“Mate? Are you listening to me?” Samantha said. “Can you call the cops? This guy just stole five hundred bucks from me.”
Right, yes. The cops. Scott fumbled for his phone. Samantha DaSilva was still here. Still here, and covered in tattoos. Still here and she’d just tackled a man. He squatted down, pressing his knee into the short man’s back as he dialed triple nine. The phone refused to connect and, swearing, he remembered he was in Australia and dialed triple zero. He was following the pre-recorded prompts when the short man twisted beneath them and with a dexterity Scott could hardly believe, wiggled free of both him and Samantha, shooting to his feet like a bar of wet soap.
Both he and Samantha stood to chase and their knees connected, sending them both sprawling backward. Programmed to save him and not the expensive technology he owned, his hands flew backward to break his fall and he heard his iPhone shatter on the warm concrete.
“Bloody hell.” Scott lifted the phone and saw the screen was covered in a spider web of fractures. He was suddenly furious with the short man, with himself, with his father for sending him here.
“Nice going, you two!”
Scott looked up to see the short man sprint away in the same incompetent manner in which he’d left Silver Daughters Ink. Samantha clambered to her feet. “Come back!”
The short man just shot her the finger and kept running. “See you around, Sammy!”
“Arsehole!” Scott shoved his broken phone into his pocket and got up, determined to find the short man and improve this dismal afternoon by punching him in the face. A cool hand fell on his wrist.
“Don’t bother,” Samantha DaSilva said in her lovely, throaty voice. “Frank’s got his car parked around the corner. I’ll call the cops. Thanks for trying to help, though. Is your phone okay?”
Scott opened his mouth to say something, felt a hundred stuttering words rise up like a wave and then closed it again. Revulsion and longing churned inside him and Dear God he was sixteen, again.
Samantha squinted at him. “Are you okay? You look a bit pale. Want to come inside and have a cup of tea?”
“Y-y-you don’t recognise me, do you?” Scott blurted out, because he was a fucking idiot. For a moment, everything was still, then Samantha’s eyes grew wide. “Fuck me… Scott?”
“I…yes. It’s me,” he said, enouncing his words with the kind of care that made him sound mentally impaired, while mentally repeating the mantra; I will not stutter, I will not stutter, I will not stutter.
Samantha let go of his arm. “Woah, what…what are you doing here?”
He wasn’t sure what made him lie. Her beauty or the fact that he’d just allowed someone who’d robbed her to escape. “Just a visit. Thought I’d swing by and see the old place.”
“I…sure.”
His former neighbor eyed him up and down, giving Scott tacit permission to do the same. What he saw made his heart hammer against his ribs. Her tight clothes and the sheer volume of ink on her skin should have looked gaudy or at the very least, punk-rock, but it only added to her loveliness, like a sharp black border around one of Monet’s watercolors. He looked at her hands and saw cherry blossom petals, scattered from the tattooed buds on her arms, but no wedding band, no engagement ring. It shouldn’t matter, but it did. Of course it did. “What, uh, happened with that guy?”
“He’s a client. He had three hours’ work done, then ran out the door when Gil was packing away the ink.”
“That’s…unfortunate.”
“Yeah. You’re taller than you were when you left.” Her voice was accusing, as though he’d done it on purpose to trick her.
“Post adolescent growth spurt. Happens, sometimes. Or so I’m told.”
“And you’re bigger.” She held her arms away from her body to indicate muscle mass.
“I was on a rowing team in London. Am on a rowing team,” he corrected, remembering his earlier lie.
Her lovely mouth curved into a smile. “Your voice has gone all posh again.”
“Living in England for ten years will do that.”
“It hasn’t been ten years.”
“It has. I left just after graduation, remember?”
Sam’s brow wrinkled. “I…yeah. I remember you leaving. I just can’t believe it’s been so long, Gala—”
Scott had the pleasure of seeing a blush spread over her cheeks.
“Galahad?” he finished, lighter than he’d felt in an eternity. “You didn’t recognise me, you forgot it’s been ten years since I left, but you still remember Galahad?”
She opened her mouth, but before she could talk, the door to Silver Daughters Ink slammed open again and a bear-like man emerged. “Everything okay, Sammy?”
Scott’s heart sank. She had a boyfriend. Of course, she did. And of course, it was this guy. She’d always liked them big and dumb and full of muscles. Guys who played AFL and were forever kissing her neck and shoving a palm into her back pocket of her jeans. Exploding hot pockets of semen he alternately loathed and envied, like an Ouroboros of shame.
“I’m fine,” Sam said. “Scott helped me out. He’s my old neighbor from way back. Scott, this is Noah Newcomb, my best tattoo artist.”
Tattoo artist? So not a boyfriend?
The big man extended a hand toward him. “Thanks for helping.”
“I don’t know how much help I was, considering the guy got away,” Scott said as they shook hands.
“We’ll call the cops. So, you’re the Sanderson guy?”
“Y-yes,” Scott said, astonished. “How did you—”
“Edgar talked about you. You grew up around here?”
“Scott was my mortal enemy,” Sam chipped in. “It was a real Batman and the Joker situation.”
The big man looked impassive. “Bet I know which you were.”
She smiled, a wicked little smile. “You’re right, but unlike Batman, Scotty had no idea how to handle me.”
Noah grunted something, but Scott didn’t hear it. Now that the shock of seeing Samantha had worn off, the memories were coming in thick and fast—the flaming bags of dog shit Sam and her sisters left outside his house, the times they’d taken the wheels off his bike and spray-painted his schoolbag pink. He’d retaliated, of course, but he’d never had the energy, or the numbers, to beat them. Also, he’d never understood what they were fighting about. The pranking had tapered off as he and the twins hit their teens, but the contempt was far from over. Sam flipped him off whenever she saw him, called him Galahad and made it clear that the pounding, heart-stopping feelings he had for her were unreciprocated. Then came The Thing that almost got them both arrested…
But he didn’t want to think about that.
No, he’d rather think about how he wasn’t an awkward stammering virgin anymore, dammit. He’d had sex. He’d had a lot of sex. He knew exactly how he’d handle her. He’d tear off her clothes and slam her back into the wall, kissing her deep the whole time. He’d suck her nipples and stroke her panty-line until she was panting with need, then he’d bend her over and show her he was far from the boy she used to know. In fact—
“Scott?” Sam interrupted. “You thinking about all the ways I owned you?”
“No, I’m thinking about all the ways I’d handle you, now.”
Samantha’s mouth dropped open, not wide, but a definite part. Fucking hell, had he actually said that?
The big man cleared his throat. “I’ll uh, see you inside, Sammy.”
He turned and walked toward the storefront leaving him and Sam staring at one another.
“So…” Scott said, willing himself not to blush. “This has been nice. Seeing you again I mean?”
Idiot.
Sam shoved her hands into her jean pockets. “Likewise. So, you came, you saw, you almost apprehended a thief. Are you going somewhere else?”
Time to do what he came to do. “I was hoping to have a word with your father.”
“You can’t.” She straightened her spine and Scott willed himself n
ot to stare at the firm swells of her tattooed breasts.
“Okay…should I come back later?”
Samantha gave a humourless smile. “No, I mean you literally can’t. He’s gone. I own this place now.”
Chapter 4
Chaos. It was one of those forces that sounded so cool, so metal, so fucking 1974 and in reality had nothing going for it. Sam had considered herself a child of chaos; even considered getting a tattoo above her pubic bone to that effect, but that was a complete and utter joke. She was a child of chaos like Dora the explorer was a child of Satan.
Ever since her dad left, life had been chaos—a disordered whirlwind in which problem after problem kept swirling up and hitting her in the face. The biggest and most pressing was finances. She’d known business was a little slow, but a close look at the finances showed Silver Daughters Ink was well into the red. They were losing clients, failing to find new ones and she still needed to pay salaries and order supplies. Sam didn’t know if her dad had some secret way of making free greywash appear in their storage cupboard, but under her command, Silver Daughters edged closer to bankruptcy every day.
Their second biggest problem was bad PR. SDI’s online presence was minimal. Their website sucked and they had no social media accounts. Sam hadn’t minded—she was a pin-up girl for anti-social media sentiment—but she needed to get new customers into the studio and right now that was like trying to move a boulder by flicking it with a tea-towel. The studio’s bad press had more force behind it; customers whose buyer’s remorse had translated into impetuous little Facebook groups warning other customers away.
Problem one and two were ugly, but problem three threatened to shake Sam’s sanity clean from her head. Some fuckstick, some absolute moron had petitioned to get her dad’s property listed as a heritage site. Apparently, recently uncovered records showed the building had been used as Yea Olde Mafia Clubhouse in 1912. That was fine, cool, even, but the restrictions a heritage listing would put on the business was not. They’d be subject to draconian maintenance laws and unable to change the façade or renovate. She could even—according to the barrister she’d shelled out more precious money for—be forced to take down their signage or shut the business in favour of tourist interest. The barrister assured her this was unlikely, but he also assured her she needed to be ready to go to court if the matter progressed, and she did not have the time or the money to go to court.
Chaos.
Three problems, and from them a million offshoot problems, a trillion sources of stress and panic. Sam felt like the newly elected captain of a leaky ship. Last night, she’d dreamed she burned Silver Daughters Ink to the ground before fleeing interstate like her coward mother. Noah kept telling her to call her sisters, but that wasn’t happening. When she texted them to say their dad had gone on a trip to an unknown location, Tabby sent back a thumbs up emoji and Nicole asked if he’d taken his bottle of B-vitamins. Neither was equipped to deal with the fallout of the business and she didn’t want them to be. Her dad had left her in charge. Silver Daughters was her responsibility and if she had to go down with the ship, so be it.
At least, that had been her thinking when Frank ran out with five hundred bucks worth of stolen ink on his back. She chased and not only failed to apprehend the thief, but ran smack-bang into another problem—an offensively gorgeous Scott Sanderson.
He’d always been a pretty fucker, a hot nerd along the lines of Seth Cohen, but he was even better-looking, now—taller, broader, manlier. His smile lines enhanced his otherworldly blonde-hair/black-eyes deal and his shoulders filled out his jacket in a way that made her want to climb him like monkey bars. Except he wouldn’t let her, obviously. In the ten years since she’d seen him, he’d gotten one hundred percent more posh. His accent was pure Mr Darcy, his thick mop of hair was artfully cropped and his suit was designer, if not bespoke.
What did he think of her tattoos and leather halter? That she was trash, probably, but God her body didn’t care. Of all the reactions she could have had to seeing her old nemesis for the first time in a decade, ‘horny’ was the most ridiculous. But it appeared she didn’t have a say in it. Her eyes locked on the pretty swell of Scott Sanderson’s mouth and all she could think about was sex.
She hadn’t been with anyone since Marc. Her sex-drive had flamed out the day she inherited the business, which meant she’d been celibate for seven—no, eight—weeks. Now, looking at her old neighbor, it felt like all that collective energy was manifesting at once—making her skin tingle and her nipples prick up. That was bad, but Sam could feel worse things fighting to slip from under the lid of her emotional Pandora’s Box. There was trembling relief that he was okay after all these years of radio silence. There was anger, because why the fuck was he here after all these years of radio silence? There was shame, too, wafting fresh life into memories of what she’d done to him—things of such breathtaking childishness it made her cheeks burn. But worst of all was the throbbing hurt, like a toothache in her chest. He’d left. That hadn’t been the deal. They’d been enemies, the fun kind of enemies, but he wasn’t supposed to leave. That wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right.
Aware of Scott’s gaze, Sam cleared her throat, desperate to end this encounter before she set off a new and interesting clusterfuck hand-grenade in her life. “So, you came, you saw, you almost apprehended a thief. Are you headed off somewhere?”
“I was hoping to have a word with your father.”
Of course, why would he have come to see her? All the happy memories? “You can’t.”
“Okay…should I come back later?”
“No, I mean you literally can’t. He’s gone. I own this place now.”
He stared at her with a horror that would have been insulting had she not made a complete arse of running the business. “I…I had something to discuss with him. When will he be back?”
It was a question with an easy answer, ‘I don’t know,’ but as Sam opened her mouth to say that…something happened. The past eight weeks concentrated into a hot ball in her chest—the stress, the celibacy, the eating instant noodles to save money, the endless bills and the sudden iron-clad realisation that she didn’t know when her dad would be back. If he would be coming back at all. It was all real in a way that she had never felt it before. She missed her dad. She missed her sisters. She was so sick of trying to make this work and so embarrassed that she couldn’t. She turned away, pressing her hands to her eyes.
“Samantha?” Scott’s voice was gentle. “Is everything okay?”
She lost it, then. There was no rhyme, no reason. The same manic energy that had driven her to tackle Frank had hot tears running through her fingers. She tried to rein in her misery but that only had her sobbing harder. “Oh my God. What am I doing?”
A cool hand cupped her shoulder. “Are you okay? Did you hurt yourself?”
Typical boy, always hoping tears were tied to physical pain. “No, I’ve just…I’m going through some stuff. Sorry, I’m never like this. You know I’m never like this. I can’t remember the last time someone saw me cry.”
Sam knew she was personifying a lot of crazy-lady clichés and waited for Scott to make some excuse and run for his life. That didn’t happen. Instead, he wrapped his arms around her like it was the easiest thing in the world. As though they’d been close all their lives. Sam’s first instinct was to pull away, to retreat or lash out, but the bliss of physical contact, the proof she wasn’t alone was just so…lovely.
She wound her arms inside his suit jacket and around his back, bringing herself closer to his warm skin. The feel of another human body against hers was a release she hadn’t known she needed and she cried even harder because it felt like every trouble she had was draining out of her body. She slumped, and Scott’s arms clenched tight around her, keeping her on her feet. His head bent low, and she felt his sandy hair brush her cheek.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I promise everything will be okay. Everything is okay, really.”
It
was something her dad would have said. Sam sobbed as she hugged her ex-neighbor tightly. “You have no idea. Dad’s gone and my sisters are gone, the business is dying and I’m…I can’t…”
She broke off, pressing her face into his shoulder, embarrassed but still unable to stop. “You should let go of me.”
The arms around her grew tighter still. “I won’t.”
“We don’t even know each other.”
“We did once. We knew each other well. No other girl has ever burned my underwear.”
Sam remembered that winter morning when she and Tabby had cooked seven pairs of Scott Sanderson’s Bonds briefs over a barrel fire in revenge for him smearing honey over the inside of their mailbox. Sam couldn’t help it, she laughed. It felt even better than crying, especially when Scott laughed, too. His back shook beneath her fingers and she felt swells of muscle shift and tense. As a tattooist, she’d felt more than her fair share of the male form and she was sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that her ex-neighbor had a gorgeous body beneath his fussy clothes. He smelled good, too, like that smoky fire on the winter morning—only without the smell of burning underpants.
Fuck…
Her skin tingled all over, as though she were lighting up from within. She glanced away, waiting for the blush of arousal to fade, but it stayed humming under her skin. Her nipples tightened and her pussy—so long ignored—closed in on itself in anticipation of more. This stupid arousal, it was all her fault. Why had she neglected her body so thoroughly these past weeks? She didn’t think she’d even scrubbed herself intimately, her mind had been so detached from her body. Well it wasn’t, now.
So Wild Page 5