by Stacy Gail
“Yeah, you’ve got the kind of legs that probably looked gawky and ridiculous at that age. Bet all the kids called you names. Stretch, or Baby Giraffe, maybe.”
“Storky Alice, actually. But don’t worry about little ol’ me. I taught them not to.”
“Oh, I bet you did, Alice. Nice, old-fashioned name, by the way,” he went on, his smile a white slash in his beard while he watched her with eyes so strangely hot she felt scorched all over. “Good thing for you I’ve got a weakness for nice old-fashioned names and long, fuck-me-now legs. Good God, woman. You’re just about perfect, you know that?”
A wave of heat flashed through her that almost—almost—felt like alarm. “I just landed you on your finely toned ass, and you call me perfect? You must like it rough.”
“Oh, baby, I fuckin’ love it rough. And by the way, Stems, I’m thrilled you like the look of my ass. Believe me, that feeling’s more than mutual.”
Arrrgh. “Just get over here and take what’s coming to you.”
“Do I look stupid to you?”
“You look…” Hot. Indescribably, overwhelmingly hot, with eyes that were undressing her where she stood, and for some insane reason her brain was hopelessly distracted by it. “Powerful.”
“You know it.” He outright flexed, showing her without preening just how right she was. “Thing is, you’ve still got murder in your eyes. And while I’m crazy enough to find that so fucking hot I can hardly concentrate, I’m still smart enough to know you’re going to kick me to death with those heart-stopping stems once I get within range. Am I right?”
Shit. “You sound like you doubt I can do it. Come on over here. Let’s find out.”
“That’s the problem with pure kickers like you, Stems. Sure, you’ve got epic reach and speed, but you don’t have the greatest mobility when it comes to fighting, do you? Best fighters are a mongrel mix of wrestling, punching and kicking. Fighters like me.”
Damn him, he was bang-on target. “Come on over here and prove it.”
Again he shook his head. “See, when you’re a mongrel like me, your opponent never knows which form of attack is going to put you—”
He launched once more, this time interrupting himself. Idiot that she was, she fell for that distracting trick again, and reacted a half-second too late. She tried spinning away toward the main empty space separating the rows of parked cars, and almost made it.
Almost.
He caught her with one arm, and the next thing she knew her feet left the ground. A heartbeat after that, her back slammed the pavement, knocking the breath out of her. That was why it took her a second to realize that her head had hit too, but instead of hitting hard asphalt, it hit something… soft.
His hand.
Even as she’d been flying through the air, he’d clutched the massive mitt of his hand around the back of her head and kept it from splattering against the asphalt like an egg.
What…?
Did he actually just… save her? From his own attack?
No.
No, that couldn’t be.
The man her foster brother had described would never save her from harm. All he did was bring harm to others.
And yet…
His hand was still between her head and the pavement.
He most definitely saved her from a terrible injury.
What the actual fuck.
“You’re bad at this, Stems.” There was a hint of laughter in his voice, much to her outrage. Torn between that and genuine gratitude that her head wasn’t smashed like a melon all over the parking lot, her gaze jerked to his. Something weird fluttered in her chest when she looked into his eyes—only a handful of inches away—and discovered they were such a light brown they appeared gold. A heartbeat later she found she couldn’t move, with his body holding hers down, and his forearms trapping hers. “Props for your enthusiasm when it comes to caving my head in. I know you wanted to do me some damage, but you were too nice to push over my bike just now. You know what that tells me?”
This guy’s penchant for idle chats at weird moments was something else again. “Get… off… mother… fucker.”
“It tells me that you’re an inherently nice person. And, as an inherently nice person, you’re always going to be bad at this kind of shit, no matter how many moves you’ve got.” He pressed his weight down on her all the more, to show her that moving was something she’d be allowed to do only when he was in the mood for it. “Leave shit like this to the professional ass-kickers of the world, like me, because nice is one thing I’m not.”
An infuriated growl seethed out of her as she struggled uselessly to get out from under him. “Get off, you sonofabitch, or I’ll bite your damn nose off!”
When he burst out laughing, she honestly couldn’t blame him. Then, just as she gave serious consideration to headbutting him to get him to move, his mouth suddenly landed on hers.
What.
The.
hell.
By degrees, the rasp of his close-cropped beard on her skin and the press of his hard lips against hers seeped into her stunned senses. His touch was warm and vibrant and so overwhelmingly masculine it knocked every thought out of her head. Then it was over, and he was back to grinning down at her.
Like that, the rage inside her vanished without a trace. It was almost as if he’d thrown cold water on her. Or slapped her. Or…
Or kissed her.
Alice blinked, baffled and upset and holy crap, strangely unable to stop from focusing on how she could still feel the imprint of his lips on hers.
She who loses control, loses.
Yeah. That was her, all right.
A total loser.
“There we go.” He sounded inordinately pleased as he looked down at her, his hammered-gold hair hanging down in a way that seemed to almost curtain off the rest of the world. “That stopped the bite, or headbutt, or whatever the hell it was you were about to pull. Still wanna kill me?”
“Yes.” She shouted it so loudly she hurt her throat, before huffing in a growing sense of soul-crushing humiliation. Dear God, she’d let her temper—that murderous Halliday temper—get the better of her, when she’d never allowed that to happen before. Never. How could she ever forgive herself for this horrible lapse? “Except I can’t. You’re way more than I can handle.”
“Yes, I am. Though, honestly, I doubt there’s a man alive who can handle you. ‘Cept me, of course.”
With the embarrassment of losing her vaunted cool swallowing her whole, she barely heard him. “I wanted so much to teach you a lesson… Damn it.”
“What lesson would that be?”
“The lesson that you can’t just screw with people’s lives and get away with it. But…” Again she struggled, hating how hot his thighs were against hers. Honestly, the man could rent himself out during the winter months as an organic space heater. “But I was the one who got taught a lesson instead.”
“Hell, yeah, you did.”
Great. Now he was laughing at her wild-eyed lunacy. She swallowed against the hard knot in her throat and looked away, all too aware that this was what she deserved for losing control of the dreaded Halliday temper. “Maybe I should be grateful I can still walk away… And I will walk away, I swear, just as soon as you let me up.” In point of fact, she’d run, not walk, as far from this place as she could to make sure they never crossed paths again. If she had to call the police to get that payroll back, then fine. But never again would she darken this man’s doorstep.
“Hm.” She felt his gaze slide over her for what seemed like forever. “Yeah, nah. I don’t believe you.”
Her eyes widened before she began struggling in earnest, knowing instinctively that her humiliation over her loss of control was about to find new depths. “Get off of me, you—”
“Here’s the way I see it,” he went on, ignoring her while at the same time refusing to let her go. “Either you’re going to crawl away like a whipped dog, or you’re going to get even more crazy and come
at me like some vengeful maniac. I can’t have that, Alice, especially here at my place of work.”
Crazy.
Vengeful.
Maniac.
It was like he was trying to punch every button she’d had burned into her soul from the time she was twelve.
“You think I want a repeat performance of this?” she gritted out, torn between humiliation and fury. “I lost control, I admit it. That’s something that’s never happened before, and I never want it to happen again.”
A faint frown crossed his face. “What are you talking about? You seemed pretty much in control to me.”
“I came here to talk to you, not…this.” She wriggled her trapped arms against his for emphasis. “You’re obviously too much for me to handle. I might hate your guts for screwing up my life because you’re a selfish, violent asshole thief, but I’m not about to take you on again. I’m not frigging suicidal.”
Watching her with that curious frown in place, he slowly shook his head. “Try to understand my position, Stems. First off, you’re continuing to believe that I’m a thief who’s taken something from you. I haven’t taken a damn thing, but since you think I owe you something, you’re not going to stop until you feel you’ve exacted some kind of payment from me.”
“No, I—”
“Secondly, you’re the one who challenged me. Because of that, you promising to not be a pain in my ass somewhere down the road isn’t going to put my mind at ease, yeah? I need something more than that.”
What the hell could he possibly need from her? “Let me make this perfectly clear. I do not care what you need, because I’m not a part of your life, and you’re not a part of mine. Let me up, and I swear to everything I hold holy that you’ll never see me again.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.” God knew she never wanted to see him again. He was a living reminder that she was nothing more than a chip off her father’s block.
“Hm,” he said again, his head tilting as if in thought. Then he shrugged. “Too bad for you that’s not what I want.”
She scowled up at him, baffled. “What?”
“Never seeing you again is not what I want. What I want is an even playing field.”
“What does that even m—” Before she could finish the question, he was up on his feet and pulling her to a standing position as well. The moment she was vertical, she turned and began to walk away, only to be grabbed from behind. A massive, muscled arm slashed diagonally across her torso like a seatbelt, his forearm between her breasts and his hand clamped hard on her shoulder. Automatically she stomped down on his foot with her heel, then groaned when it felt like she’d stomped down on a rock.
Damn those steel-toed biker boots.
“Even playing field, Stems,” he said again, his mouth close to her ear. “You know way more about me than I know about you, but that’s about to change.” To her outrage, his hand groped her ass. In an instant she bucked, first trying to elbow him in the ribs, then crouching and trying to flip him over her own back. He seemed to know every trick she had and evaded every time. Then, just when she started to panic, she felt a tug at her back pocket before she was abruptly released. In an instant, she whirled around with a roundhouse kick—which he deftly avoided. He barely even looked at her, his attention instead on the wallet he held.
Her wallet.
Oh, no.
“Well, well. Hello there, Alice Kathleen Halliday, aged twenty-three,” he read out loud, then shot a frown her way. “What’s a good Irish girl like you doing with an apartment in Little Italy? You are Irish, right? According to your pictures here, you really go all out for Chicago’s annual St. Paddy’s Day festivities. Looks like you and I both have a fondness for green beer. Gotta love our hometown’s traditions, am I right?”
Fucking… fucker. “Give that back, you—”
“Loki.” The metal door leading into House of Payne slammed open, and suddenly the pink woman was there, hands on hips and death in her eyes. “Work. Now.”
“Ah. Looks like Mom got worried about me getting all handsy with you, Alice.” Plucking his phone from his back pocket, he took a pic—no doubt of her driver’s license—before he threw the wallet back to her. “But since she obviously set this meeting up between the two of us, she doesn’t have anything to bitch about. Do you, Scout?”
The pink woman, Scout, didn’t blink. “Don’t you make me fucking repeat myself.”
“See that, Alice? That right there is how to be genuinely scary. You should take notes.” With an unrepentant grin, he headed in Scout’s direction, only to detour to pick up the jacket Alice had draped over the railing. “Yours, right?”
Alice stepped forward, hand out. “Yes.”
“Not anymore.” With a shrug, he moved toward the door. “You want it back, meet me tonight at midnight outside Lyric Opera’s main entrance. Don’t be late.”
Oh, shit. “Wait, my car keys and phone are in there—”
But he was already gone.
“Like I said,” Scout offered after a moment, looking remarkably unsympathetic. “Stupid. From this point on, especially now that you’re on Loki’s radar, you might want to live a smarter life. Being TSTL—too stupid to live—doesn’t fly here at the House, Alice Halliday.”
With that pearl of wisdom dropping like an anvil on Alice’s head, Scout went back into the building with a sassy swirl of petticoats.
Note from Stacy Gail
Hey there, friends!
When I received several emails from readers asking if they had missed Gus and Joelle’s book, I knew I had to tell their story. This is the first time I’ve ever written a story prompted by you, you fabulous readers, but I hope it won’t be the last. I had a ton of fun writing HIS PRINCESS!
HOUSE OF PAYNE: SAGE is up next, but until recently I wasn’t sure how to frame it. You see, I came up with SAGE’s plot long before the coronavirus showed up. But now that the world has changed, I began questioning myself. Should I write SAGE’s story as I’d originally planned it? Or should the impact the virus is having on tattoo studios be added to the plot?
Coronavirus is now our reality. I get that. But it wasn’t how I had imagined SAGE’s story. And it’s not how I imagine House Of Payne.
And hey, I’ll be honest here. I’m tired of living in the reality of the virus (isn’t everyone?). Because I’m suffering COVID-fatigue, I’ve been actively avoiding reading any books with the coronavirus in it. I can’t escape it in my reality, but I can damn well avoid it in my reading.
Ultimately I decided that I’m not going to overthink it. I’m simply going to write. I know what I want to do with Sage and Mads, so I’m going to get the first draft going and see where it takes me. The same goes for the new MC series I want to get into, centered around the Gravediggers MC, and I have that scheduled to debut in 2021. If the virus decides to show up in my writing, I’m not going to fight it. But I suspect it won’t, if only because I need a happy mental place that is blissfully COVID-free.
This is a strange time in our world. There are a lot of stressors out there. If my stories can offer a safe harbor for those who need a much-needed break from reality, then I AM HERE FOR YOU. If you like your heroes to be badass Alpha males who worship their women, and sassy heroines who make you cheer, then you have found your home with me. I promise to do my best to take care of you.
Love to you all, and while you’re taking care of everything in your world, please don’t forget to take care of yourselves, okay? You deserve it. <3
There’s more lust, lies and love to be had in the House that Payne built. Look for HOUSE OF PAYNE: SAGE coming in December!
About the Author
A competitive figure skater from the age of eight, Stacy Gail began writing stories in between events to pass the time. By fourteen, she told her parents she was either going to be a figure skating coach who was also a published romance author, or a romance author who was also a figure skating pro. Now, with a day job of playing on the ice with her stud
ents, and writing everything from steampunk to cyberpunk, contemporary to paranormal at night, both dreams have come true.
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