by Meghan March
“So that’s it?” Con’s harsh breaths became louder as he inched closer. “Then why did you even agree to give me a shot?”
I rested my palms and my forehead against the cool metal of the door. My next words were so quiet that if Con hadn’t positioned himself beside me, there was no way he would’ve caught them.
“That night was… a huge deal for me. It was one of the first times I’d ever just… jumped. I didn’t look first. I didn’t think about all of the potential outcomes. I just went for it. I mean, the booze helped, but there was something pushing me to follow you anywhere you wanted to take me.”
I craned my head to look at him. His rugged features were dimly lit by the glow, but it was impossible to miss his eyes drilling into me.
I continued, “There’s something about you that makes me do things without thinking them through. It’s like you’re this crazy catalyst that gives me the courage to just… jump. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I agreed to give you a shot. But when you kiss me, instead of all my thoughts flying away, they come rushing back. That’s when I remember all of the reasons this is a bad idea that’s going to blow up in my face.”
Con leaned against the door beside me. “Damn. That hurts, Van.”
I blinked in confusion. “What? What hurts?”
“That you can still think when I kiss you. Means I’m not doing a very good job.” He reached out and trailed a finger along the strap of my dress that had been revealed by the cardigan falling off my shoulder.
“Of everything I said, that’s the part you care about the most?” I would have been lying if I’d said I wasn’t disappointed.
“No.” He shook his head, tugging on the strap. “I care about every damn word that comes out of that mouth of yours. I’m still digesting the rest. Might take me a while to figure out how to respond to those. But the part about thinking while I kiss you— that I can do something about right now.”
Con released the strap. I twisted so my back was against the door, and Con followed my movements until we were toe-to-toe. He pressed a hand to the door on either side of my head and leaned closer before adding, “Unless you want to go.”
With the cool metal against my back, Con’s heat at my front, and the heavy summer air all around us, I considered my options. Despite my above-average height, Con still topped me by a good five inches. I felt small standing in front of him. Feminine. Delicate.
“So?” He dropped one hand, dug in his pocket, and produced a key. The shiny silver metal caught and reflected the light. “Stay or go?”
Did I want his lips on mine again? If he could silence the racing thoughts, and allow me to simply enjoy the moment and not worry about the consequences? God help me, but I knew the answer to that.
“Stay,” I whispered.
His eyes flashed, and the key disappeared from sight.
“Then stop,” he said.
“Stop what?”
“Thinking.”
If only it were that easy. “You can’t just order me to and expect it to happen.”
With the same hand that had produced the key, he flicked at the edge of my cardigan. It slipped down my arm and caught on my hand.
Con’s mouth dipped and followed the path from my shoulder, his lips and tongue tracing my collarbone, stopping to tilt my head up and kiss a line up my neck to my chin. He ghosted past my lips and followed my jawline up to my ear. He paused and whispered, “Did you stop?”
“What?” I breathed, dying for him to continue his lazy journey.
“Good girl.”
I coughed out a small laugh when I realized that I had indeed stopped thinking. At least stopped thinking beyond where Con’s lips and tongue would touch me next.
I smiled, and that was when he finally kissed me.
His lips took mine. One hand held my jaw, tilting my head back, and the other hand dropped from the door to grip my hip, holding me against him. I moaned as he angled my head to fit his mouth against mine, tongue diving inside, dueling with mine. My hands couldn’t be still, they needed to touch, to participate. I shook off the other shoulder of my cardigan and let it drop before I reached up and buried my fingers in his shaggy blond hair. Con groaned and his hand moved to my ass, gripping it, kneading it, and pulling me in against him.
The hard ridge of his erection pressed against my stomach, and I shifted closer, wanting to feel more. Wanting to feel everything.
Con released my lips, before skimming along my jaw, to my ear, and then down my neck. Almost an inverse of the path he’d taken before—and this one didn’t allow for thinking either. When he nipped along my collarbone, the strap of my dress slipped down my arm. I expected him to seize the advantage and brush the other strap away, but instead he pulled it back into place and stepped away.
His chest heaved, and my breathing was just as unsteady. I sagged back against the door.
“Why’d you stop?”
“I gotta know you want this too. Need to hear you say it. I don’t want to watch you run from me again because you decide this is more than you can handle.” His tone was edged with raw honesty.
My brain had finally kick-started back into reality. All the thinking was back.
“What if I say no? Then where do we stand?” I asked.
He jammed his hands in his pockets. “I guess we go our separate ways.”
“What about our deal?” I pressed.
Con hung his head, and his chuckle was humorless. “Guess that would mean I got my shot and blew it.”
“You’d still give me the deed?”
He jerked his head up, his eyes pinning me in place. He opened his mouth to respond, but I reached out and pressed three fingers to his lips. “Don’t answer that. I don’t want to know. I don’t need to know.” I took a deep breath. “Because I’m not saying no. I’m saying yes. I want this.”
Con released a long breath, and the giddiness I felt at his relief quelled the feeling that I’d just made a decision that would impact the rest of my life.
I dropped my fingers from his lips, and he caught my hand and pressed a kiss to the center of my palm. It wasn’t the kind of gesture you’d expect from Con, but having seen him at his smoothest once before, it didn’t throw me.
“So you’re willing to jump without looking again?”
Staring up into his fallen angel face, I knew I didn’t have a choice.
“Yes.”
The back booth of Tassel was supposed to be my information trafficking hot spot, and most nights when I left Voodoo and dragged my ass over here, it was. But tonight it had turned into something else completely—a place for too goddamn much introspection. After Vanessa and I had left the rooftop—separately—I hadn’t wanted to go home to my empty bed. So here I was.
What the fuck am I doing?
She wasn’t for me. I’d drag her into the gutter and dirty her pristine, lily-white reputation—and her life.
I stared down at my hands. One flat on the table and the other wrapped around a double shot of Wild Turkey.
Those hands had no business touching a woman like Vanessa.
I lifted the glass and sucked down the bourbon.
Not even liquor could burn away my need to bury my hands in her hair, slide them up and down her silky-smooth legs while I spread them wide and feasted on what my imagination had decided was the sweetest pussy I’d ever tasted.
I smacked the glass back down on the table. Drinking surely wasn’t going to help. If I hadn’t been so wasted that night, I wouldn’t have spent the last two years wondering if my imagination was right.
Those kinds of thoughts could wreck a man.
A dancer—a new girl—with dark skin, golden brown eyes, and velvety black curls sat down in the booth across from me. Normally, if a girl was going to attempt to get my attention, she made herself right at home on my lap. Not that it’d do any good lately, because unless you were a smoking hot society princess, my dick wasn’t having it. But still, this chick wasn’t even trying, which had my radar pinging
.
If the girls were allowed to drink on shift, I would’ve offered to share, but given that I’d already ordered a half dozen or so to be fired for the offense, it didn’t seem quite fair.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
It was late, and I was ready to head home and escape from thoughts of Vanessa.
“Heard you’re looking for information.”
Her long eyelashes were fake and tipped with gold glitter, and she fixed her gaze on the table.
“I might be,” I replied.
The gold tassels hanging off her tits barely covered her wide nipples. She looked to be all of about twenty years old. I felt like an old man sitting across from her.
“What’s your name?”
She looked up, clearly surprised by my question.
“Gold Dust.”
I shook my head. “Your real name.”
She sat up straighter, eyes darting up to mine and then back down again. “Gina. Gina Mulvado.”
“How long you been stripping, Gina?”
“Just had my three year anniversary last week.”
“So you’re…what? Twenty-one? Twenty-two?”
“Twenty-one. Last week.”
The numbers lined up. “Started stripping when you were eighteen?”
One side of her mouth quirked up in a mocking smile. “As soon as they’d let me in the door.”
“Why?”
She finally met my eyes. “Why not? I got bills to pay. Ain’t like I got any other skills that’ll make me this much money, at least not without fucking and sucking my way across town.”
“That shit don’t fly here.” That was my policy, but it wasn’t like I had time to personally police it. My manager was on the up and up, and that was the best I could do. But I didn’t want girls using my place as a hook up for picking up Johns. It left a bad taste in my mouth.
“I know, and that’s why I like it here.” She tucked a dark lock of hair behind her ear. “So I heard you pay for information.”
“True.” And paying for information drew all sorts of attention my way. And some of that attention—especially from the gang bangers, ex-cons, garden-variety lowlifes—I’d never want spilling over onto Vanessa. Which is why keeping our relationship on the down-low was advisable on several fronts.
“Pay good?” she asked.
I surveyed her. “More than you’ll earn tonight otherwise.”
She nodded. “I used to work at a club on the other side of town, and there used to be this guy who’d come in for a dance once a week. He was always broke. We joked about having to dodge the quarters he tossed on stage because he could barely scrounge together a damn dollar.”
I rolled my shot glass back and forth between my thumb and forefinger, wondering where this was going.
“Well, one night he came in flush with cash. He went from digging in the cushions for loose change to tossing twenties on the stage and tipping fifty for a dance. He was drunk as hell, and rambling on and on about it being blood money for the little blood-sucking whores.”
I reached for the bottle of Wild Turkey and sloshed another three fingers into my glass as she continued.
“The girls started getting nervous, with all the cash flying around and his crazy ass comments, so we did some checking after he left.”
I swallowed a gulp, savoring the burn.
“When was this?”
“The night some rich white folks were murdered. I didn’t know…didn’t realize they were your folks until I started working here.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and gripped the glass so hard it’d shatter if I didn’t relax.
I felt a soft hand on my arm, and I forced myself to calm. “You get a name?”
Her voice was whisper soft when she said, “He gave me a hundred dollar tip after my dance. Told me it was a Benjamin from Black Ben himself. He also said that if more white folks wanted to off white folks, the world might be a better place. I thought that was real weird. Never forgot that part.”
Black Ben. A name to run down. But it was the last part that threw me.
She started to slide out of the booth, but I grabbed her wrist. “You’re telling me he said he was working on the orders of a white guy?”
She stilled, eyes dark and full of sadness. “He didn’t say anything for sure. Just ramblings of a drunk guy looking to rub up against a tight ass and fake tits.”
“You ever see that guy again? Black Ben?”
She shook her head. “Nah.”
I released my hold and reached for my wallet. Peeling off a stack of hundreds, I slid them across the table.
I needed to process the information. It didn’t make sense. I was missing something.
Gina scooted out of the booth, folded the bills, and shoved them in the waistband of her thong.
“Wish I knew more.”
“Thank you. This is…helpful.”
As I watched her strut away, I knew a call to my boy was in order. I didn’t understand how this fit with the gangbangers my buddies and I had tangled with when we were on leave. But it had to be connected somehow. Nothing else made sense.
Updating the cop on the cold case wouldn’t help. They’d listened to my theory early on, and they’d found “no connection between the two incidents.” Those empty words hadn’t smothered the guilt rising up from my gut to suffocate me.
It’d been over three years and still the guilt hadn’t abated. Which is why I sat in this back booth and paid girls like Gina for information. And anyone else who had a lead I could follow.
After Joy and Andre’s funeral, I’d gone back to service and finished out the remainder of my commitment. Instead of doing my twenty like I’d planned, I’d separated and made my way home. I’d bought Voodoo first, then Chains, my pawnshop, and most recently, Tassel.
Lord, the manager of Chains, helped Reggie and me out with the boys. But more than that, he ran a tight ship and kept his ear to the ground. I rarely had to set foot in the store, but I got the benefit of the information he gleaned off customers and the cash flow.
I’d chased down more leads and had my Army intelligence buddies misappropriate more government resources than I could count. Every damn time we ended up in the same place: a dead end.
And now I had a name from Gina “Gold Dust” Mulvado. Black Ben.
The hairs on the back of my neck rose like a dog sensing trouble. There was a whole hell of a lot more going on here than I thought.
I palmed my phone and found the contact I wanted.
It only rang once.
“Lord.”
“I got another lead.”
I’d replayed those moments on the rooftop over and over. And Con’s words.
Sitting at my desk, at work, was not the appropriate place to be remembering. The stack of bids in front of me needed my attention. But reading about interior finishes for the new building paled in comparison to remembering what it had felt like to kiss Constantine Leahy while we were both sober. The few sips of beer didn’t count in my book—except for how good it’d tasted on Con’s tongue.
“If the scenery in my office was this good, I’d probably never leave.”
Those words were more effective than a bucket of cold water. All thoughts of Con were dashed away as Lucas Titan smiled broadly and stepped inside, shutting the door behind him.
“Surprised you ever leave your office at all to begin with, Mr. Titan.”
“Board meeting for my favorite foundation qualifies as a good reason.”
Crap. How could I forget the meeting—one I was scheduled to attend—this afternoon?
He crossed the room to one of my guest chairs, unbuttoned the jacket of his three-piece suit, and took a seat without being invited.
“Make yourself comfortable,” I mumbled.
“Don’t mind if I do.”
For a moment I was surprised he didn’t just kick his heels up on the edge of my desk. Instead, he rested his elbows on his knees and leaned forward.
“I expec
ted a progress report.”
“And I expected to leave the banquet without being blackmailed. Guess we both have to live with disappointment.”
“I like your style, Frost.”
“Don’t bother trying to charm me, Titan. I’m not interested.”
“You know saying something like that is just going to make me want to try harder.”
I surveyed him. Pale gray suit, crisp white shirt, orange and navy plaid tie. “I think you’re smart enough to know when investing your time in something is going to give you a dismal return.”
His grin flashed white and boyish. There was no denying it; the man was attractive. And I should have been attracted to him. He was arguably my type, but he just didn’t… do it for me. My senses should have been revving, but all I could think was that I wanted him out of my office now.
I considered all the ways I could tell him to go to hell, but bit my tongue because I didn’t want to antagonize a man who could let one little thing slip and call my judgment and ability to lead into question.
“Can I help you, Mr. Titan?”
“I thought I told you to call me Lucas.”
“I’d prefer not to.”
He sat up and grabbed the house-shaped stress ball on my desk. He threw it in the air, not looking away from me as he caught it.
“Stressed, Vanessa?”
“What do you want?” I bit out.
He switched to tossing the house back and forth between his spread hands.
“So you got all the invites?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t feel the need to inform me?” he asked.
“Apparently not.”
Silence stretched between us as the stare down continued.
I broke first. I looked down at my desk, shuffled some papers, and lined up the pens in a neat row.
He didn’t speak—just kept flinging the house back and forth until I wanted to bat it out of the air like a pissed off cat.
He was baiting me, but I wasn’t sure why.
I smoothed on my most businesslike don’t screw with me frown. “Is there anything else, Mr. Titan? If not, I’d like to refresh my coffee and get to the board room.”
“You’ve still got at least fourteen minutes before the first board member, excluding me, will arrive.” He didn’t even look at his watch.