“You can do this,” she said to herself as she took one last glimpse in the mirror. Her lipstick was good, and her hair could use a little styling, but she didn’t really have time for that. She ran her fingers through the locks before stepping out of the car and bumping the door shut.
Kyle was already headed inside.
The living room, much like the outside, was just as she remembered it. Three shelves of cheap dollar-store figurines, most of them with sayings like “Bless This Home” and “God, Keep Our Family Safe.” The television was an upgrade from the one she remembered, but it was still positioned on a cheap entertainment center that sagged in the middle. Her father’s La-Z-Boy was surprisingly unoccupied, but there was a permanent dad-shaped dent in the center of it, and a sweat stain where the back of his head would be.
The kitchen was a mess, days’ worth of dishes piled in both sides of the shallow sink. The dish rack was only a third full. Last night’s dinner was still sitting on the stove. A few fat flies were buzzing around the lid, searching for a way to get to the contents.
And over all of it was the pervasive scent of cheap liquor and cheaper cigarettes.
Someone had clearly tried to clean the living room. Donna guessed it was her dad since her mother just couldn’t be bothered. A trash bag full of old magazines, newspapers, and old paper plates was currently roosting next to the door.
“Home, sweet home,” Donna muttered under her breath.
“Baby!”
Elizabeth Mason burst out of her bedroom with fresh makeup on and tears in her eyes. Apparently, it had been more important to put on eye shadow than clean out the sink. A dress, two sizes too small, clung to her very tan, very skinny form.
She surged forward and wrapped her arms around a statue-still Kyle. “Hi, Mom.”
“Don’t you ‘hi’ me,” she said, stepping away from him and gripping his shoulders with skinny clawlike fingers. “You gave me a heart attack.”
He dipped his head. “I’m sorry. Donna got me out though. Uh… thanks for calling her.”
Her head whipped in Donna’s direction. The bottle-blonde hair was stiff with too many chemicals. Her mother’s brown eyes weren’t glittering with tears anymore. “Well, I didn’t expect you to step inside.”
“Hello, Mom. How are you?”
“I’m just fine.” Liz Mason lifted her tan chin and stepped around Kyle. “Look at you in your fancy suit.”
She said it like it was a bad thing, like Donna had come here to rub her money in her mother’s face. “I came here right from work.”
“There’s my girl!” Her father’s voice boomed through whatever Liz was about to say.
Robert Mason was a massive man. He stood nearly six foot five in height and at his best—or was that worst—came in at three hundred and eighty pounds. He shuffled awkwardly toward her, with a cane in one hand to steady himself. His bearded face was all smiles as he wrapped an arm around Donna. She was instantly enveloped in the scent of stogies.
Over her father’s massive shoulder, Donna could see her mother’s lips twisted into a sneer. Oh great.
“Put her down, Robert, and take a seat. I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”
“I won’t,” Robert said, but he let go of Donna and waddled over to his seat anyway. He plopped himself down in the worn and cracked leather, pulling a blanket across his legs. “You grew up nice.”
“Well, of course she did,” Elizabeth said. “She had me.”
Donna didn’t agree with that, but she wasn’t here to fight. Fighting would mean problems and sticking around longer. She had no desire for any of that. She wanted to get out of here and find a place to stay. She wanted to make sure she could have a regular wireless connection for work so she could still get things done while she was here.
“Yes,” she said, “I did. Um, Kyle, why don’t you go get some of your things together while I talk to Mom and Dad?”
“What?” both parents asked in union. Her father sounded confused, while her mother sounded shocked.
“Yeah, all right.” Kyle dipped his head and took a step toward his bedroom.
“Kyle, don’t you move. You stay right there where I can see you.” Elizabeth’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean ‘get some things together’? Is he going back to jail?”
Donna shook her head. “No, Mom. I had to work out a deal with the sheriff. Kyle is a multiple offender, and they are afraid that he’s just going to disappear rather than go to his court date. They released him into my custody. I have to keep him until everything is decided.”
“What?” Her mother’s voice was as shrill as a dying cat. “What do you mean? You can’t take him. That’s my baby. He’s not yours. Oh, I should have known this would happen. Prissy little Donna thinks she’s so perfect, that she can do a better job being a mother than I can.”
Donna ran her tongue over the inside of her mouth to keep herself from snapping the first thing that came to mind. “Mom, it has nothing to do with me.”
“The hell it doesn’t.” Elizabeth stormed past Donna and jerked the fridge door open. She pulled out a single-serving bottle of wine and twisted off the top. She threw her head back and took a long swig. “You did this on purpose. You did this to punish me.”
“Mom, this isn’t about you.”
Those were quite possibly her mother’s least favorite words. They turned her dark brown eyes into liquid fire, and her face flushed a dark red. “You are just trying to punish me,” she said, as if repeating it would make it true.
“Now, Lizzy,” her father said from his place in the La-Z-Boy. “Just hear her out.”
“I don’t have to hear her out. I know what this is all about. This is typical Donna. You abandoned me and the rest of this family so that you could go off and pretend like you were better. But that wasn’t enough, was it? You had to rub it all in our faces, didn’t you? You had to slink up here in your fancy car and your fancy suit and show it all off.”
“Mom,” Donna said, gritting her teeth. “You invited me here. You asked for me to come and help. This is part of that. Kyle has to stay with me. I’m going to make sure that he gets to school, and to his after-school job, and that he does his homework until he has to go to court.”
“Bullshit.” Elizabeth took another drink.
“Kyle,” Donna said firmly. “Go pack.”
He scurried off. Liz damn near hissed. “How dare you! You can’t boss around my boy.”
“Actually,” Donna said, meeting her mother’s fire with ice, “according to the state of Nevada, I can.”
“Donna,” her father called from the chair. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I did. The sheriff wasn’t going to let him go unless it was with me. He thinks since I put up the bail I’d have a vested interest in making sure that Kyle showed up, and since I don’t feel like being out thousands of dollars, he’s right.”
“So, helping Kyle is all about money for you?” her mother snapped.
If it hadn’t been so damn annoying, Donna might have been fascinated with how quickly her mother could switch topics until she found the one that would win an argument. Donna held up her hands. “Money was why you called me, Mom. You wanted me to wire it, remember? I showed up because my brother is in trouble. I am going to help him. Yes, part of it is because I don’t want to lose money, but let’s be honest. I make enough on my own. Even if I did lose twenty thousand dollars I wouldn’t suffer too much.”
Her mother made a scandalized gasp. “You make all that money, but you never come to see me? Why do you hate me so much?”
Donna rooted around inside of her head for a single reason that she had no desire to spend any time with her mother and came up with ten. None of them would get her out of here any faster. She could see Kyle, hovering down the hall with a backpack in his hand, looking lost and uncertain of himself.
“Mom, I don’t hate you, but I have to go. Daddy, I love you.”
“I love you too, little wonder,” he
r father said.
“Mom, I will see you later.”
Kyle was already making his way out the door when Donna turned on her heel and headed back to her car. She heard a wild female screech followed by the sound of breaking glass. It was just another day in the Mason household.
Chapter Four
Cody
“You met Donna?” Hulk asked. His dark lips formed a smile around very white teeth. “Damn.”
“You know her?” Cody asked.
Hulk nodded his head once, making his shoulder-length dreadlocks sway inside the bandanna he wore around the top of his head. He pulled out a glass and poured out a beer, sliding it across the bar toward Cody. “Yeah, man, we went to school together. Well, at least we did right up until the tenth grade.”
“You drop out?” Cody asked, picking up the cold beer and giving it a long sip. The pool hall was nearly empty, just a few familiar faces tucked into booths or bent over the pool tables while bets were passed between hands.
“Naw, man. She did.”
Cody nearly choked on his drink. He couldn’t picture that icy redhead dropping out of anything. “What?”
Hulk shrugged. “Okay, I know that little Maverick talks about his big sister with all this, I dunno, pride I guess. He says how smart she is and how she’s got her own business and shit. I’m sure he’s right, but I don’t want to bring up the fact that I knew a totally different girl way back when.”
“She dropped out?”
“She sure did, man. I mean she wasn’t a great student to start with. She liked to run wild, and she only showed up when it suited her, so I can’t say I was really surprised when she just stopped showing up altogether.”
Cody shook his head and took another drink. “You’ve got to be talking about a different girl.”
“Man, there are only, what? Ten thousand people in this entire piece-of-shit town? How many Donna Masons with a brother named Kyle do you really think there are?”
Hulk had a point. Cody pictured that swanky redhead in her million-dollar suit giving him the cold shoulder. He wasn’t sure if it made it better or worse that she had a bad side. Okay, that wasn’t true. It made certain thoughts in his head a whole lot better knowing that she had a bad side.
“But you don’t gotta ask me,” Hulk said. “Twitch used to hang with her.”
“Twitch? Like… what do you mean ‘hang’? Did they date?”
“Shit man, no. She always had more class than Twitch. But they were friends. He used to live in the same trailer park as the rest of her white-trash family so they hung out. Childhood buddies or whatever. You’d be better off asking him.”
“Where is he?”
“Chasing Mindy. Where else? Shit, Lieutenant, you wanna find out about that girl so bad? What did she do? Turn you down?”
Cody’s lapse of silence was enough. Hulk smiled again and barked out a deep rolling laugh.
“She did!” he said. “She totally turned you down. How often does that happen?”
“Never,” Cody said, and it sounded childish even to him. He shoved his half-finished beer aside. It didn’t taste good. All he could picture was her dark lipstick and how that might taste on his lips. “Man, she was cold. And now she’s got Kyle.”
“That a bad thing?”
Cody thought about it. “It’s a bad thing because I think she’s going to turn him away from the club, or at least stop him from being a part of this.” He waved his hand across the pool hall.
“Kids gotta make their own choices,” Hulk said levelly. “So what are you mad at? That Kyle went with her, or that you didn’t?”
“Both,” Cody responded.
“So seduce her.” Hulk took the half-finished beer and tossed it out. He ran the glass through the little automatic washer behind the bar and ran a dry cloth around the edges before setting it back up.
“What?” Cody was pretty sure he hadn’t heard the other man right.
Hulk chuckled. “I think you heard me just fine, Lieutenant. You want this girl to come around to how you see things, and you want to scratch this sudden itch for her. That’s cool, man. I get it. So do what needs to be done.”
“I tried?”
“What, you give her a smile and bat those pretty blue eyes at her? That ain’t enough, especially when the woman has her life interrupted to come handle her troubled brother. You have to go about this a completely different way.”
It wasn’t a terrible idea. The swanky redhead could use a little fun.
“So what? I should bring her flowers and make lots of pretty promises?”
“Hell no,” Hulk said leaning over the bar. “Jeez, man, how do you even get women?”
“I usually wait for them to come get me,” Cody fired back amicably. “It works better all around.”
Hulk nodded his head, sticking out his lower lip so he could plop a toothpick on top of it. It bounced nimbly over his mouth as he said, “Yeah, all right, that’s not bad, but do you think a woman like that is just going to come to you, man? She isn’t some lonely housewife or giggling coed from up the way. She isn’t even just a high-strung businesswoman who might enjoy a walk on the wild side. If everything I hear about her is true, she knows all about the wild side.”
Cody tried to imagine a younger Donna Mason. In his mind, she was long-haired and sleek with shorts and a tank top tied up between those pretty breasts. It didn’t look a damn thing like her. What on earth could she have done to get that kind of reputation?
“What did she like to do when she was living it up?”
Hulk shrugged again. “You’d have to ask Twitch for the details. He would know better than me. But she was all about things that shine, if you know what I mean.”
Cody did. “She had a case of sticky fingers?”
Hulk held up his hands as if to show that he was weaponless. “That’s what I hear. She liked all kinds of things that glittered, and that got her into a bit of trouble. When she said good-bye to public education, she supposedly made some side money by snatching up all the things that people didn’t want to snatch themselves. She even shacked up with some guy for a while.”
“Some guy?” Cody felt his brow furrow across his olive forehead. “Did you just say that this wasn’t that big of a town?”
“He wasn’t in town. Just some dude. I dunno.”
Cody frowned. He had been to Kyle’s house; he saw the way they lived. It was all bottom-shelf stuff. Sure, there were plenty of good people who were fine with secondhand everything and store-brand groceries. If Donna wasn’t, however, it could have gotten the best of her when she was too young to fix things.
“And then what?”
“Well, I know she got caught doing something stupid. The entire town talked about it for weeks.”
Cody found himself even more interested than before. “What stupid thing did she do?”
“She broke into the church.”
“What?” he asked. “Why?”
Hulk spread his hands apart again. “Man, your guess is as good as mine. A lot of people say she was going to steal the offering box. Some say she wanted that gold cross that sits up at the front of the place. I dunno. But it must have been what hit rock bottom for her. Maybe that guy had something to do with it too.”
Cody told himself he was going to talk to Twitch when he got the opportunity. Then his phone rang.
“Well, look at that.”
Hulk glanced down at the phone. “Is that Kyle?”
“Sure is. Bet he’s already slipped her watch and wants me to go pick him up.”
“You do that and it’s going to put a serious wrench in the plan to seduce her.”
Cody waved it off and swiped the phone on. “If he has, I won’t have to.”
Chapter Five
Donna
The “grand room” of the rent-by-week apartments was, in Donna’s opinion, anything but grand. It was a single room that tried to be a kitchen, a dining area, and a living room all at once. It was only the linoleum that
separated one area from the other. It came prefurnished with a couch, a dinette set, and a recliner, all in shades of brown.
“Awesome,” she muttered as she moved past the kitchen, which she hadn’t bothered inspecting just yet, and to the larger of the two bedrooms. Her suitcase was already camped out on the bed ready for her to give it the time of day. She really didn’t feel like unpacking right now. She wanted to go back in time to where she’d never taken her mother’s call.
No, she decided, that wasn’t fair. Her mother hadn’t been the reason she had come here. Kyle was. Donna was sure that deep down, Kyle was a good kid. He was just young and frustrated and acting out. She understood.
BARE SKIN: A Dark Bad Boy Romance Page 27