by Kira Graham
Disease. I have disease on my shoe.
“I’m not laughing. You laughing, Bee? See? We’re not amused. In fact, I’m more than a little peeved that we didn’t get to destroy Cole’s house and get you that closure we were going for. I was thinking that after we got that for you, you’d stop being such a ninny, and finally admit to yourself that you’re going to go after Paris. And then…I thought that we might both engage in some light, very entertaining stalking for a few weeks, before I helped you drug him, get him to Vegas, and…” she says, trailing off with a shrug and a smile.
But I get where she’s going with that, and the thought gives me hives.
“I am not drugging Paris and marrying him in Vegas!” I hiss, sliding Bee a murderous glare when she starts to chortle beside me and gives me a nod.
“Why not? It seems pretty simple to me. You love him, and he only slightly hates you right now. So it’s pretty much a done deal that the two of you are going to get married and pay some other saintly individual—moi—to carry your weird babies. Happily ever after, baby,” she says seriously, with a swipe of her hands, as if that’s that.
There’s only one, maybe two—okay, a lot of—problems with that scenario. Firstly, I am not ever eloping to Las Vegas with a man who has to be drugged to want to marry me, and that’s assuming that I even want to get married, which…let’s just say, do not get me started on the heart palpitations that I experience when thinking about marriage. Secondly, I’m pretty sure that drugging a guy in order to marry him is a felony of some kind. I’m not sure—I’d have to ask Rosetta about the deets. Not that I would, because that bitch is crazy, and I’d probably wake up in Vegas, having been drugged myself and married to Paris, if Rosetta were involved.
Thirdly, and this is the big one of all big ones, “happily ever after” isn’t something that I think I believe in all that much. I mean, I’m down with the love and happiness part of the equation, but I’ve seen marriage up close and personal in my family, and it involves insanity. So, in order to be accurate, I’d have to change it to “happily and insanely ever after.”
Which, to be honest, I could live with, because being crazy with Paris Hart actually sounds great.
“Can I be a bridesmaid?” Bee asks, giggling when I groan, roll my eyes, and flop back onto her chest with a theatrical sigh.
“Paris Hart hates me right now. Hell, I’d be lucky if I could get him to give me a booty call at this point,” I point out, grimacing when Tee sniffs and purses her lips.
“So, we start small. Take a leaf out of Rosetta’s book!”
“I said move the hell aside so that their attorneys can get in there. Or I’ll move you myself!”
I recognize that voice, and, as I exchange a look with Tee—who is smiling already—I find myself grinning back, though with a groan of fear, especially when Tee’s eyes narrow and become contemplative.
“I’d say that starting small won’t be necessary. Sounds to me like Paris Hart may not hate you at all.”
Chapter Eleven
Paris
I’m listening to “All About That Bass” while crouching down in the back of an exercise class that makes my nuts want to crawl back into my body, at odds with my cock, which is even now so stiff and hot that it feels like my heart is beating in my groin.
“Christ, she’s flexible,” Ares groans, his eyes trained on Tee’s ass as she bends over at the waist and does some sort of twerking shimmy that would put a seasoned stripper to shame.
Sin is doing the same—or, at least, trying to do the same—but with her boot still on and her leg very much still healing, she keeps toppling to the side and cursing, amidst laughter from her cousins that is starting to piss her off.
“You’ve already slept with Nefertiti, so you already know how flexible she is,” I hiss, rolling my eyes when he flushes, splutters, and tries to deny it.
We all know that he’s slept with Tee. Hell, even the janitor at our office knows it, and the man is sixty-five, with no affiliation to us besides cleaning the offices. Not that we’ve spoken of it all that much, because when it comes to butting into Tee’s business, no one is willing to risk her finding out. Not even Rosetta, who happens to know people in the CIA, the military, and even gang members who make the word violent sound like a lullaby.
“I have not!”
“Oh, come on. Of course you’ve tapped that. The two of you are like circling predators that happen to hate and want each other at the same time,” Chilli points out, ducking down behind a particularly fat lady who looks like she’s about to keel over dead at any minute.
The fact that she’s sweating profusely—and that her pink spandex pants are slightly darker in the ass crack area than anywhere else—makes me extremely grateful that I chose to stand behind a tall, flabby guy who must be either fashion-challenged or color blind. I sigh with relief as I look him over: I get the pink headband stretched across his forehead, but the purple bicycle shorts? Even his mother wouldn’t like that view.
“We do not want each other. I mean, I don’t want her,” Ares amends, as my eyes narrow when I hear a muffled shriek and peek out from behind Fat Guy to see Sin toppled over, her breaths coming in billowing wheezes.
“This is bullshit! I can’t even keep my balance. Anyway, what kinda freak mixes dance and yoga?” she screams, slapping away the helping hands of her cousins, all while glaring daggers at the instructor up front, who hasn’t stopped smiling once.
Not once in the last twenty minutes. Not even when she had everyone strike a warrior pose thing and then immediately segued into a round of jumping jacks that may have torn my freaking groin.
“This is fun! Come on, admit it—your adrenaline is pumping,” Rosetta trills, her face a shade of red that resembles impending death.
Probably the instructor’s death.
“The only thing pumping is the throbbing in my fucking leg. This Nazi is trying to kill me! Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you. What the hell is she smiling about? Are you on drugs, lady?” Sin yells, hop-running towards the still serene woman until Tee manages to grab her around the waist and wrestle her back into position.
“I think this is great!” Mindy yells, her boobs jostling up and down with every hop.
“Christ, are we doing the Shuffle now?” Ares huffs, every breath coming out in puffs despite the fact that he’s fit and runs every day.
“Would you all just stop complaining? If these two can get through this class, then surely we can,” Adonis snarls, his eyes going as wide as saucers when the two people in front of us turn to glare at him.
“Shhh! If Rosetta sees me here spying on her, I’ll have to sleep at the office during the day!” Zeus snarls, ducking down when Rosetta’s head suddenly shoots up and rotates in a three-hundred-sixty-degree sweep of the room before she goes back to laughing at a now whining Sin.
“She likes to run. I don’t know why this is so hard for her,” I comment.
“You ever been forced to sit on your ass for months, and then someone expects you to run a 5k? Plus, that leg of hers isn’t fully healed yet, either. Alex said that the doctors were set to remove the boot last week, until they ran some tests and realized just how unstable it still is. She’s got something like seven or eight screws in that thing.”
“Thanks, Chilli, I didn’t realize,” I hiss sarcastically, my groin protesting when our maniac of an instructor, still smiling insanely, leads us into jumping squats that make my entire body want to give out.
I look around and notice that Cleo is enjoying the hell out of herself doing half-squats, while Tee is making farting noises and cackling through every jump. The only people not participating fully are Sin, Alex, who has broken out into a rash of hives—hell, she must be telling the truth when she keeps saying that she’s allergic to exercise—and Rosetta, whose nose and cheeks are so red that it looks like she’s about to blow apart.
“I was just pointing out that she has a right to complain about hopping around on that thing.”
“I didn’t say she didn’t!” I grunt, ignoring their shared looks at my tone.
Okay, so I am a little pissy at the moment, but can you blame me? I finally got Sin and Tee out of jail, Rosetta got the mayor to smooth things over for them, and then I got treated to something that made me want to rip someone apart: Sin smiled at me, kissed my cheek, and walked away. I didn’t get the same soft, desperate-eyed look that she’s been giving me for months, any kind of apology, or even the anger that comes out when she loses her temper. Her reaction was just…nice, which is something that makes me as suspicious as hell, because Sin is not nice. She’s a little spooky, she’s a little violent, and she enjoys laughing at other people’s expense, but one thing that I would never say about the woman is that she’s…nice.
Especially since, during the past few days, I saw her over family dinner and was ignored as if I didn’t exist, and then, when I found myself following her all the way to a restaurant, caught her out on a date. With Jorge, a man who runs a freaking drug cartel, though to hear the Sweets talking, they’re all just salt of the earth people who have a right to be welcomed into the family.
I won’t even think about the fact that Jorge is sixty, though still fit and good-looking.
“You still like her. Just let go of whatever it is that’s still upsetting you about what happened, and give things a go. Seduce her. Make her like having you around,” Adonis says before dropping to the floor in a near faint.
I give up trying to keep up as well, and use Fatso to cover me as I drop down and try not to feel what’s left of my muscles.
“And then what? I’m not looking for some huge commitment, and I don’t even want a relationship with her anymore. That leaves very little to work with, when it comes to Sin. The Sweets would kill me if all I did was mess around with her,” I say seriously, having lost the need for revenge right around the time I saw her crashing out on that highway two months ago.
Nothing gives you a little perspective quite like seeing the woman you once thought you loved dying right before your eyes. So I guess you could say that I’m in a strange place right now. I want her, but I don’t want to hurt her, and things are weird.
Especially since I’ve started having these weird hallucinations of seeing her everywhere I go. I could have sworn that I saw her sitting in the coffee shop downstairs in the Hart building, for example, and yet when I went in, she wasn’t there.
“Can’t you just…I dunno, be friends again?” Ares asks, a grimace pulling at his face when Insane Trainer Barbie starts to run in place, still smiling so enthusiastically that I hear Rosetta hiss that she needs to kill her.
“No…yes? I don’t know. We didn’t exactly leave things in a good place, man. I basically told her that I’m not interested in anything besides meaningless sex, and then she got hurt, and…we’re here,” I sigh, my thighs burning like hell when Chilli helps me up after checking his watch and declaring that we need to take off before the girls catch us spying on them.
Of course, I don’t let myself hobble out of the gym. I’m a man, and I can handle pain even if it’s shooting spears of fire through my sack, but I notice that Adonis is bent almost double as he scuttles outside. Though that’s before we meet a wall of muscle standing outside the gym. Nate, Heath, Grange, and a few of the other guys are all standing there, their arms folded across their chests as they smile so widely that I give Heath a double take and wonder why he doesn’t smile more. I’m not into guys, but damn, the man is startling when he smiles.
“What the hell are the five of you doing taking yoga-dance mash class?” Nate asks smugly, laughing when Adonis groans and tries to straighten up with a cracking sound that makes me wince.
“I needed to see Cleo actually dancing for myself.”
“Wasn’t pretty, was it?” Heath asks, barking out a laugh when my brother curses and takes a fortifying breath so that he can get into his car.
The Porsche is low-slung, and it doesn’t escape my notice that his eyes get misty right before he grits his jaw and slams the door, taking off in a squeal of tires.
“Don’t mind him—he’s just pissed off that she went at all. Apparently, Adonis has taken to those curves with enough relish that the thought of Cleo losing any weight makes him nasty. What the hell are the four of you doing here?” I ask, watching Ares, Chilli, and Zeus all speed away in Zeus’s new Volvo.
Freaking cowards.
“Keeping an eye out just in case Rosetta tries to attack the trainer again,” Nate says with a shrug and a grin. “This is the second class that they’ve been to this week, and the last time Rosetta was here, we had to drag her out while she was still clutching chunks of the woman’s hair. Clayton is in the class, which is how I knew that you bozos were in there spying in the first place. What happened? Did you finally decide to pull your head out of your ass and make another play for Sin?”
“Hell, no! I’m just curious to see what she’s doing after the ten PTs I had to pay off not to press charges. I pay good money for physical therapists, and have to pay hush money when she declares that she’s not working that leg out, and yet here she is, hopping around on the thing as if she’s all healed,” I mutter, though I have to fight back a smile because that’s just like her.
The woman is as stubborn as hell and is probably refusing all help just because she hates not being in control.
“I heard that Rosetta threatened to break in while she was sleeping and shave her head bald. Cleo laughed about it for hours and then advised Sin to just play along, because it seemed to her that Tee was buying all those herbal sleeping pills for a reason,” Grange snorts, his smile dropping so fast that I react before I can think.
It shouldn’t be possible for men our size to move as fast as we do, but by the time I’m in Heath’s SUV and watching the girls all fall out of the gym, with Sin clutching a chunk of hair while yelling at the top of her lungs and being dragged along in a headlock by Tee, we’re all out of sight and thus safe from any repercussions of spying on the Sweet women.
Christ, it isn’t normal for men like us to be afraid of five small women. But it’s a reality, and one that’s driven home when Rosetta comes to a dead stop, turns her head, and stares fixedly at the car, as if she can see through the heavily tinted glass.
It gives me the willies, and I see even Heath shudder before Grange slowly pulls away, once Clayton ambles out behind them, grinning like a fool.
“Ain’t right that I’m afraid of that woman,” Nate breathes with a chuckle and a shiver.
“What’s not right is that their significant others are just as afraid. I thought that Adonis was going to break something getting out of here, and don’t get me started on the fact that I’ve found Zeus hiding under his desk more than once when Rosetta’s been in a bad mood. What about you, P?”
“What about me?” I ask, as we turn the corner and Sin falls out of sight.
“You scared of Sinai?”
“No,” I grunt with a silent curse. “She’s not my significant other.”
“Oh, come on, now. You’re following the woman to the gym and out on dates,” Heath taunts, his mouth curving darkly when I hiss at him and flip him the bird.
“I happened to be in the neighborhood, that’s all, and this gym thing was Adonis’s idea,” I lie, not giving a damn that they’ll ridicule him for this for days.
“Are you telling me that you’re not at all interested in Sinai Sweet?” Heath asks seriously, his eyes meeting mine in a dead stare that I meet in challenge even as I nod.
“We’re not a thing, and I have no intention of going there.”
“Sweet! That means I can ask her out.”
Sinai
“Hold still, and let me spray perfume on your junk. Nothing turns a guy on more than those subtle whiffs of clean, floral vagina,” Tee says, flipping up my hem and going in before I can fight her off.
I shouldn’t fight at all, I know, as it’s a waste of time and energy at this point.
“I don’t
want to go on a date with Heath.”
“Well, you’re going! And that’s final. Remember the plan, Sinai.”
“The plan is juvenile and stupid,” I mutter, dodging her teeth as I hobble into the living room and away from the mountain of makeup that Tee seems intent on slathering onto my face.
“The plan is foolproof, trust me. Guys love this shit, Sinai. Nothing gets a man going more than competition.”
“This isn’t a game, Tee. Look, I really like Paris, and I don’t think that playing around this way is going to get me anywhere,” I say over my shoulder as I walk into the kitchen to grab a bottle of water and the pills that I’m still taking because, right now, my leg feels like a truck rolled over it.
And then backed up over it again.
“Something has to, Sinai! You’ve been practically stalking the man for a week, and all you have are a few photos of him and a schedule that makes him look like Superman. It’s pathetic,” she sniffs, rekindling the argument that we had all the way home from that hellish gym, where I’m hoping that our maniacal trainer is walking around bald, and not smiling.
“Well, of course it is. I’m basically following Paris around, watching his every move! Since when is it cool to stalk a man?” I ask, uncapping the bottle and going for my pills.
I nearly have them when Tee slaps me so hard that they fly out of my mouth and land in the sink, as if the move were planned and executed to the letter.
“What the hell?”
“You’re not taking those things tonight because you’re drinking, and that’s final. Come on, Sin, loosen up and enjoy yourself a little, and if things go well, and you like Heath—”
“Oh my God, is that what all this is about? You think that I should move on. What was all that talk for about plans and stalking and happily ever after, then?” I ask softly, a little part of me pained by the thought but also in agreement.