Work of Art

by Monica Alexander

Ryan stood straighter at that jab. “I’m not going to tell you again, Hammond, back the fuck away, and leave us alone, or I’ll level you.”

  Hammond just laughed. “Carson, I’ve known you since the fifth grade, and you’ve never fought anyone in your life.”

  Then, before I realized what was happening, Ryan’s fist flew out and connected with Hammond’s jaw, and Hammond was flat on his back in a second.

  “There’s a first time for everything, asshole,” Ryan said, stepping over Hammond’s prone body. Then he turned back to look at him. “And spread the word. Anyone who talks shit about her will have to answer to me.”

  I followed him as he walked away in a huff, afraid not to, as Hammond struggled to gain his wits about him again. Anger was radiating off of Ryan as he stormed into the kitchen and over to the refrigerator, yanking open the freezer door and wincing in pain.

  “What’s wrong?” I was instantly by his side as he cradled his hand. “Here, let me,” I said, nudging him to the side so I could reach past him.

  I grabbed an ice pack from the freezer and a towel that was hanging over the handle of the stove, wrapped the freezing cold ice pack in the towel and took Ryan’s hand in mind. Gently, I placed the cold compress over his reddening skin and held it there.

  I looked up after a few seconds to see him gazing at me in wonder.

  “What?” I asked, not sure what he was so in awe of.

  “You’re incredible. I love you.”

  My eyes went wide. “You what?”

  He chuckled as if his brain just realized what his mouth had said, but he didn’t seem to care. He pulled the ice off his hand, wrapped his arms around me, pulled me close and kissed me like we were saying goodbye. But then he pulled back and looked at me.

  “I love you,” he said gently. Then he kissed my nose.

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I wasn’t ready to say it back, that was for sure. “Um, wow,” I said instead, and he chuckled again.

  “I wasn’t expecting you to say it back. Take your time, say it when you’re ready, but just know that I’ll take down anyone who has anything negative to say about you. I mean it. No one talks to my girlfriend that way.”

  “Thank you,” I told him, as I wrapped my arms around his neck and hugged him tightly to me. “You’re so special to me, Ryan Carson.”

  “And one day soon, you’ll love me,” he said confidently.

  And I knew he was right. Just as he had been when he told me he would kiss me at the end of our first date, he was right about me loving him. And a few weeks later, I told him just that.

  Ryan never had to defend me again after that , since word spread about his attack on Hammond, but it didn’t matter, because when you’re loved by someone like I was loved by Ryan Carson, digs from small-minded people don’t really register with you.

  He loved me so deeply and so much that I never expected him to hurt me. But he did, and because of that, I was jaded against men. I had been guarded around them ever since, and I didn’t let relationships go on for longer than a few months. I didn’t want anyone getting attached to me, because I wouldn’t get attached to them.

  Ryan had broken me, and I wasn’t sure I was even fixable.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Harper

  I felt like banging the phone down, but Paulie was standing in my doorway, so I needed to maintain my composure. I didn’t sensor myself much around my employees since, after all, this was a tattoo parlor, but I also didn’t want them to see me emotional. And I was emotional right at that moment.

  I took a deep breath.

  “Hey Paulie,” I said, turning to face him.

  “Gracie said you wanted to see me?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, come on in,” I said, gesturing to one of the two armchairs in my private room/office. He sat down and looked at me expectantly. “I need you to be in charge for a few days – again. I’m sorry to spring this on you, but I have to go back out to Boston. There are some issues with my mother’s estate, and the lawyers need me to sign some papers. I know it’s last minute, but I sort of just want to put this behind me.”

  I probably sounded like one of the most detached human beings on the planet, but Paulie knew my mother and I hadn’t ever gotten along, so he either got it or he didn’t feel the need to press for details. And that was probably why I trusted him over anyone else.

  He was respectful of other people, so I knew he’d be respectful of my shop. I’d let him be in charge a handful of times before, and everything had run smoothly, so I figured it would mean less stress for me, since I could already feel the tension creeping up my neck as I sat there talking to him.

  Paulie ran a hand back through his long black hair. He was half-Italian, half-American Indian, so he had some really unique features, but my favorite was his silky hair. Women were always commenting on it and wanted to touch it. He also had some really cool ink that was representative of his tribe that I’d done for him over the years. And the one on his back that spanned his shoulder blades was so detailed that it took me five sessions to finish it, but it looked fantastic when it was done.

  “Yeah, boss, you got it. How long are you going to be gone for?”

  I thought about what the lawyer I’d just spoken to had told me. “Probably three days. I’m leaving on Monday, and I’ll be back at work on Thursday.”

  He shrugged. “No worries. We’re good here. Why don’t you take some time off, stay there longer?”

  I raised an eyebrow at him. “No. I grew up in Boston, and as much as I love the city, there are too many bad memories there, so I think I’ll be in and out as fast as I can.”

  “You need a vacation, Harper,” he said sternly.

  I sighed. “I know.”

  I didn’t elaborate on that statement, because what was I going to say? I needed a vacation, but I didn’t exactly feel like going anywhere. The past few weeks had been stressful as hell. Maybe I’d take Brandon up on his offer of hanging out at his vineyard house for a few days once he moved to town. Maybe some fresh air would do me good.

  Paulie knew me well enough not to pry when I didn’t say anything further, so he just said, “Anything else? I’ve got a guy waiting for me to do a phoenix on his shoulder.”

  “No, thanks Paulie. I appreciate your help.”

  “Anything for you, boss.”

  I smiled at him. Then I picked up the phone and called for reinforcements.

  “Hey BF,” Brandon said when he answered the phone on the second ring.

  “Can I come visit?” I asked him, probably sounding sullen and pathetic as shit.

  “Hell yeah!” he cheered. “I’m stoked. What’s the occasion?”

  “I have to settle my mother’s estate,” I explained.

  “Estate? What happened? Did she die?”

  “Yes,” I deadpanned, not really meaning to, but what else was I supposed to say. He’d asked a direct question.

  “Oh, shit. Sorry, Harper. When did it happen?”

  “Um, so when we met, I was actually flying back from the funeral.”

  He was silent for a few seconds. “You had just gone to your mother’s funeral?” he questioned. “Why didn’t you say anything? I would have been a fucking wreck.”

  I took a deep breath. “Oh, Brandon, that’s because your mother is probably a wonderful lady. Whereas mine was someone who tried to sleep her way through life, constantly told me I was worthless and kicked me out when she found out I was pregnant at eighteen.”

  I heard him suck in a breath. “Okay, so I’ll pick you up from the airport, and we’ll head straight to the bar.”

  I laughed. “That would be amazing.”

  “And you can stay at my place.”

  “Uh, I don’t think that’s a good idea. I’ll just get a hotel.”

  “Like hell, you will. I have a spare room. You can stay with me,” he said without hesitation.

  “I don’t know. I really don’t want to be murdered in my sleep,” I said, hoping to sound playful, b
ut there was a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that told me I really didn’t know him at all.

  “Harper, I just killed someone last week,” he said, so completely serious that I covered my mouth so he wouldn’t hear me laugh. “I’m good for at least another two months.”

  “Oh, so that’s your pattern?” I questioned, recalling terminology I’d heard when watching Criminal Minds.

  “Yes. I kill and then I disappear. It’s a way to throw off the authorities, and it’s worked for ten years. Besides, you’re not in my MO. I only kill blonds.”

  “So you’re one of Boston’s most notorious serial killers,” I joked, realizing that my sour mood had basically turned around in two minutes of talking to Brandon Cooper.

  “The most notorious,” he confirmed, playing along.

  “So, I should probably turn you in, right?”

  “Unless you want to be my assistant, my right-hand girl, my accomplice. Think about it. Anyone you want to off? I can be of great help with that.”

  I laughed. “Oh, if you only knew.”

  “Okay,” he said conspiratorially. “Text me your flight information, I’ll pick you up, we’ll have some drinks and then go off everyone who’s ever wronged you – but not Ryan, because he’s my boy, and I love him.”

  I sighed. He had to go there. “You had to bring him up, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, I did, because I think you need to reconsider this shit between you two. He’s a great guy, he’s with the wrong girl, and I know he was very, let’s say, intrigued to have run into you again.”

  “Brandon, drop it,” I said firmly, and I think he got the message although he’d sufficiently planted a really bad idea into my head, and I sort of wanted to smack him for doing it. “It’s bad enough that you talked me into going to his stupid wedding. I don’t want to talk about him before then.”

  “Fine, I’ll drop it. I won’t mention him again,” he said, but I really didn’t believe him.

  “Thank you. I’ll see you on Monday afternoon.”

  “Can’t wait. It’s going to be epic.”

  “Yes, it’ll be legendary,” I deadpanned.

  * * *

  “Damn, you look hotter than I remember, and I just saw you four hours ago,” Brandon gushed when I walked into his condo after my meeting with my mother’s lawyer. And I wasn’t happy.

  I dropped the key he’d given me on the counter and set my bag on the floor.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked from where he was sitting working on his laptop.

  I sighed. “My mother, the piece of work that she was, was mortgaged up to her eyeballs and had maxed out all her credit cards. I’m not quite sure what she was doing with the money she was earning, but she wasn’t paying bills with it.”

  Brandon looked at me pointedly, covered one nostril with his index finger and sniffed loudly to mime someone ingesting cocaine.

  “Yeah, exactly,” I said, sitting on one of the matching black leather chairs in his living room.

  His whole condo was a stereotypical bachelor pad, and it was so modern, right down to the black and white framed photograph of a naked model over his couch. As a woman, I’d scoffed at it when I’d walked in, because it was pretty much exactly what you’d expect to see in a place like his, but as an artist, I kind of loved it. It was actually a beautiful piece of art.

  I kicked off my black oxfords and tucked my legs up under me, letting my black shirt dress cover my knees and hide anything appealing from Brandon’s eager eyes. He’d been making lewd references about seeing me naked since I’d arrived the day before, and I wasn’t in the mood for his, albeit joking, perverted comments.

  “What does that mean for you?” he asked then.

  He knew I’d come out to Boston to settle my mother’s affairs and also knew I figured that would mean putting her house on the market, selling her car, hiring someone to pack up her things to donate to Goodwill, and figuring out which charity to donate her money to since I wasn’t keeping a dime of it. I never figured I’d be unearthing family secrets, but I guess in my family, it was sort of expected. Aside from my father, my family was crazy.

  And I should have known. I really should have known, but I chose to look the other way and ignore my mother’s choices. And with good reason. Ever since my stepfather had gone to prison, and we’d ended up broke, she always seemed to have money, but she never had a job. And it was sort of one of those things that you just didn’t want know the answer to because you knew it was going to be bad.

  And it was.

  I untucked my legs, crossed one over the other and caught Brandon trying to look up my skirt. “Stop being a pervert,” I told him sharply.

  He shook his head. “I can’t. It’s who I am. I’m perverted, and when the opportunity to look up a girl’s skirt comes up or a chance to see her boobies, I’m looking.”

  “Boobies? Really?”

  He grinned. “I loooove boobies.”

  “Great. So glad to hear it.”

  He let his grin fall. “So seriously, what does this mean?”

  And instantly he was back in financial planner, serious guy mode.

  I sighed. “Well, the house is worth something, so the bank will get it, which is fine by me. I have horrid memories of living there anyway. And I guess I’ll cover the twenty-five thousand she owes Visa and American Express.”

  Brandon looked confused for a few seconds. “Why would you have to pay her credit card debt?”

  I smiled, but it was more of a ‘wait until you hear this shit’ smile.

  I took a deep breath. I was going to keep things in control. I’d already gone off on the lawyer when he’d shared this information with me, and I wasn’t going to do it again. I really shouldn’t have been surprised.

  “My mother, charming woman that she was, not only put her entire fucking, mortgaged to the hilt, maxed out estate in my name, but she also used my name and social security number to open up two credit cards last year, and then she made herself an approved user and maxed them out completely!”

  I took a deep breath, realizing I was losing it, but I couldn’t believe she’d done something like that. Who does that to anyone, let alone their child? She had to have been seriously desperate for money. I could only hope she’d been using it to buy groceries and not a new Chanel handbag and designer clothes, but I knew that was a slim possibility. I’d seen her closet.

  “Shut the hell up,” Brandon said, his eyes bugging out of his head.

  I sighed. “I guess that’s what I get for barely speaking to her over the past decade.”

  “Dude, that sucks.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said, as I pulled my hair back into a ponytail. It was still half pink, and the lawyer I’d talked to had been distracted by it the whole time I’d been in his office, but I didn’t care.

  “But, oh, you haven’t heard the best part,” I told Brandon, knowing he’d love what I was going to share.

  “What?” he asked, his eyes lighting up.

  “Take a guess at how my mother was earning money for the past twelve years?”

  “Stripper,” Brandon said quickly, and he was pretty darn close. “Drug dealer. No, cigarette girl.”

  “What? No. This isn’t the nineteen twenties.”

  He thought for a moment. “High-class call girl.”

  I pointed at him and touched my finger to my nose. “Ding, ding, ding. You win!”

  “Shit, really? She was a call girl?”

  I laughed, but in was a non-humorous, ‘I just found out my mother was a hooker’ kind of a laugh. “Yes, and apparently most her clients were the husbands of the women in our town. Nice, right?”

  “No shit,” Brandon hissed.

  “Yeah, apparently she would ‘date’ them for as long as they wanted, sometimes years even, be available for their ‘needs’ and in return, they paid her enough to feed her drug habit.”

  “How in the hell did you find this out?”

  I laughed. “Oh, this is good. My
mother had W-2s for her legitimate business as an escort. She even had a fucking company, and apparently I’m now the owner of it.”

  “Sweet,” Brandon hissed, as he eyed me lasciviously. “I want to hire you.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Oh, sorry, I’m selling the company to the homeless man who sits outside your building. He offered me a whole dollar, and I can’t turn down an offer like that.”

  “Damn, I’m too late,” Brandon joked.

  I shook my head. I planned on dissolving the company. I did not want that in my name.

  “She was always a train wreck. Always. You know she got pregnant with me at sixteen?” His eyebrows went up, but he didn’t say anything, and I wondered if he thought I was a hypocrite. “Yup, she got knocked up by her high school boyfriend, and then she had the nerve to kick me out when the same thing happened to me, all because she was pissed off that I became the self-fulfilling prophecy she’d always feared.”

  “What do you mean self-fulfilling prophecy?”

  I quirked a half-smile at him. “Oh, she told me from the time I was a teenager that I was going to get pregnant in high school. She said it was inevitable that I would be just like her, and guys would love me because I was pretty, and I’d better not be a whore.”

  “Wow, that’s some stellar parenting.”

  “Tell me about it. Fortunately, I was good at tuning her out, and I was pretty smart, so I knew how things worked. I was so afraid that I would end up like her that I never dated.”

  “Never?”

  “Never. I kissed a guy at a party when I was thirteen and went home and cried for hours, afraid that it was the first step on the road to whoredom. So I just didn’t date. Then a few years later, my stepfather was arrested for stealing millions from his clients, including a decent amount of people I went to school with, and I became a social outcast. Ryan was actually the first boy to ask me out after my family’s name was dragged through the mud. He didn’t seem to care what my stepdad had done. He just liked me.”

  “Your face just lit up when you talked about him,” Brandon told me, and I let my face fall.

  “Shut up. It did not.”

  “It did,” he confirmed. “I was not going to bring him up, per your request, but let the record stand that you mentioned him. But I’m not going to hold it against you. Please continue.”