Desert Angel (Family Justice Book 2)

by Suzanne Halliday

  Like a good western saloon gal, she quickly poured two ridiculously generous shots and pushed the container of limes close.

  This time she did him Arizona proud—made a fist, licked the fleshy portion around thumb and forefinger, poured a healthy amount of salt onto it, licked, exhaled, and then threw back the entire shot. She used the lime like a mouth guard, getting all of the juicy goodness.

  After watching her flawless performance, he followed suit but after destroying his lime, tossed it aside and immediately grabbed Angie by the neck so he could then devour her mouth.

  They were drunk—that last shot wasn’t going to help matters—and he really did know they shouldn’t be doing this, but she tasted so damn good. Like tequila and Angie and limes and stuff.

  So he kissed the living shit out of her. She didn’t resist. Mostly she clung and moaned and rubbed all around on him as he kept her tight against his body.

  Eventually, they ended up back on the huge table after covering it with a stack of riding blankets they found, giggling like naughty children as they made a nest.

  “I want a room like this,” she sighed, snuggling against him, one of her legs thrown casually over his thigh.

  “A tack room?” he asked, confused.

  She chuckled. “No. Just a room with lots of leather and wood. I like the smell and the way it feels.”

  “I have a study in my house in Sedona,” he told her. “Lots of wood. Big pieces of furniture. And leather. Even the top of my desk is leather.”

  She didn’t say anything right away so he asked her before he lost his nerve. “Would you like to see my home, Angel? Come to Sedona for the weekend maybe and let me spoil your baby girl ass a bit?”

  “What is it with you and my ass?” She giggled. “One minute you want to spank it, then I believe there was a bite it in there someplace, and now you want to spoil my ass?”

  “Is that a yes?” he asked hopefully. Spending the whole weekend with her would be amazing. Give them a chance to keep building on what they’d started.

  She laughed and kissed him soundly with a loud smacking noise. “My brother would kill you. Come to town for the day? Yeah. For a whole weekend? You’re dreaming.”

  Alex. Shit. Sometimes it was easy to forget the stone in his shoe that was Angie’s brother.

  “I’ll take whatever I can get,” he drawled. Hauling her close in their cushioned nest of blankets, Parker feasted on her with his mouth, lips, and tongue. That was pretty much the last thing he remembered—the voracious kissing and then the tequila took over and everything became a huge blur.

  “GUS DID AN AMAZING JOB re-thinking the space Brody wanted to be changed.”

  That was high praise coming from Drae, and Alex did have to admit the guy was right. With the animal program expanding, they needed to maximize the existing kennel space and an area in the barn that was available because of the new construction. Brody had been working with Gus to make that happen.

  So he, Cam, and Drae were coming from an inspection after one of their early morning conference calls with the dog guru who was still back East, when something so fucking funny happened that Alex almost shit himself.

  They were walking back to the house, talking quietly because it was still early even though nobody was around, making their way from the rear of the big building when in front of them many yards away, one of the walkway doors to the barn opened wide with a tremendous bang as it slammed into the side of the wood structure.

  The three of them awkwardly shuffled to a halt waiting to see what happened next and in the blink of an eye, sure as shit, something did.

  Stumbling like prisoners released from the hole after a long confinement, Angie and Parker stepped from the barn into the daylight, each of them instantly groaning and covering their eyes. Angie was using the other hand to swing back and forth in front of her as she walked like a blind man wielding a cane. While Parker looked a lot like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  They stumbled into each other, she snapped something at him, he growled something back, and then gave her a mighty shove along the path. Off they went, like two hung over sailors after an all-night drinking binge.

  As they walked on, Alex felt his blood pressure soar when he saw that hanging from the back pocket of that motherfucker’s jeans was an unmistakable pair of pink panties.

  Why, he was going to have to kill that son-of-a-bitch! The only thing stopping him was the sound of Cam and Drae whooping with laughter.

  “That looked like the morning after I married Victoria,” Drae guffawed merrily. “Same hung over stumble, same snapping female. Ah, the memories!”

  “There really may be justice in this world if that grinning poster boy met his match. And leave it to a Marquez to be the one to hand him his ass.” Cam seemed to think this was especially funny, then sobered, muttering, “I hope this doesn’t mess up tonight. You know how the girls get. They want that karaoke trophy bad!”

  “Fuck my life,” Alex grumbled. “Now I have to kill that asshole.”

  More grist for the comedy mill because his foul temper and the ridiculously fucked-up situation with Parker and his sister was giving his two counterparts a serious case of the shits and grins.

  “There’s comfort in this, though,” Cam sniggered. “None of us had to deal with another dude. Like in the flesh.”

  Drae muttered, “Fuck that shit.”

  Truth. The three of them were alike in that way. He could easily imagine blood being spilled should a contest to win their women had been part of their stories. They played for keeps and people were generally wise enough to respect them due to their physical presence alone.

  Parker was all that too, only he was something of a lone wolf out there in the big city. Drae wasn’t kidding with the snide poster boy remark. It was true. Guy looked like he stepped out of an underwear ad. The kind the women lick their lips over. He could have all the strange he could ever want, but Alex was aware that there actually hadn’t been any notches added to ol’ Parker’s bed post in quite some time. Probably the reason why he hadn’t drop kicked the man before now.

  So what was Cam’s reference to another dude? Was he missing something?

  “Yo,” he barked. “Cam. Wait up,” he grumbled because he’d fallen behind while lost in his thoughts.

  “What’d you mean about another guy, in the flesh? Angie’s not interested in anyone else,” he snorted. “Believe me.”

  Drae planted himself in the middle of the path and did that hands-on-hips silent visual appraisal thing he excelled at. “Indeed,” the analyst drawled a touch mockingly. “She’s Team Parker, according to my wife.”

  Alex nodded his agreement. “C’mon, I mean—that’s why she’s here. To resolve their thing, whatever that thing is, once and for all. I don’t see how another guy figures in.”

  Cam smiled. It still knocked him back a second when a genuinely warm expression replaced his usual glower.

  “Do you ever even look at that hi-tech surveillance grid you’ve got going on or was that just another toy you’ve lost interest in?”

  Drae roared a mocking, “Ha!”

  Alex couldn’t be bothered not to laugh. They had him there. He was the king of gadgets, tech toys and nerd projects. His fiancée only made things worse. Sometimes he could tell what her mood was by how many Amazon and QVC boxes were piled by the door. Just last week she’d giddily passed out every imaginable make, model, and style of drone she could find. The ultimate boy toy. It was hilarious too, all of them, running around the property with their flying gadgets, dive bombing the dogs, bothering Gus whenever he was outside the barn, acting like a bunch of twelve-year-old kids at summer camp.

  Yeah. He liked gadgets. The surveillance system was a necessity and hardly one of his tech toys, but Cam was correct. He hadn’t bothered with it much lately. With all the construction activity, it became impossible—even cutting out separate work entrance hadn’t done much. It was crazy town out here some days so yeah, he had indeed dropped
the ball on that.

  Apparently, Cameron had seen something so he asked, “What’d you pick up?”

  Pulling his phone out, Cam tapped and swiped away then cleared his throat like he was announcing a royal birth or something.

  “You can do this too, by the way,” he said sarcastically, waving his phone in Alex’s face.

  Another less boisterous “Ha!” came from Drae.

  “Anyway—at approximately eight-oh-five A.M., an airport limo accessed the keypad at the main entrance. The license plate was scanned and came back as a valid operator.”

  An airport limo? It was too soon for the surprise he had for Meghan and besides that, a limo service would be unnecessary so who the hell had turned up on his doorstep? Suddenly exasperated, he snapped at Cam. “And? Jesus, dude, spit it the fuck out. Who’s here?”

  Snickering with delight, Cam pocketed his phone and started back along the path, elbowing Drae out of the way as he passed.

  “I predict more fun times await inside the Villa, fellas. The silent approach,” he drawled with a winking sneer. “Best to watch and wait. Let things unfold organically, okay?”

  “What the fuck is this,” Alex muttered tersely. “What’s going on?”

  “Oh,” Cam chuckled. “Just you wait!”

  It would have been kinder just to put a pillow over her face and let her die a slow painful death than what she was going through now. Oh, my god. Her head weighed a ton and seemed to be filled with explosive marbles swirling about that detonated on contact.

  Gripping the towel bar in the powder room off the big kitchen, Angie steadied herself and peered into the mirror. Oh, no. It was worse than she thought. Good lord. She looked a fright. How the hell could she fix this? Turning the water to a slow trickle, she dragged her fingers through the stream and splashed a smattering of droplets onto her face.

  A face, which was pale as death, crowned with a mass of wildly tangled hair, with eyes that looked sunken due in no small part to yesterday’s make-up which was now a smeared and smudged mess. The bride of Frankenstein looked better than she did.

  And her mouth? Oh, dear god. Her mouth felt slimy and tasted like roadkill left too long in the sun.

  Slowly turning back her sleeves, she had to take it easy or her head might topple from her shoulders. Angie let a groan out from the taxing effort. Fucking tequila.

  By the time she’d washed her face and done what she could about the horror happening in her mouth, her head began to clear a bit as well.

  What—the—hell—had—they—done? She wasn’t sure. Not only was their evening after they’d returned to the Villa a blur, what she did remember was confusing at best.

  Waking up to a sound that made her want to kill something, she knew the second one eye cracked open that she’d fucked up big time. Instead of finding herself all comfy and cozy in her huge wood bed in the familiar hacienda, she was staring up at a rustic beamed ceiling with all sorts of stuff hanging about. The barn. She was in the damn barn.

  And then that sound happened again and she had to groan as mightily as she could to drown out the obnoxious racket. What the hell was that?”

  Groaning again, she tried to shift to her side but couldn’t. She was restrained somehow—unable to do more than wiggle. And she tried to do as little of that as possible because every movement caused a thunderous boom in her head.

  Checking to see if her legs worked, she stretched one, knocked something over with her foot that sounded like an empty bottle when it fell.

  A new noise joined the growing racket in her head. A roar. No, a growl. Sounded animalistic and not just a little menacing.

  “Stop fucking wiggling,” an angry, muffled voice demanded.

  Parker. Shit. It all came rushing back. Dinner with his folks. Uncle Matt’s deadly margaritas. Driving back to the Villa. Sneaking around in the barn. Polishing off more tequila. With Parker.

  Why did it seem like she was cocooned in some sort of man-shroud with half his body covering hers and the other half weighed down by something else. Struggling to untangle from him, she started pushing at his dead weight. Feebly, but she tried.

  “Get off me!” she groaned. “You snore and I need to pee.”

  It took a couple of minutes of heavy effort to get them both upright where she realized they’d passed out cold on the big round table in a bed of riding blankets. Nice.

  But the icing on the cake? Although they were both dressed, when she managed to pry both eyes open at the same time and looked at him, she was horrified to see that dangling from his arm were the pink panties she’d worn last night. Somehow, and she shuddered to think how, they’d gone from being on her body to his entire arm in a leg opening as the pale pink against his cowboy heartthrob denim mocked her.

  She and Parker seemed to notice those damning panties at the exact same moment, both of them letting go simultaneously with a tortured sounding groan.

  “What did you do?” she croaked—the words causing shards of hung over agony to pierce her brain.

  “What did I do?” he ground out indignantly. “I’m not the one with no underwear on,” he snapped.

  She needed a bathroom—like stat. Not only did she desperately need to pee, now she had to hope she could tell just how fast she was going to hell. The suspicion that they might have succumbed to an interlude of drunken sex made her stomach gurgle.

  With a strangled, “Ugh,” she slid carefully off the table relieved to discover that yes she actually could feel her feet. Unfortunately, the room chose that moment to spin. Clutching her head, Angie closed her eyes and swallowed down the embarrassing vomit threatening to join the proceedings.

  Unable to deal with Parker while she felt like the walking death, she wobbled carefully toward the door only to find him hot on her heels.

  “Move it or be carried,” he grunted, crowding her from behind with his big body.

  Instinctively, just like when she was a kid, Angie shoved him with her shoulder. “You’re not the boss of me,” she gritted out, not caring that she sounded like a peeved five-year-old.

  Thinking she could stomp away, leaving him in her high-and-mighty dust, was a joke. Instead, she stumbled and lurched awkwardly, her hand on the wall of the barn for support as she made her way along.

  At the door, she fumbled with the heavy latch and snarled when it didn’t immediately open.

  “Move,” he scolded on a throaty growl pushing her hands away and attacking the latch himself. “Don’t want you to break a nail.”

  “Oh, fuck you,” she scolded.

  His response was a husky croak.

  Note to my bad self, tequila was most certainly not our drink. Maybe a couple but not enough to get falling down shitfaced because the other side of that? Well, she didn’t know about separately, but together they were one snarling, mean-spirited unit of tequila excess. Not their best look.

  Angie tripped over the door jamb but managed to keep from face planting as the door swung open and bright sunlight smacked ’em both dead on.

  Groaning, she covered her eyes and headed for the house on auto-pilot until he practically knocked her down in his haste.

  “Back off, counselor,” she ground out.

  “Move your ass or . . .” he drawled then gave her a shove along the path.

  How they made it into the house was a blur, but they had with Parker quickly dropping onto a stool at the kitchen island, his head cradled in his hands.

  “Do I smell coffee?” he mumbled to no one in particular.

  Leaving him to figure that part out himself, she scuttled away as quickly as she could and barricaded herself in the powder room to assess the damage.

  WHAT FUCKING DAY WAS IT?

  Ugh. His head felt like Satan’s crypt. Full of dark shit and ready to burst into flames at any moment.

  Coffee. He needed coffee. And some Advil.

  Luckily, he knew the kitchen well so he was able to bumble through the steps of pouring a generous mug of the hot brew without making t
oo much of a mess. Back on the stool, Parker kept one foot on the floor as an anchor and hunched over the mug of steaming coffee while massaging his temples.

  Slowly, the fog cleared. It was Saturday. That was good. No one would be looking for him. That was one problem out of the way. Which left that other thing, the waking up with Angie pressed against him and her underwear looped around his damn arm. That thing. Ugh.

  The hot coffee tasted bitter as it washed over his tongue and down his throat leaving behind a burning trail of leftover tequila vapors. The only thing keeping him sane at the moment was the relative certainty he was clinging to that he hadn’t done anything too horribly stupid despite the evidence of the pink silk presently pushed into his back pocket.

  Nothing much from the end of their drunken frolic remained in his memory, but he was pretty damn sure there was no fucking way he’d had the ability to perform considering how trashed he was. That and the fact that he awoke fully dressed, boots still on, and as far as he could tell, still wearing his briefs, went a long way to keeping him from overreacting.

  The panties, though. That bothered him. How the hell had her panties ended up wrapped around his arm? He suspected they’d never know for sure.

  “Thanks for pouring me one, too,” he heard a voice gripe.

  Slamming a mug onto the counter loud enough that he grimaced at the jarring sound, Angie got herself a coffee and joined him, only from the other side of the island.

  “What time is it?” she asked before taking her first sip.

  With his head still in his hands, Parker peered between his fingers at the clock on the wall. “Nine ten,” he told her.

  She nodded but didn’t say anything else or look in his direction.

  Parker looked her over, searching for clues. She’d done a damn good job of pulling it together although the buttons on her blouse were out of sync, making the fabric gap at just the right spot to give him a clear glimpse of the sheer bra she had on and a peek-a-boo vantage point for a dusty pink nipple.