Troublemaker: Rascals: Book Five

by McCoy, Katie

  I could feel a headache starting in my temples and I gave them a quick, rough massage. That was the thing about Hayley—you wanted to kill her and kiss her at the same time. Usually I had no problem thinking of her in the “killing” category, but now that I’d felt her lips on mine, I couldn’t help entertaining more of the “kissing” type of reaction.

  By the way she had stared up at me, her lips swollen and red, her eyes round and curious and saying absolutely nothing, maybe that was a better way to deal with her when she got on my nerves.

  Unfortunately that meant I would never stop kissing her.

  And that was completely out of the question. Even if she wasn’t the sister of one of my best friends (something that was already in short supply for me), I didn’t do long term. I didn’t do relationships. Hell, sometimes even one-night stands were too much “togetherness” for me to take.

  Hayley was a relationship girl. And not only that, she was looking for a very specific type of guy. The kind she could bring home to her mommy and daddy—the kind that would fit in at all those fancy benefits she hosted. I was definitely not that guy. I was the guy who got kicked out of those kinds of events, if I was even invited at all.

  “Emerson in the back?” I asked, knowing that if he knew about the kiss, I was likely going to be walking right into his fist. But that was the price you paid when you broke the code. I was prepared to take the punishment.

  Chase nodded, and I headed towards the office behind the bar.

  Rapping my knuckles on the closed door, I waited as I heard the sounds of two people making themselves presentable—the rustle of clothes and a soft, feminine giggle. When the door opened, it was Alex that greeted me, looking flushed and happy. No surprise as to what had been going there.

  “Hey Dante,” she said with a bright smile.

  “Your shirt’s buttoned wrong,” I told her.

  She glanced down and laughed. “So it is,” she said and quickly fixed the crooked top. “See you later,” she said, patting me on the shoulder before heading out.

  I headed into the office, where Emerson was leaning back in his chair, his feet up on his desk, looking annoyingly satisfied.

  “Does anyone ever get any work done in here?” I asked, knowing that most of the guys had hooked up with their girlfriends in this room.

  “Oh trust me, I do some of my best work here,” Emerson said with a lazy grin.

  I rolled my eyes, but couldn’t help feeling a little jealous. It was then that I realized that Emerson was still seated, and hadn’t leapt from behind his desk to pummel me. Which meant that he didn’t know I had kissed Hayley.

  It should have made me feel better, but it didn’t. Instead, the guilt inside me just continued to grow. Emerson and the guys had always been there for me—even when I didn’t deserve it—and repaying their friendship and generosity by mauling the person they all considered to be like a little sister was extremely uncool.

  “I heard you needed my signature on something?” I said gruffly, knowing that the sooner I got out of there, the better.

  Emerson nodded and pulled out an envelope. “Renewal on our lease. Check it out if you want, but I’ll need it signed before the weekend.”

  I nodded, knowing that it was probably pretty standard and wouldn’t take me long to read over, but the last thing I wanted right now was to be surrounded by the constant reminder of what I had done. So I tucked the envelope under my arm and headed out to the one place where I could find a moment of peace and privacy.

  Bull’s Gym was my home away from home. It was old and slightly run-down and smelled of sweat and spit, but I fucking loved the place. When I was at my most troublesome age, my foster parents had sent me to Bull to learn how to box. They had done it hoping he’d beat some respect into me, but he had inadvertently changed my entire life. My foster family had changed many times since then, but Bull became the one consistent thing in my life. To say that he saved me would be a massive understatement.

  But Bull was getting on in years and couldn’t maintain the gym the way he used to. I had been saving for years now to buy the place from him, and restore it to the way it had been in its glory days—while also using it as a place to train at-risk youth. To help kids who had been in the same situation I’d been in when Bull came into my life.

  The place was empty when I arrived, but I liked it that way. Even though the building was still Bull’s, I had a key and was allowed to come and go as I pleased. I turned on the overhead lights, the familiar buzz of the fluorescents flickering above me as I methodically went over every inch of the place, checking to make sure nothing needed my attention. There had been a leak a couple of months ago that I had paid for out of pocket, taking away some of the money I needed for a down payment.

  It was the reason I’d hosted the poker game that had gotten me into so much trouble. With Hayley. I had been running it long enough and knew enough powerful enough people that the game itself never caused me much stress, but it obviously had put me in a bad state of mind if I had ended the evening by kissing her.

  Clearly, I needed to clear my head and get my focus back. Being at the gym usually helped with that.

  I replaced the chains on one of our older biking machines and was about to start my own workout when I heard a heavy fist banging on the door. It was too early for the gym to be open, but clearly someone had spotted the light beneath the door and decided they wanted in.

  “Hey, bro,” Nicky greeted me as I swung the heavy metal door open.

  Nicky wasn’t my brother, but he was the closest I had to a blood family. Both of us had managed a pretty long run at the same foster home—the one that sent us both to Bull’s to straighten us out.

  But while I had managed to stay out of the serious kind of trouble my foster parents worried about, Nicky hadn’t been so lucky. He’d gotten mixed up in dangerous shit when we were teens, and instead of moving to another family, he went to juvie. And after he got out, it wasn’t long before he found himself in prison for doing the same dumb shit over and over again. I might have been a troublemaker, but I knew how to keep my trouble on the down-low. Nicky never learned when to stop running his mouth, and it was his mouth that usually fucked him.

  “We’re closed,” I told him, but let him in anyways. He strolled inside, shaking off the expensive shearling coat that had probably fallen off the back of a truck somewhere.

  “So what’s new, Nicky?” I asked cautiously.

  Even though we’d never been close, Nicky was part of my life, for better or worse. He had cycles—he’d come out of prison, swear up and down that he had changed and that he was doing better, and then he’d come up with some harebrained scheme to make it rich or get revenge or whatever else he needed, and he’d immediately get arrested and thrown back in jail. From my guess, we were in the “I’ve changed” part of the cycle.

  That meant him asking for a favor. Or money. Or both.

  In the past, I had always given him something. A few thousand just to keep him away. But his timing right now was terrible. After fixing the roof, I needed the several thousand I’d pulled in from the poker game to buy the gym from Bull. It was one of the reasons I had been such an asshole about Hayley wanting to do her Secret Santa thing. I couldn’t afford gifts this year. Couldn’t afford anything. All of my money—all my earnings—had to go into my down payment. I didn’t have anything to spare for my best friends, let alone my fuck-up foster brother.

  “Just thought I’d swing by and catch up with my big bro,” Nicky said, looking around. “Nothing like the holidays to make you want to reminisce about the good old days.”

  Good old days? I wracked my brain trying to remember any of those. Our foster parents had been better than most—they made sure we were fed, that we went to school, that we had books and shoes and clothes—but they sure as hell didn’t consider us part of the family. Not like I would have allowed them to parent me, even if they tried.

  At that point, I had already been bounced aroun
d to half a dozen different foster homes. I had grown up in the system. Never knew my father, and as far as I was concerned, the best thing my mother ever did for me was leave me at the hospital where I was born. I learned pretty early on that there was no point in depending on people.

  The only person you could trust was yourself.

  “Yeah, the good old days,” I finally said.

  “Heard your poker game is back up,” he said.

  Yep. I knew where this was going.

  “Not really,” I told him evenly. “One last haul.”

  Or so I hoped. After buying into Rascals, I had hoped to give up the poker game for good. It was profitable but risky, and the last thing I wanted was to get caught and get the bar dragged into it.

  “Still,” Nicky pressed on. “Bet you got a pretty good haul off of those rich fuckers.”

  I shrugged.

  “That’s the way to do it,” Nicky said. “Take those snooty assholes for all they’ve got.”

  It had been a pretty profitable night, thanks in part to Hayley’s incompetent and rich date. He had practically hemorrhaged money all evening, but being that he was so fucking rich, the whole thing—losing time and time again—seemed to amuse him more than anything. What was it like, I thought? To be so rich that losing it was a lark?

  “If you ever need some muscle running those games,” Nicky added, “you know where to find me.”

  It would be a cold day in hell before I got Nicky involved in any of my plans, but I just nodded.

  “Appreciate the offer,” I said smoothly.

  “Yeah, you know, guys like us, we’ve got to stick together.” Nicky gave another look around. “Well, I better be going. Irons in the fire, you know how it is.”

  “Always,” I nodded.

  After he left, I went over the paperwork that Emerson had given me. Like I suspected, it was pretty standard, so I read it over and signed it. The bar was doing well, and if things had been different, I would have been able to wait a year or so and pay for the gym with money earned legitimately. But Bull was getting older and he needed to sell this place soon. Waiting much longer would mean the building would fall apart further, making it a bad business decision to buy it.

  So I did what I had to do.

  Tucking the bar’s lease under my arm, I headed back to Rascals, intending to drop it off and go. After everything that had happened, putting a little space between myself and the bar was probably a good thing.

  But when I got there and peered through the light-lined windows, I saw the one thing that would keep me from going inside. Hayley.

  She was there, laughing and talking with Chase and Juliet. It was the first time I’d seen her since the poker game, and fuck, the sight of her made my pulse speed up. She was so goddamn pretty, with her dark hair curling around her shoulders and her eyes twinkling in the light. She looked like a fairy princess that belonged on top of a Christmas tree—not the kind of girl that belonged in my arms.

  I’d had a lot experience wanting things I knew I couldn’t have. Hayley was just one more thing on that list. And she’d have to stay that way.

  4

  Hayley

  Christmas came and went—without any sign of Dante. My confusion over the kiss—that hot, bone-melting kiss—had morphed into rage when I realized that he was doing his damned best to ignore me. He skipped out on the Secret Santa exchange, missed our big Christmas dinner, and completely went AWOL for the next morning when all of us gathered at Rascals to drink cider and plan for the bar’s big New Year’s Eve bash.

  It was so bad that even the guys had noticed Dante’s absence.

  “He’ll show up for New Year’s,” Emerson had said when I spoke to him last.

  I wasn’t as optimistic, but I couldn’t say anything. Basically, the less I said about Dante, the better. If Emerson and the guys knew that Dante had kissed me, well, they’d probably want to kill him. They’d never had a good understanding of boundaries when it came to me and the men I dated.

  “What about this?” My mom’s words brought me back to the task at hand—finding the right New Year’s Eve outfit.

  I was going to the Rascals event, but my parents would be at a gala raising money for one of their many causes. My mom had unsubtly suggested that I join them—because while they had warmed up to Emerson’s involvement with Rascals, they didn’t understand why I was always there as well.

  “It’s nice,” I said, looking at the pale blue shift my mother was holding up.

  “Hmm.” She examined it again. “Nice is not good enough,” she finally said and put it back.

  We had been shopping for almost an hour. Usually I didn’t mind shopping trips with my mother, but lately they had become more like interrogations than fun afternoons out with a parent.

  “So, how’s Mike?” my mother asked, not being slightly subtle in the least.

  “He’s fine,” I said.

  Things had cooled off a little since the poker game between us—and by that I mean that I was ducking all his calls. I knew he planned to come to the party at Rascals. I kept hoping that I’d feel a spark—or anything, really—but so far, the only sparks in my life had come from the maddeningly short kiss from Dante. A kiss I couldn’t stop thinking about.

  “I spoke to his mother the other day,” my mother continued, and it took me a moment to realize she was still talking about Mike. “You know, we’re on the board of several charities together.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said, because it was something that she had mentioned more than once.

  It was one of the reasons she and my father were such fans of Mike. Not because they liked him as a person—they barely knew him—but because he had the right connections. Came from the right family.

  My tone—the lackluster sound of it—made my mother refocus her attention.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked, concerned.

  I shook my head, letting out a sigh.

  “Mike is nice,” I said, trying to figure out what I wanted to say.

  My mom nodded, her expression thoughtful.

  “Your father and I just want you to be happy, you know that, right?” she asked.

  “I know,” I said, because it was true.

  My parents did want the best for me, but sometimes they forgot that what they thought was best and what I thought was best wasn’t always the same thing.

  “I’m still pretty young,” I reminded her.

  “I was younger than you when I met your father,” she countered. “And your age when we got married.”

  I’d heard this story before. How they met at a benefit—caught each other’s eyes across the room—and well, the rest was history. It was a pretty romantic story, and extremely hard to live up to.

  “I just don’t think I need to be in any rush to settle down,” I said.

  My mother nodded. “I understand,” she said. “But sometimes when you meet someone, you just know.”

  Well, if that was the case, then poor Mike wasn’t going to be part of my happy ending. I wished he was. Because he was exactly the type of guy my parents wanted for me. He was nice, successful, well-connected, and he seemed to like me a lot.

  Of course, when he kissed me, I felt nothing. Not like how I felt when Dante kissed me. I felt my skin grow warm at the memory of his lips against mine. How intense it had been. How passionate. When Mike kissed me, it was nice. But Dante’s kiss made me feel out of control. Passionate. Exciting.

  Why was he ignoring me? If the kiss had been as good for him as it had been for me, then why not do something about it? Dante was a man of action, and yet, when it came to this, he seemed to have gone completely into hiding.

  “How about this?” my mother asked, holding up a black crepe gown.

  “That’s perfect,” I told her, wishing the other problems in my life were as easily solved.

  The bar was crowded, the drinks were flowing and Dante was nowhere to be found. I tried not to be disappointed. Instead, I just decided to be annoyed.
I had put a lot of work into this party and one-fifth of the owners couldn’t even be bothered to show up. It wasn’t personal, I insisted to myself, it was a professional courtesy.

  I was also annoyed at myself for caring. Dante had made it pretty clear that whatever that kiss was, it meant nothing to him. He had probably just done it to shut me up, which was extremely rude and insulting and should have deflated the lady boner I kept getting whenever I thought about that kiss.

  It was stupid. It was just one kiss. And it hadn’t been that good.

  That was a lie. I knew it had been that good.

  “You look fantastic.” Mike appeared out of the crowd, putting his arm around my waist to kiss my cheek.

  “Thank you,” I said, glad that someone had noticed my little black dress.

  It was a little shorter and sparklier than the stuff I usually wore, but I was a short girl and one of the few benefits of being petite was being able to wear sexy dresses without looking too over-the-top. If someone like Juliet, who was tall and willowy, had worn something like my dress, she would have been mobbed in the street.

  Speaking of Juliet, I glanced over at the bar, where her and Chase were holding court. They seemed to have some sort of unofficial competition going as to who could get the most tips that evening, and Chase had started playing dirty, unbuttoning his shirt to the middle of his chest to get tips from our female patrons. If Kelsey had a problem with her boyfriend showing so much skin, she didn’t show it, sitting at the bar and grinning like an idiot at him.

  Liam was a little less enthused by the competition, and seemed to be chasing away some of the male patrons by glaring at them from his end of the bar. So far, Chase seemed to be in the lead, much to Juliet’s obvious annoyance.

  “Go entertain yourself somewhere else,” I heard her tell a glowering Liam.

  “Not a chance,” he said.

  “If you don’t stop chasing away customers, you won’t be getting a kiss at midnight,” she threatened.

  “As if you could resist me,” Liam smirked at her, but did as requested and left her at the bar to do her job.