Return of the Bad Boy

by Paige North

The next afternoon after my shocks got fixed, I drove to the garage and told him I needed an oil change. The grin he gave me told me he was so onto me. I know oil changes don’t take very long. But he gave me an in-depth tutorial while I sat on a stool by the workbench, watching him work. I watched his hands moving expertly under my car, for the first time in my life, all I wanted was those grease-stained hands on me.

  Now I sit here in a car with Dax as an adult, watching that muscular forearm of his, this time tattooed with the tail of a serpent. He upshifts onto Interstate 84, and I feel like I’m a teenager again.

  I sneak a look at him. He has his baseball cap on backwards and mirrored sunglasses on, and he’s chewing on gum from the blow pop he just finished. His jaw is more defined, covered with more stubble, and he’s definitely filled out.

  But that same thrill surges through me as it always did, only this time, so much more intense.

  “So what’s the fire, Katydid?” He says, making my body quiver as he says my name. “You must be important, if they can’t do without you for one day.”

  “Not really,” I say, tapping my feet along to Maroon Five. He’s letting me listen to my station, which I guess is as much of an apology for last night as I’m going to get. “I forgot to do something. I’m kind of . . . not my boss’ favorite person right now.”

  “That right?” He laughs. “What is he, an idiot?”

  I smile along with him, because yeah, Fowler is an idiot. It’s nice to hear someone say it out loud. “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve known Katie Donahue for a long time. And there ain’t a single person who’s got anything bad to say about you,” he says, peering at me over his sunglasses with those mesmerizing green eyes. “So your boss must be an idiot.”

  I shrug. Then I say softly, “Nevaeh and Juliet would have bad things to say about me, I’m sure.”

  “Who?” He’s confused. “Oh. Those friends of yours?”

  “They’re not friends anymore. They haven’t been since . . .” I stop, feeling a twinge of heartache over that day. “You know. Since that day in the cafeteria.”

  He laughs bitterly. “Guess a lot of things went on after that, huh? It was the punch that tore the world apart.”

  I nod, thinking more about it. Goosebumps pop up on my arms.

  “What was that asshole’s name again?”

  “Stephen,” I whisper. I look over at Dax nervously and gather my hair into a ponytail to ward off the breeze threatening to blow my hair into a rat’s nest. “The rest of high school was hell for me, after that.”

  “And you blamed me,” he mutters. “Got it.”

  “No, I didn’t,” I assert.

  “Don’t give me that shit. You did. I got expelled, and you stopped coming around to see me after that.”

  I shake my head, but the truth is, yeah, I did. “I had to. My parents grounded me.”

  “Even after that, though.”

  I shrug. My parents were both teaching that day, so they learned right away that Dax got into a fight with Stephen Andrews over me. That blew the whole thing open. They didn’t know the full extent of my relationship with Dax, but it didn’t matter.

  They grounded me. They said I’d been changing over the past few months, and now they knew why. They forbade me to see him again.

  If that was all, though, I might’ve tried to find a way to sneak out and see him. But at school, I became an outcast overnight. Rumors swirled about me and Dax. None of the students knew quite what to make of me anymore, so they ignored me. For months afterwards, I would go home, alone, and cry.

  I hated Dax for making that scene, without even asking me. I hated him for making me want him so bad and uncontrollably that I was willing to go against my parents and lose their trust. I hated him for doing things like getting himself expelled so that my parents would never, ever approve of him. When Dax threw that punch, I felt like I lost everything.

  So yes, I blamed him. Maybe I still do.

  “Well, you started going through your laundry list of girls again, so I didn’t see the point,” I grumble, scowling at him. “And then I came by to tell you I was going to Boston, hoping you’d wish me well, and you were a total dick to me.”

  “Can you blame me? You came by to rub it in my face that you were going to Boston, leaving all us hicks back in Friesville to choke on your dust,” he clarifies.

  “No, I didn’t,” I say. “I thought you would be happy for me. I guess that’s too much to have expect from Dax Harding?”

  He snorts. “Yeah.”

  “I mean, have you ever been with a woman you haven’t treated like shit?” I spit out, recalling all the rumors about him. God, there’s been so many. Once I heard that he’d slept with two different girls in the same night, at the same party. And then there was the rumor that a certain dumpster was named after him because it was where he used to take girls to give him blowjobs between classes.

  The more I think about it, the more disgusted I get. It’s a damn good thing I stopped things from going any further last night.

  The rest of the ride is silent and strained. I spend much of the time looking out the passenger’s side window. It’s only when we’re halfway through the state of Massachusetts that I sneak a glance at Dax. Though I doubt he’s ever been outside the Pennsylvania state lines, he looks just as unimpressed as ever. By the time we get into the city and we’re navigating pretty heavy traffic past the Fenway exit on Interstate 90, he only looks annoyed. “What is this, NASCAR? I’ve never fucking seen such asshole drivers before.”

  “They’re called Massholes. You’ve really never been out of Pennsylvania before?” I ask him incredulously.

  He gives me a sour look. “You know us backwoods people,” he says with a mock Southern drawl, “We’re too busy screwing our sisters to travel much.”

  I roll my eyes. “Oh, stop it. Take this exit.”

  He veers to the right onto Boylston Street. We end up at a standstill for a while, even though it’s Sunday afternoon, but I manage to direct him toward the law firm with little trouble. He pulls into a spot on a narrow cobblestoned street behind Fowler’s fire-engine red Porsche with the LITIG8 license plate.

  By that time, my stomach is twisted in knots. Of course Mr. Fowler is here on a Sunday. Swallowing the lump in my throat, I pull my hair out of the ponytail, fluff it, and scuff my feet into my heels. “I shouldn’t be long,” I murmur, gnawing on my lip.

  He jumps out of the car and leans against it, eyes darting all over the place as if he hasn’t a clue what to look at first. “Take your time,” he says, gnawing on the stick of his blow pop and checking out my boss’ ride. As he does, two women in business suits do a double take and check him out.

  I can’t blame them. This city has much to offer, but he’s the best looking thing on the street (and any other street in a fifty mile radius). The way his butt looks in those jeans? Criminal. I feel a chill snake down my back as I push open the door and think, Dax Harding is waiting for me.

  Who the hell cares? Maybe in high school, that would’ve been a badge of honor for a girl, but he’s still just as immature as ever.

  Immature but also really hot, with an insanely muscular, drool-worthy body and heavenly eyes that you can see your whole future in.

  I try my best not to fixate on Dax as I get into the office building.

  I rush up the stairs. When I get upstairs, of course, the door to Fowler’s office is open and the light is on. I manage to skitter past it and slide into my cubicle without hearing his annoyingly nasal voice call my name. Breathing a sigh of relief, I start to tear the cubicle apart, looking for the Mason Daniel brief. My cubicle is about the size of a closet, but that doesn’t make the brief any easier to find. I have files stacked on every surface. I start in all the usual places, like the filing cabinet, then move on to all the unusual places, like the waste bin and under the desk. Meanwhile, I’m sweating and my face is getting hotter.

  I sit on the floor of my cubicle, gasping for br
eath. Where the hell is the file?

  Finally, I get to my feet and shakily make my way to Fowler’s office. I take a deep breath and am just about to knock on his door when I realize the leather chair behind the desk in his enormous corner office is empty. Creeping in, I sigh. The guy is a complete disaster. He talks about me not having my shit together, but his desk is a mess. It’s a wonder he can find—

  I stop.

  I reach down, under a pile of papers, and pull out a thick red folder. The tab says, in my neat handwriting, Mason Daniel.

  It was in his damn office the whole time, if he’d ever bothered doing even the slightest bit of looking for it.

  “Katherine,” a voice booms behind me.

  I jump. I whirl to see Mr. Fowler, dressed in his 3-piece suit as if it’s an ordinary weekday. I’m holding the file in my death grip. “I—“

  He looks down at the folder. “It’s about time you found that. You’re lucky Jones’ doesn’t have your ass for that stunt.”

  “But I—“

  He holds up a finger and flicks off the banker’s lamp on his desktop. “I’m on my way to a lunch meeting. Walk with me. Let’s have a talk.”

  I swallow. His “talks” are never pleasant things. It’s never a conversation. It’s mostly just him yelling at me, mile-a-minute, like gunfire. But I scurry after him in the narrow hallway as he strides importantly down the hallway, adjusting the collar of his expensive custom suit jacket.

  No small talk, no asking after my family. Instead he says, “You understand you very nearly lost your job for that stunt?”

  Stunt. He keeps calling it that, as if I planned it, as if I was ski-jumping over sharks for their amusement or something. “But you see, I found the folder on your desk.”

  He narrows his eyes. “What?”

  In that instant, I know what’s going to happen. He’s going to accuse me of lying. I can see it in those cloudy eyes of his, in that self-important stiff jerk of his head. He expects people to nod along and agree, and anything else is unacceptable. He will never let me, a low-life intern, be the one to school him. If I try, he’ll call me difficult and have just another thing to hold against me. “Um . . . nothing,” I mumble.

  “You have an attitude problem, don’t you, Miss Donahue?” he says, taking the stairs down. “The thing you young people don’t seem to get is that nothing can substitute for hard work. You can’t just go on week-long vacations on a whim and expect the work to get done.”

  A week long vacation? You know that’s not what it was! I told you, asshole! And I haven’t even been gone from work yet—it’s still the weekend!

  I’m screaming it in my head, but doing a hell of a good job keeping my composure on the outside. I nod. “Yes sir.”

  I follow my boss outside, where the hot sun is baking the sidewalk, and the first thing I catch sight of is Dax, leaning against his Mustang, this time leafing through some Boston Apartment Rentals magazine, eyes goggling at the prices. I’m still gaping at how freaking gorgeous he is when Fowler spins suddenly, facing me. “And another thing . . .”

  I blink back to him and the smile that was threatening to creep over my face dissolves. But not before Fowler catches it, and scowls.

  “This isn’t a joke. You keep thinking this is funny and you’ll be out on your ear faster than you can say unemployment,” he says, clearly pleased with himself.

  My face heats. The last thing I need is to be reamed out by boss in public, in front of Dax, of all people. Some big, fancy, important person I am. “I understand,” I whisper to my boss, hoping he’ll drop it.

  He doesn’t. He shakes his head disappointedly. “It’s a great inconvenience to me to be one man down unexpectedly like this. I expect you to put in double time when you get back, with no overtime pay. Do you hear me?”

  Tears sting my eyes suddenly. Of course I hear him, he’s standing only inches away from my face, yelling loud enough for the entire city block to turn around and take notice, and his breath smells like old coffee. I shrink back, nodding, praying to myself, Please let this be over. “Yes,” I murmur, my eyes scanning the sidewalk for a sewer grate to climb under.

  “Do you understand?” He barks again, his sour breath on my face.

  I open my mouth to say yes but another voice breaks in, low and controlled. “She said she did.”

  My eyes dart toward the Mustang, but Dax is no longer lounging there, relaxed and waiting. Now he’s striding toward us, determined. His jaw is set and his lip is curled in disgust. I know what that look means.

  I saw that same look in the cafeteria, right before he punched Stephen Andrews.

  Oh, no.

  I put up a hand to stop him when Mr. Fowler turns toward Dax, a disinterested smirk on his face. He regards him as if he’s piece of scattered trash left on the ground, then his eyes are back on me. “If you know what’s good for you—“

  “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll leave her alone,” Dax breaks in, edging closer.

  My heart jams into my throat. I put a hand on his solid, broad chest, holding him back. “Dax. Don’t,” I mumble, looking pleadingly into his eyes. That emerald green is now tinged with fire. “I’ve got this under control.”

  His eyes begin to soften, just as Mr. Fowler opens his mouth. “Who is this clown? One of your dimwitted friends?”

  I groan because I can pinpoint the second Dax hits his breaking point. I saw it that day in the cafeteria, when Stephen came up behind me and whispered You know you want it in my ear when Nevaeh wasn’t looking. Dax had been halfway across the vast, crowded room filled with kids eating lunch, and yet he was the only one who saw it. In that whole place, he was the only one who took notice. Now, there might as well be steam radiating off of every bare inch of skin.

  This isn’t happening, I think. Not again.

  But it is. Dax whips around to my boss, staring down at him. He’s a full head taller than him, and his shoulders are twice as broad. “You fuck with her, you fuck with me, you got it?” he breathes, his eyes like cold steel.

  For the first time, I see a glimmer of fear in Fowler’s eyes. He swallows and adjusts his tie. “Don’t threaten me. I’ll fire her quicker--”

  “I don’t think that’s a wise choice,” Dax says, his voice very calm and measured. “Like I said, you fuck with her, you’ll be fucking with me.”

  Fowler owns the boardroom. He thrives on having complete control of the company. He can hand asses to an entire room full of attorneys with a simple raise of the finger. And I’ve never seen him look so nervous. He regards his opponent carefully, then backs away from the solid wall of a man in front of him and clears his throat.

  “Have a good vacation, Katherine,” he says reluctantly, not even looking at me. “Be in at seven sharp next Monday.”

  I nod, dazed, and manage a “Yes sir.”

  He starts to walk away, adjusting that too-tight starched collar of his again, his shiny loafers gleaming, leaving my mind racing, trying to come up with some way to make it up to him. I think of calling out to him, apologizing, but I’m just too humiliated. I wipe the stray tears out of my eyes, knowing nothing will be enough. Dax tries to plant himself in front of me, but I whirl and start to stomp off in the other direction.

  “You can’t do that stuff here,” I mumble, head down, wiping away the tears as they start to fall.

  “What?” he asks, again trying to plant himself in front of me.

  “Talk like that to him.” I bristle as I remember the look on Mr. Fowler’s face. Oh, hell, I’m in such deep shit. I look up and see an entrance for the T so I scuttle around Dax’s broad form, toward my escape. “He won’t allow it.”

  Dax picks up, right on my heels. He grabs for my arm, trying to spin me around, but I lurch my arm away and move faster. “Where the hell are you going?”

  “I’ll find my own way home.”

  “What? Because I told that asshole off?”

  I whirl back to him, incredulous. “That asshole was my boss! H
e’s only the second most important person at the firm and a freaking senior partner!”

  Dax shrugs, eyes narrowed. He thinks I’m making a big deal of nothing. Oh, god, he doesn’t know anything! He doesn’t know that at work, you toe the line and don’t make trouble, even if you do have an asshole boss, or else you can very well end up on the street, in a cardboard box.

  I scowl at him, annoyed. “You really don’t know how the real world works, do you?”

  “Maybe I don’t, Katydid. But in my world, if I see someone treating you like shit, I’m not going to stand for it,” he says, breathing hard. “You should know that by now.”

  I guess I should. After all, this isn’t the first time he’s done it. But he should know that I’m still feeling the repercussions from the last time. “You just don’t get it, Dax,” I say, shaking my head.

  “Maybe I get it too well,” Dax fires back. “And so maybe I shouldn’t be around. Because hell, Katydid, I can’t stand there and watch anyone treat you like shit,” he growls. He stares into my eyes with an intensity that nearly takes my breath away.

  And then it hits me like a ton of bricks. Dax Harding is trying to protect me and I’m choosing some asshole boss over him—a person who truly cares about me.

  But he can’t just hit someone every time he feels like I’m being mistreated!

  At least he sticks up for you…

  The voices in my head are having a full-on argument and I feel shaken.

  I feel every ounce of resolve I have slipping away. When he speaks again, his voice is low and deep and soft. “Do you want me to go?”

  I look over his shoulder, at the T station, and suddenly it’s no longer an escape. It feels like the worst mistake ever.

  Well, the second worst mistake ever. The first one kept me away from him for four years.

  Goddamn Dax Harding. He’s doing it to me again.

  Right now, the last thing I want is for him to leave me alone.

  Chapter 7

  Stephen Andrews was Valedictorian of our class, Student Council president, Stanford-bound, rarely seen anywhere without Nevaeh, his flawless, raven-haired girlfriend. They were the power couple, admired and fawned over as they strolled the halls together. The entire student body loved them and wanted to be them.