Dirty Ties

by Pam Godwin

  His strong jaw was bare of whiskers, the cut of his dark blonde hair combed back, every strand gelled to perfection. While he rocked the clean-cut look with the smoothness of a rich businessman, I preferred him tousled and tangled and covered with scruff.

  I wanted to shove my hands in his hair and muss that shit up. I wanted to kiss him until his mouth gaped for air and his eyes hooded with desire. I longed for the ruthless, sexual man who starred in my fantasies every night. Logan on a sportbike. His body gloved in black leather. His synthesized voice whispering filthy things.

  This crazy need to meld two men into one made me uncomfortable. I didn’t need any more complications in my life, but my body was desperate to merge them. My thighs flexed together, and the warmth between them swelled into a needy clench.

  “What impact would it have on digital media, Kaci?” My father stared at me over his silver-rimmed spectacles.

  I slid my hands to my lap and slowed my breathing. My open disgust with them was nothing new. I abandoned pleasantries seven years ago when they forced me into a contract. But there was no more contract, and they didn’t know I knew their secrets. Didn’t know I was a phone call away from turning them in. Didn’t know I was considering other angles of retribution. “I don’t care. Just fire me and leave Collin alone.”

  My mother pushed back from the table and stood to bend over it, her blue eyes sparking with outrage. “Grow up, Kaci. Get over your petty disappointment and do your damned job.”

  My insides winced at the viciousness in her tone. No matter how heartless she was, part of me would always crave her love.

  God, I resented that. Add in my revulsion at their crimes, and I couldn’t keep my mouth from curling in a hateful sneer.

  They would assume my indignation had everything to do with Logan’s betrayal. So I played the part. “My job was stolen from me by a man who blackmailed everyone in this room. Let’s talk about that.”

  Trent lowered the phone he was constantly consumed by and leveled me with hard eyes. “Putting your nose in our affairs won’t turn out well for you.”

  I didn’t even bother looking to my parents for support. They knew the threats Trent held over me. Their greedy agendas took priority.

  White noise buzzed in my ears, and my head pounded. As much as I tried to tune out my mother, her voice penetrated.

  “…your thrift-store leggings, and what are you wearing on your feet? Are those biker boots? We have an image to uphold, and your disrespect will not—

  “Kathleen.” Logan’s voice was syrupy soft, but everyone in the room stilled, my mother included. “Sit down and shut up.”

  A vein bulged in her forehead, and I suppressed a smile. It was impossible to dismiss the lethal edge beneath his sharp black suit, but the people in this room would respect that. They’d want that kind of danger on their side.

  “I am Kaci’s boss.” Logan relaxed against the chair back. “If she’s violating the dress code, or if her attitude is affecting her performance, I will deal with it.” He gave me a dispassionate glance and returned to her. When my mother sat, he continued, “As for the cable network’s impact on digital media, I believe it will gain an even greater competitive advantage in the marketplace if you used Dalton’s ideas.”

  He carried the conversation seamlessly, even as he knew none of these initiatives would be brought to fruition. I imagined my mother in an orange jumpsuit, her face shriveled from the loss of Botox. Then I pictured her cold, dead eyes and blood draining from her lacerated throat.

  I pressed a fist against my stomach and stared at my lap. When I looked up, she was glaring at me with her lips pursed.

  She would never care for me the way a mother loved a daughter. She didn’t give a shit about Logan’s video. Hell, she’d encouraged the original setup with the male escort, Holden. But that didn’t justify a death sentence. She also stole millions from charities and was an accomplice in hiring assassins. Maybe the latter justified death, but it wasn’t my decision to make.

  The meeting adjourned, and Logan and I went our separate ways in the corridor, headed to our own wings. When I reached the door to my office, I sensed him. I’d been so lost in my thoughts, I hadn’t heard him change direction. But God, how I welcomed the heat from his body at my back, the scent of his clean soap, and the deep rhythm of his breath.

  My pulse skipped, and my limbs locked up. He stood right behind me, not touching, but close enough to scramble my brain. I stepped into my office, and he stayed on my heels, shutting the door behind him.

  As I turned, he caught my waist with one big hand, preventing me from facing him. His other hand traced a slow, torturous path down my arm, setting sparks of electricity through my blood.

  Brushing my hair off my shoulder, he lowered his mouth to my ear and whispered thickly, “I miss you.”

  I blinked hazily at the skyline through the windows across the room, stunned by the amount of relief his words brought me. Two weeks of stress sloughed off my body, and I twisted to face him.

  He stopped me again, his hands on my hips, fingers clamping down. “Please, don’t turn around. If you do…” He inhaled deeply. “I’m trying to stay away, but if you look at me right now with those gorgeous eyes, I’ll forget all about your marriage.”

  I nodded, my entire body focused on the hands on my hips, my skin burning for his fingers to move beneath the hem of the shirt.

  His hard chest brushed against my back, and his hands tightened against the thin material of my leggings. “You’re done thinking about this shit. It’s taken a toll on you. You’re too pale. You’ve lost weight.” He touched his brow to my shoulder, his exhale warming my back. “There’s goddamned bruises under your eyes. It’s time to end this.”

  His nose and mouth pressed into the curve of my neck. His chest rose and fell against my back, mirroring the heave of mine. He was all around me, bracing me with his strength and chasing away the coldness in my limbs. The connection I’d missed so badly, the simple pleasure of his presence, the hope that maybe I wasn’t alone, his warmth, his smell, his words, all of it snapped into place and formed a power line between us.

  My heart sped up. I broke away from his grip and stepped out of reaching distance before turning to face him. “You want to know what I want?”

  He nodded once. The rigid tension in his body, the cords twanging in his neck above the tie, and the fire flickering in his eyes told me he was seconds from ripping my clothes off.

  I wanted more than that. I wanted his arms around me while I slept. His warm body curled around mine, sharing our bed and protecting me from the things I couldn’t fight alone.

  I wanted to be the one he fought for, to be the reason he lived and breathed. I wanted him to choose me over revenge. “If I tell you to kill them, that will make me just as evil as they are. If I turn them in, you’ll disappear to evade the repercussions of your crimes. If I walk away, their greed won’t end, and more people will die.” I raised my chin and stared deep into his eyes. “I want the fourth option.”

  His eyebrows pulled together, one higher than the other. “There is no fourth option.”

  “You know there is. You just have to decide if you want it, too.”

  I paced the basement warehouse, weaving between motorcycle parts and circuit boards, hands in the pockets of my jeans, then pushing through my hair, and returning to my pockets. Restless energy skittered over my shoulders, my thoughts caught in an endless loop.

  Benny was due back any minute. I should’ve been focused on the message she was retrieving. But my convictions, my plans, every damned thing I knew about myself and my life, shifted and pulled toward Kaci. All that mattered was her happiness.

  It had been fourteen days since I’d touched her, smelled her, and talked to her on a level that didn’t involve corporate initiatives. Fourteen days since I’d held her in her office, the curves of her back against my chest, my hands clinging to her tiny waist. Fourteen days since she told me she wanted the fourth option.


  You just have to decide if you want it, too.

  I wanted her above all else. I knew it then, and I positively knew it now.

  Hungry, possessive desire was my constant companion, burning my chest, muddling my mind, and pulsing through my cock. So I paced. To redirect the path of my thoughts. To burn off the jealousy that gripped me when I thought of her with her husband. But the sound of my footfalls only intensified the buzz in my head.

  Finally, the basement filled with the sounds of the elevator descending, the door shutting, and the squeaks of Benny’s boots on concrete. A moment later, her small frame appeared in the doorway between the warehouse and the garage.

  The braided pigtails of her orange wig fell over her shoulders. A blue leotard gloved her arms and chest, the rest of her covered with pink overalls. The outfit, combined with the mischievous bow of her lips, reminded me of a smurf.

  She held up a dollar bill and waved it at me with a twinkle in her huge expressive eyes. “We got him.”

  I waited for the rush of excitement to vibrate my insides, but my breathing continued its even rhythm, and my legs strode toward her without any real sense of purpose. My body didn’t feel a fraction of the energy it should have.

  I took the dollar from her waiting hand and stared at the handwriting on the front, the scrawled numbers blurring into a trail of zeros. “He placed the bet.” Finally.

  “I verified it on the network. Every dollar is there.” She smoothed a hand down one orange braid and flicked the end back and forth. “The fact that he sent the confirmation on the smallest bill in print adds a kind of pathetic irony, doesn’t it?”

  I nodded numbly and stuffed the dollar into my wallet. The final piece of the plan was complete. Trent took the bait. The months of anonymous offers I’d made through the Timex watches worked.

  October twenty-seventh was only two days away. My last race. Everything was in place.

  But everything had changed.

  Benny narrowed her eyes, the glare dramatized by the drawn-on eyelashes that swept half-way to her temples. “Why do you look so butt-hurt?” She put her hands on her hips. “You’re supposed to… I don’t know, smile with crazy eyes or something.”

  A decade of preparations and meticulous work, and here I stood, two days before D-day, imagining a life without the finality of revenge, without finishing a plan with a gun in my hand.

  Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw that life in Technicolor. Two bikes side-by-side on a racetrack. The fierceness of her forward incline on the Ducati. Her braid whipping over her back as she looked at me. That look, my God, it was searching, hopeful, demanding. The same expression she wore when she told me she wanted the fourth option. The option I felt in the deepest reaches of my soul.

  But what if I was wrong? What if I let her in, gave her everything I had to give, and it wasn’t enough? It was in my nature to choose the path with the most resistance, to not back down from a fight. Maybe I’d win this race, win her. But what if she left me down the road? What if she left me like my mother?

  I scrubbed my hands through my hair. I needed to get out of my head and follow my damned heart. So what if it was half-baked, delusional, and feverishly beating like the wound-up pulse of a very tiny mammal? It was really quite simple. I wanted her, and if that scared the shit out of me, good. I needed to be scared. I needed to be fucking terrified, because the best rewards in life didn’t come from pussying out.

  The strongest love begins from a place of conflict.

  I pivoted, my resolve propelling me the short trip to the workbench lined with computers. “Change of plans.”

  “A distraction,” she snapped, clomping after me.

  “No.” I whirled on her, my voice ricocheting through the rafters. “A change of heart.”

  Her green eyes flashed, her face twisted in confusion. “You’re not talking to me, Logan.”

  “I do talk to you.” I turned back and dug through the clutter on the workbench, gathering penlights, wire cutters, and…where the fuck was the RFID reader? I shifted to the next bench. “I tell you everything.”

  She knew every conversation that transpired between me and Kaci. Except for the intimate stuff. That was none of her business.

  “You don’t tell me how you feel.” She caught a bundle of wires knocked away in my aggravated search. “I know you have more than one feeling, you angry man. For the past month, I’ve seen grouchy, dreamy, lazy, slouchy—”

  “Those aren’t feelings.” I glanced over her outfit, pausing on the blue-sleeved arms. “They’re smurfs.”

  She shrugged. “I have a date with Gargamel tonight. But the connotation applies. You’ve been moping around, staring into your beer bottle. You haven’t raced in two weeks. Which would be hard to do with that huge stick up your ass.” She crossed her blue arms. “I just want to hear you admit it.”

  I drew in a deep breath. She didn’t give a damn about the revenge business. Her employment with me ended in two days, regardless of the outcome. And with the salary I’d paid her over the past decade, she could retire on a yacht with a full staff of servants dressed in cosplay.

  She was busting my balls because we shared a ten-year friendship. And that friendship was worth ten-thousand retorts.

  I turned to face her and spoke through my teeth with all the frustration I’d felt for the past month. “I want to kill the loneliness inside her more than I want anything else.” I gestured to the room of electronics and engine parts. “More than any of this. I want to be the one who makes her happy.”

  She chewed on a fingernail and shifted her weight to one foot. “She’s married.”

  And lonely.

  I pushed my shoulders back and pressed my lips together. “It’s a hail Mary, Benny.”

  She cocked her head. “The hell with Mary.” Her grin stretched from ear to ear. “You’ve got me. What do I need to do?”

  Determination settled deep inside me. My heart thundered with purpose. I gripped the back of her head, pressed her cheek to my chest, and kissed the top of her wig. “I need you to get me into her condo undetected.”

  Sneaking into Kaci’s condo in the middle of the night dressed as Evader wasn’t a levelheaded plan. It was a balls-out declaration. Walking away from my revenge, exposing my underground identity, and standing over her bed where she slept with her husband was a reckless way to fight for her happiness. But reckless was my way of giving her everything I had to give, including the power to decide what to do with it.

  And I hoped to God she chose me over him.

  As I stepped off the elevator on the eighty-eighth floor, I was pretty sure the veins in my temples were going to pop, probably while the contents of my stomach hit the floor. Slipping past Trump Tower security had been the easy part.

  Benny had finalized the program on the RFID reader, which gave me access to the parking garage and Kaci’s floor. She shut down the cameras and the entire security grid in the tower, including the alarm systems in the residential condos. A five-minute glitch, she’d said. Enough time to scatter the guards as I rode one of my spare bikes into the garage, took the elevator, and stepped through Kaci’s condo door.

  Pocketing the metal reader, I shut the front door silently behind me and was greeted with the dark hush of the condo’s interior. I swallowed back my simmering nerves and followed the display on the visor. The night vision prevented a clumsy fall in the dark, and the image of the condo’s blueprints guided me to the master suite.

  The helmet, however, would probably get me shot. I wasn’t just an intruder. I was an intruder wearing a notorious mask. I would have to talk fast, and with any luck, Collin didn’t sleep with a gun.

  Straight ahead, the skyline twinkled through the windows beyond the sitting room. I was drawn to the magnificent view, but instead followed the diagram, turning down the hall on the right. My hands slicked with sweat in the gloves, and my muscles ached with tension as I forced my boots to move slowly and soundlessly.

  This was the part I ha
dn’t strategized. What if I found them having sex or their naked bodies entwined in sleep? How would I stop myself from going apeshit? I hadn’t thought past the breaking-and-entering and standing-over-the-bed plan. What was I going to say? Choose me.

  I reached the open door at the end of the walkway, my heartbeat pulsing in my throat. Time to step into the dark, murky waters of risk. Risk of being turned in once I showed them my identity. Risk of Collin bludgeoning me to death for sleeping with his wife. Risk of Kaci’s rejection.

  I wouldn’t have to spell it out for her. She was a brilliant woman and would understand the magnitude of what I was giving her. But was it enough? Was I enough?

  I pulled in a deep, silent breath and flexed my fingers. Then I strode through, crossed the room, and stopped at the foot of the bed.

  Blankets gathered in messy lumps, but the edge-sharpening perception of the night-vision outlined the forms of two bodies, entwined front-to-back, fit together like lovers after sex.

  No amount of mental readiness could’ve prepared me for the jealously surging through my veins. Blood roared past my ears, and my hands balled into fists. I closed my eyes, seconds from yanking him out of bed and losing all sense of reason.

  Man up. Power through it.

  Stretching out my fingers, I opened my eyes and searched for her toned arms, the strands of her blonde hair, something familiar in the pile of bedding.

  I stepped forward, locking my spine and measuring my breathing. But when my gaze landed on the pillow, the strength in my legs threatened to melt away.

  Two heads lay side-by-side. Two heads with short, black hair. My vision tunneled. Two masculine jaw lines. My ribs squeezed. Two faces shadowed with whiskers.

  The shock of a thousand volts slammed into my heart, electrocuting me into a state of stupefied paralysis. Unholy mother of fuck.

  He was gay.

  Collin Anderson.

  Right-winged commenter.