He also had some box-like contraption in his hand that had buttons on it. I assumed that was what was controlling the flatbed, but honestly, I had never watched anyone operate a tow truck before.
Curious, I looked around to see what was going on.
We were in a parking lot now, and on one side of us was a Tractor Supply. The other side across the street was the Walmart where I’d just experienced one of the most embarrassing moments in my life.
Behind us was the Harley Davidson retailer, and just beyond that were a couple of fast food chains.
Directly in front of us, next to the Tractor Supply, was a beauty salon and a Jiu-Jitsu studio.
My eyes kept scanning the area, wondering if what we were doing was a sanctioned event, or a surprise ‘I’m taking your car’ event.
Based on the looks we were receiving, I wasn’t really sure.
“Is this a repossession?” I questioned Parker.
He looked up, caught my eyes, and winked. “Yep.”
“How did you know this car was here?” I questioned.
“Saw it from the road. The woman works in that hair salon there. Tried to pick it up yesterday, but she didn’t come to work,” he explained.
I bit my lip and nodded, my eyes returning to the beauty salon.
Based on the car itself, I’d deduced that it had to belong to someone in the beauty salon. It was a Kia Soul and had a pair of fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror. Dice that were bright freakin’ pink.
I winced.
“How do you keep them from flipping out about their car getting towed?” I asked.
Parker opened his mouth to reply when a screech was heard over the drone of the winch that was towing the car up onto the flatbed.
I followed the sound, as did Parker, and blinked when a woman dressed in a bright pink smock came barreling out of the beauty salon toward us. What appeared to be the contents of the salon followed behind her which included smock-wearing women wielding curling irons, hair brushes, foil and a broom.
“It’s a lynch mob!” I cried, halfway joking, and halfway afraid it was the truth.
Parker wasn’t anywhere near as amused as I was.
His body was wired in anticipation, but he continued to do his job.
Seeing he was severely uncomfortable with the situation, I walked around the back of the truck where the car was almost in position on the flatbed and intercepted the women.
“I’m sorry, but you can’t get closer. It’s a hazardous situation, and it could be dangerous. You’ll have to wait here.”
The woman with the broom, who must’ve been the owner of the car, looked down at me with anger written all over her features.
“I’m sorry, but who are you?”
I grinned. “I’m Kayla.”
I was not giving her my last name. No way, no how.
“And do you work with him, Kayla?” The woman seethed, pointing the broom at Parker with an accusatory glare.
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“He’s stealing my car,” she sneered.
“Actually, we’ve been contracted for this pickup directly by the bank,” I countered.
I’d done my fair share of filing as well as answering calls all week. People called all day long complaining about certain employees of ours stealing their cars or hurting them.
The calls were bogus, but apparently it made them feel better to have someone to accuse for their own problems.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the woman said. “The car is paid up. I’m not late on any payments.”
Doubt it. The law didn’t work that way.
Parker wouldn’t have the permission to pick this car up if it hadn’t actually been warranted. I didn’t believe this woman as far as I could throw her—which admittedly wasn’t that far seeing as she was about three times my size. Which meant I didn’t trust her at all.
“Well, our records don’t indicate that,” I said, shrugging.
That’s when she decided she was tired of dealing with me and shoved me.
But I’d grown up in a compound with kids who were all brawlers.
None of the Free kids, or the Dixie Wardens kids, were anyone to mess with. I could scrap with the best of them, and this woman didn’t so much as rock me.
I’d, of course, been waiting for her to try to get around me.
But I didn’t let her.
“No,” I stopped her, stepping back into her path. “If you get physical again, I’ll press charges.”
The woman’s eyes were irate. “You could try.”
“Now’s probably a good time for me to point out that our truck has a dash cam and a bed feed. Anything you do and have already done, has been recorded. It’s being sent to our crew at the office, and if they notice anything going amiss, the cops will be called.”
I was totally bullshitting her, but she didn’t seem to know whether to believe me or not since I’d said it so convincingly.
“You’re lying.”
I snorted. “I’m not.”
I was really good at this lying thing. I had to be with Janie as a best friend.
Do you know how many times she got us in trouble?
Hundreds. No, thousands.
Hell, it was either kill or be killed in Janie Allen-now-Luis’s world. You had to either keep up or get left behind, and I wasn’t a quitter. No way, no how.
If there was one thing that I knew I possessed that was from my father, it was his will of iron.
I’d do just about anything to win.
Even if it meant taking on a woman three times my size.
“Listen, chickie,” said the woman next to repo-girl who was holding the curling iron. With the cord to the curling iron dragging along in the gravel behind her. “This is her car. She needs that car to get to work. If she’s not at work, she can’t make money.”
“Well, I can pick her up. But you know she calls in sick at least twice a week. It’s not really a surprise that this is happening.”
I looked over at the woman standing off to the side of everything else. She was wearing a smock like the other two, but this woman looked like she could give zero fucks that this was happening. She had a cigarette in her mouth, and she was steadily puffing away at it, blowing the smoke into the air without taking the cigarette out of her mouth.
My lips twitched as everyone glared at the woman.
“Nobody asked you, Karen.”
“No, Marilyn. I guess you didn’t.” She puffed again, speaking around the cigarette. “But nobody asked you to fuck my boyfriend, either. So, we’re even.”
I covered my mouth with my hand.
This woman—and she was quite beautiful despite her speaking around a cigarette—would get along famously with Janie.
“This has nothing to do with your inability to keep your boyfriend satisfied.” Marilyn, the repo-girl, said. “This is not about that.”
“Seems like it’s Karma catching up with you for your slutty tendencies.”
While this was going on, Parker finished loading up the car and then whistled softly at me.
I looked at him over my shoulder to see him gesture to the truck.
“Get in,” he mouthed.
I backed up just as Marilyn’s patience snapped.
Luckily, I didn’t have to show my superior skills.
Unfortunately, Karen did.
Only, Karen was like a kung-fu master.
She let Marilyn come, and the moment she got within range, she reared back and punched Marilyn in the throat. Marilyn went down hard, and she lay still as she tried to figure out how to breathe again.
“It was the only thing I could reach, okay?” Karen said, sounding miffed. “Dammit, she made me drop my cigarette. It was my last one!”
I was laughing as I got into the truck, and Parker actually had a partial smile on his face, too.
“Did you see that?” I gasped.
“Yep.”
I started to laugh, then leaned over the center console and started to go through the bags for my candy. I found it in the bag with the lube.
Pulling it out, I sat back in my chair, unaware that the entire time I’d been over the console, my ass had been in Parker’s face.
But when I looked back over at him, it was to see his hand clenched tightly into a fist on his lap, with him staring straight ahead as if he moved, he might very well lose it.
“Something wrong?” I asked.
“No,” he said in a suspiciously calm voice. “Are you hungry?”
He looked over at me opening my value-sized bag of peanut M&Ms and shook his head.
“Yeah, I could eat,” I admitted. “I was hoping to stop at Chick-Fil-A. Their breakfast minis are the bomb. Have you ever tried them?”
He shook his head. “Don’t really eat out all that much.”
“You don’t?”
He shook his head. “Eating out is not conducive with having abs.”
“You have abs?” I asked rhetorically.
I, of course, knew he had abs. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that the man had fucking insane abs. Abs that put all other abs to shame, and I knew quite a few men who had abs.
My entire life I’d been surrounded by men with abs. Men with a healthy obsession to stay fit and never lose their shape.
Rafe had abs, too.
But Parker?
His abs were sculpted. Sexy. Perfect.
I could run my tongue down each ridged section on my way to…
I squirmed in my seat as I tried to find a more comfortable position that wouldn’t make my clit feel like it was being touched with an electric probe.
“What?”
I looked up to find Parker staring at me while we stopped at a stop light.
“What what?”
He grinned. Then, the devil turned back around and kept that stupid grin on his face while he drove the car to the impound lot.
Chapter 15
Boys wake up with a boner. Girls wake up with an attitude.
-Fact of Life
Kayla
Overall, I’d had a pretty spectacular day.
That spectacular day took a downward spiral with about an hour left in Parker’s workday when we passed the house where the latest victim to the Lampshade Serial Killer had been murdered.
Since this serial killer had now gained national attention due to the number of victims, there was way more than just the local news crews in attendance. Now, there were so many that they lined both sides of the streets and even curled around to the side streets.
The mob of reporters and cameras outside the house, behind the police line, was insane. There had to be at least two hundred, if not more.
I shivered in my seat, and my good mood instantly fled.
“I don’t know what it is about this that’s freaking me out so badly,” I told him. “But it’s all I can see. I thought that I could handle that life…but with one look at that man—how his body was mutilated—my conceptions were proved false. I just…I can’t get over this.”
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Yeah, why?” he repeated.
I thought about that for a long moment, and the more I thought about it, the harder it was to say the words.
He allowed me to sit in silence as I tried to get out the words, and it wasn’t until we were pulling into the parking lot of our apartment complex an hour later that I finally released them.
“In his pictures…he looked like my dad.”
Parker shut the truck off, then released his seat belt.
The moment he did, I started to cry.
“I know it’s not rational. I never really even knew my father.” I drew in a deep breath. “But the way that Max, James, Gabe, Sam, Elliott, and Jack talk about him…I feel like I knew him. And I have some of our earlier videos. They’re all grainy, but for my eighteenth birthday, Cheyenne and Shiloh had them all digitally recreated. There are five twelve-to-fifteen-minute videos, and I watch them all the time.” I made this sound in my throat that had him releasing my seat belt and pulling me to him. “I feel like I know him.”
“Baby, you do know him,” he told me, holding me tight and allowing me to cry into his shoulder. “In that Wreaths Across America thing that I do, they want you to say the veteran’s name. They say that you die twice. Once when you leave this earth, and once when your name is spoken for the last time.”
My breathing hitched.
“I’ve lost a lot of friends. I’ve lost a mom. I’ve lost a sister. A nephew. But I talk about them. Always. Because they deserve to be spoken about. People need to know that this world lost some great people. And I need that reassurance, the reminder of their love.”
I blew out a breath against his neck, then threaded my arms around his back and clung to him.
His arms around me tightened, and I inhaled deeply, taking in his scent to help calm myself down.
“They all look like him,” I told him. “Even down to the dimpled chin.”
He didn’t say anything for a really long time, and I realized that he wasn’t going to.
He was just going to hold me and let me get it out, and I appreciated that.
Sometimes, I didn’t need to talk as much as I just needed to be held…and I didn’t have that in my life. Ever. So for Parker to give it to me without me even asking? That was huge for me, and I had a feeling he didn’t realize just how huge it was.
***
I looked at the closed door that Parker had just departed through and wondered how much longer my control would hold.
I wanted so much more from Parker than what we had. I wanted his love. I wanted his devotion. I wanted him to let me be there for him, too.
Not to mention I wanted to give him the same thing he gave me when our situation was reversed, and he was the one who needed a shoulder to lean on.
I’d certainly taken quite a bit of his time.
After my crying jag in the car, he’d dropped me and my groceries off, and then he left.
Honestly, I was wondering if he’d even wish to see me anymore that day.
Instead of going over there and ambushing him with that, I sat down at my computer where my videos of my dad were loaded, and I pulled up my favorite.
It was on my first birthday, and it was only me and him.
We were sharing a Big Mac and fries, as well as a twenty-piece chicken nuggets.
My father was sitting next to me, the camera sitting on the table across from us, recording our whole conversation.
Most likely, it was due to the fact that the chicken nuggets were about to make an appearance, and he wanted to record my reaction.
I smiled when my father’s words started coming out of the speakers.
“One day, those eyes are going to break some man’s heart.” My father’s voice drifted through me. “He’s going to take one look at you and fall. Just like I did.”
A tear slipped down my cheek.
“Isn’t that right, Kayla girl?”
I swallowed.
“He’s going to love you like I do. He’s going to take care of you. He’s going to protect you. He’s going to be everything that I ever wanted for you—and nothing you ever imagined.”
On the video, my father was recording me eating, and he was handing me French fries out of his McDonald’s fry container.
For each French fry he handed me, four more went into his own mouth.
Then he started on the chicken nuggets.
That’s when my eyes lit up.
I loved chicken nuggets. Always have, and always would.
My tastes have refined slightly, and I only eat McDonald’s chicken nuggets when Chick-Fil-A isn’t open—on Sundays when you always seem to crave the popular chicken chain and they are closed.
“You want one of these, baby girl?” he asked me.
On the screen, I nodded with excitement.
“More!”
And so it went. He recorded my one-year-old self eating twelve chicken nuggets.
With each one I put away, he’d laugh harder and harder.
It made my heart feel full, while simultaneously making me feel sad, too.
It wasn’t so much that I missed it, but that I wished that I remembered it.
I hated that I was too young when he died to remember anything about him.
Wiping my tears, I did the one thing that I knew that would make me happy.
I walked over to Parker’s place and walked right in.
He was sitting in his recliner.
The moment I came in, he turned the chair to me.
“Come ‘ere.” He held out his arms wide, indicating with his body language that I should climb into the chair with him.
I did, straddling one of his huge, muscular thighs. I laid down on top of him so that my entire front was plastered to his. The tips of my toes were just barely brushing the floor, and the majority of my weight rested on top of his thigh.
His very hard, very hot thigh.
I squirmed and resettled, and my eyes nearly crossed when the new position that I was now in put just enough pressure on my clit to make my lady bits start to tingle.
I froze as he wrapped his large arms around my shoulders, hugging me to him.
And then he started to rock.
“What do you want to watch?” he asked.
I silently cursed in my head.
I didn’t want to watch anything. Unless it was his cock being pushed up inside my… I roughly shut that thought off and shrugged.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’m not a big fan of TV. I think the last thing I watched was the first Thor movie. I’m more of a book kind of person.”
“Like Harry Potter kinds of books, or Fifty Shades of Grey kinds of books?” he questioned.
I grinned against his chest and then raised one hand to smooth his t-shirt free of wrinkles.
I didn’t realize that I was close to his nipple until my thumb brushed fully over it.
The second time I did it, I was fully aware that it was his nipple.
Oh, and it was hard.
Oh my God.
I felt my pussy pulse again, and I closed my eyes.
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