by Stacy Gail
“Talon’s not big on filters,” Sunny offered brightly from her place at the table with her maybe-husband. “Actually, no one here is big on filters, so feel free to ignore any off-color comments that might come your way. That’s what I do.”
“I say what I say because I’m no sheep,” Talon—ha, she knew his name started with a T!—shrugged before nodding at the plastic box she held. “I’m almost done with the microwave, girlie. You need it next?”
Girlie? “I’m good, thanks. The reason I’m here is because I went overboard on baking Christmas cookies last night, so I thought I’d bring some in for everybody.”
“More cookies?” Instantly alert, Sage snagged up the box. “Are there any in here that I haven’t already tried?”
“I heard about how you heisted dozens of cookies Mads had every intention of sharing with the rest of us, Sage,” Sunny grumbled before looking to her husband. “He took snickerdoodles, Ice. What kind of monster takes snickerdoodles?”
“I’d say a cookie monster.” The surfer dude, Ice, turned condemning eyes Sage’s way. “But that’d be an insult to the actual Cookie Monster, who’s pretty fucking cool and not at all an asshole who’d take all the cookies for himself.”
“I’ll have you know that I earned those cookies. What’s more, I think I’ve earned these cookies, too.” Clearly indifferent to all the hate rolling his way, Sage popped open the lid and looked inside. “Ooh, lemon bars. Mine.”
“Bullshit. Hand those over.” In a heartbeat, Talon seemed to forget all about his microwaved meal and made an earnest grab for the cookies. When Sage batted away his hand and Ice stood to help with the obvious intention of getting his hands on the box, Mads saw imminent doom for her cookies looming on the horizon.
“Share, Sage,” she all but bellowed, and the sound of it momentarily froze everyone in place. “I’m doing another baking sesh before heading to the hospital this weekend, okay? Since you said you wanted to go with me, you can have all the cookies you want then.”
“Hospital?” Sunny also came to her feet, concern in her eyes. “What’s wrong, Mads?”
“Mads has a bunch of Christmas traditions, like baking the best damn cookies in the world, and visiting sick kids during the holidays to draw caricature portraits of them,” Sage answered for her, without fanfare handing the coveted box of cookies over to Talon. “They might be trapped in hospital beds with tubes and shit, but when they tell her where and what they want to be instead of being a sick little kid in bed, they can escape. Their imagination’s their ticket out of there, if only for a little while. But that’s okay because sometimes that’s the one thing they need the most, especially this time of year. But she can’t get to all the kids by herself, so I’m going with her next time.”
“Damn, that sounds like something I’d love to do. Count me in.”
Mads glanced toward the door where the new voice had come from, only to jolt all the way to her core when she spied her father’s enemy, Sebastian Payne, strolling their way. With his trademark spiky dark brown hair going silver around the hairline, hazel eyes, and perfectly carved cheekbones, he was the one person she wished she’d never crossed paths with again.
Not exactly a possibility when he was her employer, but a girl could dream.
“It’s a children’s ward, so they don’t just let anyone in, Payne,” she managed, and hoped she didn’t sound too wigged out. But damn, it was hard to act normally around the man her father swore ruined his life. “The only reason I started this tradition in the first place was because I was visiting my sister—she works there as a nurse. But it’s not like just anyone can waltz in there. You have to have background checks and permission from the floor supervisor, the parents, and probably the doctors themselves—”
“Text me the contact information, Mads, and I’ll clear the way for Payne to tag along with you on your next visit.” Sunny fished her phone out of her pocket, hit the screen a couple times, and a few seconds later Mads heard her phone’s text chime go off. “There we go. Just send me either the name of your sister or her supervisor, and leave the rest to me.”
“Wait.” She couldn’t stop herself from shooting Payne a dubious glance. “Not to be rude or anything, I just… You do know this isn’t something that can be used as a photo op, or whatever, right? These are really sick kids, and their parents might not appreciate a bunch of hoopla. I know for a fact the doctors won’t put up with it.”
Payne’s brows went up. “Not everything I do is about promoting House Of Payne, Mads. I’ve got four kids myself, and I don’t even want to try imagining what it’d be like having one of them in the hospital, especially during the holidays. All I can do is try to give my time and my talent to those kids, and hope to Christ I can make them smile, if only for a little while. It’s not much, but it’s all I’ve got. That’s why you do it, yeah?”
“Yeah,” she said faintly, stunned he understood. More than that, he meant it all the way down to his core, if the sincerity in his eyes was any indication.
Not exactly the picture of the heartless art thief her father had made him out to be.
What the hell was she supposed to do with that?
“Gotta love the new blood coming in and changing things up by sharing her holiday traditions with us.” Sunny’s husband, Ice leaned back against the table and smirked over at Sage. “Not to mention she’s got a helluva way of taming Sage the rage machine. Anyone notice that all Mads had to do was bark that one time, and he stopped being a dick?”
“Oh, I definitely noticed that,” Sunny remarked, also smirking. “In fact, it was kinda hard to miss.”
“I thought the same thing,” Talon nodded as he opened the container of cookies, apparently oblivious to Mads’s blink of unvarnished shock. “Though it could be because he was startled by the volume that came out of such a little girlie. Who knew a mouse could roar like that?”
“I’m not a mouse,” Mads felt compelled to say. Damn it. First she was skittish, and now she was a mouse? Clearly she had to put in some work on her rep. “I’m just seriously choosy about who I talk to.”
“And I’m far from tamed, you assholes,” Sage growled, spreading his glare around the room. “What matters is I got the promise of cookies out of this. Now if you don’t mind, we’re actually going to get some work done today. Save me a lemon bar,” he added to Talon as he guided Mads toward the door.
“Fuck you, cookie thief,” Talon called back, and the last glimpse Mads got of the dark-haired man was of him taking an enormous bite out of a sugar-dusted bar.
“See, this right here is why I avoid the breakroom,” Mads said the moment they were out of there and heading toward the tattooing booths. “There are usually people in there. People make things complicated. Complications are a headache I don’t need.”
“That may be, and I even get the sentiment. But people are everywhere, Skittish, so trying to avoid them is not only futile, it’s pretty damn cowardly. You’re not a coward, are you?”
“It’s amazing how a handful of words from you can piss me off like nobody’s business,” she remarked to no one in particular before coming to a stop outside her booth. “For the record, I’m neither skittish nor a coward, pal. If nothing else, my agreeing to work at House Of Payne is a testament to that.”
His gaze sharpened on her with an almost avid intensity. “What does that mean?”
“Never mind. All you need to know is that it’s true. Now,” she added, opening the door to her booth, “if you don’t mind, I’ve got work, and I’m sure you do, too. Vamoose.”
“Just a sec.” Before she knew what he was going to do, he pulled out his phone and took a moment to tap the screen a few times. Then he pulled her up against him like he thought that was where she belonged. “Put your arm around me.”
There had to be a glitch in her brain, because she did it without a thought, then secretly delighted in how well she fit against him. “Sage, what—"
“Now smile.”
S
he glanced at the phone he held up and saw it was in camera mode. “Are you seri—”
Click.
“There.” He checked the photo, nodded in satisfaction, then slid his phone into his back pocket. “Time to start getting some personal items in your booth. I’ll get this to you eventually. See you later.”
Before she could say a word, he gave her a wink and turned to head into his own booth, this time without even one of his stupid brotherly pecks.
Chapter Six
A crash and raised male voices just outside her door snagged Mads’s attention away from the task of gathering baking ingredients and assembling them on the kitchen counter. She half-ran for the front door and went on tiptoes to peek through the peephole. A second later she had the door open to gape at a couple men in coveralls maneuvering a couch out of Zane’s apartment and all but blocking her own door. Zane kibbitzed from the foyer of his apartment while Sage stood off to one side of the pathway, arms folded and an unholy smirk on his face.
What in the world…?
“Sorry, lady,” one of the workers grunted, backing up just a few inches into her foyer while holding his end of the couch. “Don’t know how this guy ever got this crazy-long sofa into his house in the first place… Turn, Jerry, turn! Go down the path and head for the fucking truck already.”
As Jerry made the turn and the workers huffed their way down the path toward the parking lot, she looked over to where Zane now stood in his townhome’s doorway. “You’re moving?” she asked, surprised.
In response, Zane offered a rude little pfft and slammed the door shut.
“I’d take that as a yes.” Sage gave her a happy grin before swaggering his way into her place. “Nothing like a pleasant surprise to start the weekend off right. It’s all sunshine and rainbows from here on in.”
“Sage,” she said suspiciously as she shut her own front door and followed him into the main living area. “What did you do?”
He looked up from the muted Christmas movie on her television. “What?”
“To Zane. I get the feeling you’re the reason he’s moving.”
A shoulder lifted. “If we’re going to get technical about it, the reason he’s moving is because of you.”
“Me? What did I do?”
“You live one couch-length away from his front door. I didn’t like that fucking state of affairs one bit, so obviously something had to go. That something was Zane.”
Her stomach sank all the way to her knees. “Oh my God, what did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything. I just had a talk with him.”
“What exactly did you say?” Honestly, what could anyone say to compel another human being to pack up their belongings, including a ridiculously long couch, and head for the hills?
“I can’t give it to you verbatim, since it was a couple days ago, but the gist of it was simple. The moment he made a grab for you that second time, he was on my radar as a goddamn predator. That meant if anything happened to you, or your sister, or any female in this entire complex, I told him that I’d assume he was the one responsible for it. And then I’d make him pay the Vegas way.”
“The Vegas way?” It was a shame she didn’t have any pearls to clutch. “What the hell is the Vegas way?”
“I might have mentioned that one day he’d just disappear,” came the careless response, like it was no biggie. “Happens all the time in Vegas.”
Dear God. “I find that hard to believe.”
“Believe it happens often enough. Without warning a person doesn’t show up for work, or to class, and that’s it. The desert’s a great place for taking care of assholes that nobody wants around anymore.”
She stared at him, struggling for words. “So… you’re saying you tossed empty threats around until my neighbor was so freaked he had to move.”
“Who the hell said they were empty threats?”
Eek. “You know that’s crazy, right? And probably illegal.”
“He kept going after you when you’d made it clear you didn’t want to be touched by him,” he shot back, and she couldn’t help but hesitate when the brutal savagery of his tone hit her full force. “That’s unforgivable in my book. Any man who does that, even once, no longer has the right to call himself a man. And he sure as hell has no right to live right next to you. He’s gone. End of story.”
“Well, it’s apparently the end of Zane’s story, which is fine with me.” Not sure why tension was rolling off him in waves, she slid her hands into her back pockets and regarded him curiously. “You really think I needed to be protected from that guy?”
“Every woman on earth needs protection from that kind of guy. Pretty-boy pricks like that think they’re entitled to do whatever the hell they want with women, from fucking them when they don’t want to be touched, to using them to fuck others to get what they want. They think they’re God’s gift to the female gender, but they’re actually a goddamn plague.”
Each word seemed darker than the last, until it was all she could do to keep from shivering. “Why does that sound like you’re talking from personal experience?”
Those killer bedroom eyes narrowed on her. “Are we sharing again, Mads?”
Um. “If that’s how you want to play it.”
“How I want to play it,” he muttered, as if to himself before shaking his head. “I’m not sure I like the idea of having to play games with you to get you to open up, but we’ll roll with it for now. The fact is, I know guys like that useless piece of shit Zane, because I grew up around them. Or more accurately, I had no choice but to grow up around them.”
What a weird way to put it. “Are you talking about your family?”
“No. But also, kinda.” He released a rough sigh and seemed to search for the right words. “You want to know about my life? Fine. Let’s start with my mom. Fresh out of high school, she was a showgirl in one of the big casinos on the Strip. Apparently she was pretty good at it, but she didn’t last more than a couple years.”
“What happened?”
“She got knocked up with me. When her parents refused to take her back in, she worked both as a waitress and as a barista to make ends meet. I was only a couple years old when she landed a new man, a real piece of work that knew he had her cornered with a so-called good life. Paying her bills, giving her and me a solid roof over our heads and food on the table. All she had to do was take whatever shit he shoveled.”
That didn’t sound good. “Was he violent?”
“Violence was a daily thing, like blinking or breathing,” he said flatly. The light vanished from his eyes until they looked dead, and she couldn’t help but wonder if that was how he felt. “Not a day went by without that fuckwit smacking her for something. Nothing bad enough to disfigure her in ways that makeup couldn’t cover up, though. He needed her to be pretty enough to lend out.”
“Lend out?” She frowned, while something horrible clenched inside her. “I don’t understand.”
His face twisted into a terrible grimace, as if the words building up inside tasted like poison. “This asshole she’d hooked up with saw himself as a big wheel in the local real estate business. In reality he was just a small-time huckster who sold double-wide trailers to gullible snowbirds. Whenever he’d work to get in on new developments around town, he’d trot out my mom to show his business associates a good time.”
“You mean he would…” She couldn’t make herself say it. It was his mom, after all.
“Yeah, that shitbird would pimp her out,” he finished for her, clearly having no such qualms. “He’d tell his so-called business associates they could do whatever the hell they wanted with her, like she was some fuck doll rather than a human being, and he’d say it with a big shit-eating grin on his face. Sometimes she’d come back black and blue. Once she came back with a broken nose, a dislocated wrist and rope burns around her neck. Then there was the last time, that horrible fucking night when she was dumped like a sack of garbage in our front yard. She couldn’t even walk. She
had to crawl, bleeding like she was fucking hemorrhaging between her legs, to our front door.” He shook his head, and there was a wealth of rage in the gesture. “She almost died that night. She probably would have if I hadn’t called for an ambulance, and that prick beat the dogshit out of me for doing it.”
“My God,” she whispered, horrified. “Sage.”
“I didn’t care what he did to me. No amount of financial security was worth the hell he was putting us through. I’d been coming to terms with that fact for a while, but that was the night that did it for me. I was officially done with his evil shit. Problem was, she wasn’t.”
“Oh no,” she whispered, feeling sick. “She made you stay with the man who beat you? The man who treated her like that?”
“Oh, she got rid of me as soon as she got out of the hospital,” he said, and there was a world of bitterness in his tone. “She dumped me at a total stranger’s garage, told me the guy who owned it was my biological father, and drove off into the sunset.”
She had no idea her heart could hurt so much. “Maybe, when she saw the condition you were in after she got out of the hospital, she was trying to protect you from that man.”
“If that were the case, she would have chosen to take off with me. She didn’t. She stayed with that asshole.”
Oh, no. “You know that for a fact?”
He nodded. “About a month after she dumped me, I rode my bike nine miles one way back to that house I’d lived in for a decade. My mom and that shitbird were having a barbecue party out in the backyard. The moment my mother saw me, she told me to go back and never return. She wouldn’t even give me a lift back to the garage, because she didn’t want to leave the party in case that bastard needed her to be someone’s party favor. It was after midnight when I finally got back to my old man’s garage.”