
The contractor looks at me because the man isn’t stupid. I can ensure he never works in Northern California again, but the words are out there, the damage done. I mentally flip it the bird and gesture for the other man to continue.