“We’re going to consider tonight a warning. Don’t tempt me to change my mind.”
Relief reduced her to silence. She couldn’t even manage a thank you, for fear he’d hear a telltale quiver in her voice. He led her around to the passenger side of the cruiser, opened the door, and stood there while she got in. “Seat belt,” he prompted, and then shut the door. Something about the way he handled her made her feel taken care of. Not a normal feeling for her, and more than a little unsettling. She straightened, crossed her arms, and pulled on her I-can-take-care-of-myself cloak.
He got behind the wheel, and flicked the interior light to the brightest setting. Then he turned to her. “Buckle—Fuck, I’m going to kill that prick.”
His eyes were glued to her throat. She flipped the visor down to see her reflection in the vanity mirror, and sucked in a shocked breath. The sexy Jessica Simpson-style waves she’d tried to emulate hung around her face in tangles. The shadow, liner, and mascara she’d painstakingly applied earlier tonight ringed her eyes like dirty smudges. And the cherry on the cake of all this classy? A big, red bruise blooming on the side of her neck. A souvenir from Duke. She couldn’t even feel the stupid thing, but it looked pathetic. She looked pathetic. Used. Cheap.
Her euphoria from just before midnight came back to mock her. There was nothing magical or beautiful about the girl staring back at her in the mirror. A sour taste percolated in the back of her throat as another thought struck.
She looked exactly like her mother.
The impulse to hide had her hunching her shoulders and twisting toward the window, but Booker caught her chin. “Lauralie, look at me.”
A cold, hard ball of humiliation lodged in her throat. Her chest tightened. She pulled her gaze up, and fell into dark, concerned eyes.
“Did he hurt you?”
The tattered edges of her imaginary cloak of self-sufficiency slipped out of her grasp. She burst into tears.
He immediately released her, and scrubbed his hand over his face. “Shit. All right. Everybody relax. I’m not touching you. Nobody’s going to touch you. I’m just going to ask you some questions, and I want you to answer honestly. Are you okay?”
Okay? Try fucked up, embarrassed, and angry—mostly with herself. Her teeth chattered, and she couldn’t stop shaking, but as far as how he meant? Basically yes. “I-I’m f-f-fine.”
“Then why are you crying?”
The careful tone of his question made her cry harder. People weren’t careful with her. She wasn’t even careful with herself, and the reasons were hard to explain in a way that made sense—especially to someone like Booker, who’d never longed to change who he was or where he came from. She racked her brain for a reply that wouldn’t sound so crazy. A night like tonight gave a girl plenty of reasons to cry, but she settled for one of her more immediate worries. “If Denise finds out about tonight, she’s not going to ground me. She’s going to kick my ass out. All she wants is a reason to justify booting me. ”
“Denise Peterson is your mother?”
Clearly, Denise’s reputation preceded her. What a shock. “Uh-huh.” A tissue would be handy right now, but the neckline of her tank top worked. She wiped her eyes, cringing at the mess left behind on the light-gray cotton. “Neither of us is particularly proud of the fact, but yeah, she is.”
“Is she going to be home when we get there?”
“Doubtful.” She sniffed to battle the tears trying to escape through her sinuses, but then gave up and wiped her nose, too. What the hell? At this point he wasn’t likely to mistake her for Miss America.
He stared out the windshield, but something in the set of his jaw told her he was considering the options. She held her breath as the silence stretched. He hadn’t challenged her obvious lie about not drinking. Hadn’t subjected her to a sobriety test, or arrested her, but it was probably too much to hope he’d let the whole incident slide without informing her parent.
“You’re sixteen, dammit. That guy was twenty-five.” Frustration reverberated in his voice. “Do you even realize how wrong that is? If you can’t keep yourself in check, someone needs to do it for you.”
“Denise isn’t that someone,” she whispered. “Please. I won’t do it again. I promise.”
Serious eyes drilled into hers. Then he shook his head, and let out a low, resigned sigh. “Jailbait, this is your one and only free pass. I told you we’d consider tonight a warning, so listen up, because here it comes. I’m going to be watching you from now on. If you stray over the line in any way, shape, or form I’m going to bust your little ass so hard your head will spin. Understand?”
As if she’d say no. He had her boxed in, and they both knew it. Even so, some of the pressure in her chest loosened. Boxed in by Booker felt oddly secure. More like a safety measure than a shackle. She nodded.
“Good. What’s your address?”
She gave it to him, and then wrapped her arms around her middle for warmth and sat in the darkness as he drove to Nido Terrace—the ghetto of Montenido. An occasional shiver still rattled her teeth. After a mile he muttered a curse, aimed the vents her way, and punched up the heat. Otherwise, they traveled in silence.
Every so often she snuck a peek at him. He’d graduated from high school the same year as her friend Heidi, which made him a few years younger than the guy from the beach. But while Duke still had the lean, narrow build of a college boy, Booker was all grown up. She stole a glance at his lap from beneath lowered lashes, and swallowed. Definitely grown up.
Her gaze fled the imposing bulge and landed on his profile, taking in the slope of his forehead, the masculine angle of his nose, and his square chin. His cheekbone created a sexy parallel line with his jaw. He was cuter than Duke. No. Wrong word. Cute implied boyish, and nobody looking at Booker saw a boy. They saw a man. A girl in search of a guy who knew what he was doing could do worse. A lot worse.
He must have sensed her staring, because he glanced at her. She turned away, caught her reflection in the side mirror, and realized she was chewing the ragged cuticle around her thumb—a nervous habit she’d picked up from Denise. Forcing herself to stop, she put her hands to better use finger-combing some life into her hair, and then scrubbing away the traces of makeup under her eyes. Those little efforts helped. She looked more like her normal self. Then again, was that really helpful?
No. Not when it comes to a guy like Booker.
The depressing thought backhanded her, and left a lingering ache of truth. What did she really have going for her, other than the ability to fill out a tank top and cut-offs? Booker’s hard-to-read expression didn’t offer any indication he’d noticed those particular talents. Did he see anything in her except a troublemaker?
Why do you care?
She couldn’t explain why, but she did. She wanted him to like her. The car rolled to the curb in front of her house. He killed the engine and the lights. “This it?”
“Uh-huh.” Her pulse quickened. Could she make him like her?
While she worked on a strategy, he came around and opened her door. She climbed out and turned to him. Moonlight and shadows played over his face.
Go after what you want, her internal voice insisted. Work with what you’ve got. She straightened to full height, which still only brought her even with his chin, and eased her shoulders back to put the girls front and center. Then she inhaled deeply, hoping his gaze might slide down. It didn’t.
“How can I thank you for being so decent tonight?”
Her voice sounded a little hesitant, but it could pass for breathlessness rather than nerves.
“By staying out of trouble.” No hesitation there.
She took a step closer, so her breasts almost touched his chest. “I meant some way I could thank you right here and now.”
He retreated a half step, which offered zero encouragement. But now that she’d put herself out there, she couldn’t seem to find a graceful way to back down. She stared up at him, and slowly ran the tip of her tongue over her up
per lip. “Think about it.”
“I’m thinking about a lot of things, Jailbait, such as how, unlike your friend from the beach, I know the difference between a girl and a woman. Go home.”
Rejection stung. It stung a lot when it came from a mom who treated her like a stray dog, but it stung coming from Booker, too. “That’s it? Just, ‘Go home?’”
He nodded, and then added insult to injury by pinching her chin, and giving her the barest trace of a smile. “Do us all a favor and pick on someone your own size for a while.”
Embarrassment, and—if she was honest with herself—relief, filtered through her. But she wasn’t in the mood to be honest, or to be treated like a child. She had to stop herself from stamping her foot. “For how long?”
Firm hands closed on her shoulders and turned her around. He gave her a little push toward the house.
“We can revisit the topic in ten years.”
Chapter One
“Bugger me, Booker. You’ve been lusting after one woman for ten years?” Booker’s soon-to-be brother-in-law’s voice held a note of incredulity even the windy ride in the convertible Jag couldn’t cover.
“I’ve known her for ten years,” Booker corrected, and stared at the full moon shining down on him like an interrogator’s spotlight from the unrelenting blackness of night sky. “Lust didn’t factor in for the first few. When I was a rookie, she was Montenido’s poster girl for at-risk teens—a high-school kid with the body of a bikini model, zero parental supervision, and a rebellious streak a mile wide. I felt protective, because she attracted every predatory asshole within a fifty-mile radius, and she was too young to know better.”
“Okay,” Aaron inclined his shaved head, and moonlight glanced off the ladder of silver rings studding his right ear, “I stand corrected. But after she graduated?”
Yes, after that his protective instincts had turned into something trickier, because he’d been forced to face the maddening reality he could no longer bust any adult male who came sniffing around. But for him, she’d still been off-limits. “You mean when she was eighteen and I was twenty-four?”
Aaron had the decency to wince, because despite the shaved head, beard, tats, and tendency to swear like a sailor—albeit a British one—his moral compass aimed due North. “Point taken. Still, somewhere between past and present, you never thought, ‘Now’s the bloody time’?”
Sure he had. Sometime during the last handful of years, Booker’s life had become an exercise in self-restraint as he’d watched her sample men like candy. Fair enough. She deserved a chance to indulge her curiosity. Life had afforded him the same opportunity, and he’d taken full advantage.
She’d never shown an interest in going back for seconds, which made it easier to bide his time, but the I-dare-you flicker in her eyes every time she glanced his way told him he wasn’t the only one feeling the pull between them. Pull or no, he wasn’t interested in being the flavor of the night, so timing counted.
“Now’s the time,” he muttered.
“Huh?” Aaron pulled up to a four-way stop behind a red Mercedes. “What are you going to do, wankstain? Make the turn or sit there and blink your signal all night?”
Booker ignored the rhetorical questions aimed at the driver in front of them. The past twelve months, he’d found himself running out of noble reasons to resist the temptation of Lauralie Peterson. Now, he was flat out. He couldn’t tell himself she was still playing. She’d gotten serious—professionally, at least. She’d opened Babycakes Bakery, and invested every bit of her talent, energy, and hard-earned capital into it. With her business taking off, he figured she was ready to bring a similar sense of purpose to her personal life.
Well, ready might be an overstatement. The woman had an inborn pride that demanded she always stand on her own two feet. She wasn’t an island, mind you. She had friends. She had family—the fucked-up variety, but still, the ties existed. Yet heaven forbid she need anyone.
She had to get past that particular hang-up, because there was going to be need between them. A whole hell of a lot of need. He’d do his damnedest to satisfy every one of hers, but when he’d resolved to make this the year he tugged on the invisible tether binding them, he’d known getting close would bring a crash course in need. For both of them.
Odds seemed good she’d require a push. Fine. He knew how to push, and he knew when.
“Now’s the time,” he repeated, a little louder. When he’d hauled her underaged ass home from Nido Beach on New Year’s Eve a decade ago, and refused her reckless offer to show her appreciation, he’d told her they could revisit the topic in ten years. At the time, he’d tossed the answer out as a way to brush her back, and emphasize how much growing up she still had to do regardless of how physically mature she looked. But ten years had turned into…well…ten fucking years, and time was up. Tonight.
“Far be it for me to criticize a man’s timing, but did you not just spend the better part of the evening going shot-for-shot with my bride-to-be?”
Booker glanced over in time to catch the look Aaron cast at him. “So?”
“So, no offense, mate, but you may not be in the best shape to make your move.”
“What, you think I’m impaired?”
“I reckon, yeah, and it would serve you right. What kind of plonker gets shitfaced with his sister on New Year’s Eve?”
“I didn’t get shitfaced. And for the record, she challenged me. If she hadn’t been cheerleading Mom’s efforts to pair me up with an eligible bachelorette of her choosing in time for the wedding, I wouldn’t have resorted to drinking her under the table.” When Kate had tossed out the bet—if she downed the most shots, she got to pick his date for the wedding—he’d willingly cracked the seal on the bottle himself. His sister was notoriously overconfident when it came to wagers. A hundred and twenty pounds and a preference for wine ensured him an easy victory, and the only thing four shots of Jack prevented him from doing tonight was getting behind the wheel. “I only wish my mother was as easily outmaneuvered.”
“Your mum didn’t build Best Life into a billion dollar brand by being easily outmaneuvered,” Aaron noted.
“No, she did not. She got there by being bossy as hell and thinking she knows what’s best for everyone. And now, thanks to you and Kate infecting her with wedding fever, she’s decided what’s best for me is a trip down the aisle. It’s past time she accepted a simple fact—I don’t need her help managing my life.” He folded his arms. “I’ve got my own plans.”
“About your so-called plans…are you storming into this party with your balls out and your guns blazing, or shall we aim for something a tad more discreet?”
“You get rid of the guests. I’ll handle the rest.” He could already picture her, breathless and ready as he braced her against the nearest surface and unleashed half a decade’s worth of repressed longings. Fuck her so thoroughly she’d have no standing to dismiss the event as a heat-of-the-moment hookup. He was coming for her. Her, dammit, and he hadn’t waited this long only to be shown the door after one energetic encounter.
So yes, he’d use the chemistry to land him in her bed, but from there it was on him to convince her the connection between them couldn’t simply be sweated out of their systems. He had to get it through her hard head and fortified heart that he intended to stick around, and figure out where “they” led. Storming in tonight with the element of surprise on his side might work. Or it might blow up in his face. Either way, he was done waiting.
Aaron’s eyes widened as he pulled to the curb in front of her apartment. People milled on the front lawn, and the small porch. Music blasted from the open windows of her ground-floor unit, layering over the sounds of laughter and conversation. “Oh, sure. I’ll just wave my magic wand and make everyone disappear.”
“Delaney’s is within walking distance. Drinks are on you. Say it loud and then step aside.”
“You want me to buy drinks for fifty friggin’ people?”
He didn’t flinch.
“You want to marry my sister?”
“I’ll dance to this tune until Valentine’s Day, Book, but once she says ‘I do’ the ‘want-to-marry-my-sister?’ shite ends, and I’m no longer your wench.”
Booker smiled and popped the door. “I count six long weeks between now and February fourteenth. Lead the way, wench.”
He had a woman to claim.
…
“Sounds like you’ve got the whole town packed into your apartment.”
Laurie pushed the phone to her ear to hear over the din of the party. She wasn’t about to let a little logistical challenge like Chelsea’s recent move to Maui for work keep them from ringing in the New Year together. “It’s a little bigger than I planned.” Behind her, a cork exploded out of a bottle, followed by an approving roar of appreciation. “And louder. But what the hell, it’s New Year’s Eve, and…hey—!”
She broke off as a helpful soul refilled her flute, and splashed a liberal amount of ice-cold Korbel down the front of her silver sequin top in the process. The white, silk shorts that ended high on her thighs fared better, thank God, because one errant spill and those suckers would be see-through. Her strappy, silver heels survived unscathed—though the same couldn’t be said for her protesting arches. As soon as the party ended, she planned to ditch the sandals.
Normally she might invite someone to help her work the kinks out. A strapping candidate with strong hands, who knew when to be gentle, when to be firm, and when to advance a foot rub to a full-body massage, but more and more lately only one man sprang to mind, and he was absolutely out of the question, as well as not in attendance, so… Her doorbell chimed, ringing through the chaos of music and laughter.
“Shit.” She plucked her top away from her chest and started toward her door even as the nearest guest pulled it open.
“Everything okay?” Chelsea asked.
“Nothing a trip to the dry cleaner won’t fix… Shit.”
“What now?”
Had she conjured him with one unguarded thought? Maybe, because a breath-stealing span of shoulders filled her doorframe. “I don’t believe this. Booker’s darkening my doorstep.”
Hard Compromise (Compromise Me) Page 2