BARE SKIN: A Dark Bad Boy Romance

by Callie Pierce

  “What are you doing?” A light breathiness ruined her normally demanding tone.

  “Touching you,” he said. “Do you want me to stop?”

  Her eyes fluttered as his thumb skipped another inch forward. He could almost feel the heat of her through the cloth. It was too easy to know that she was damp inside her pants. He wanted to roll them down her legs and show her just how good he could be. He was just beginning to form the words to ask her to spend the afternoon with him when she reached down and gripped his wrist, halting his progress.

  “Yes, I do. I want you to stop.” There was no breathlessness this time. Only the cool certainty that he now associated with Donna. Her eyes, however, were filled with something he hadn’t expected: a dollop of fear. “Please.”

  He pulled his hand back slowly. Cody was a lot of things, and he broke a lot of rules. But making a woman he liked, and even respected from time to time, afraid of him was not something that he enjoyed. “All right. I’m sorry.”

  Her gaze lingered on his face again. She looked like a doe who had spotted a hunter. “You’re right. I really don’t know a damn thing about you.”

  “I’d like you to.” The offer was genuine, and he hoped that he sounded it.

  “That’s a really bad idea.” She shook her head and repeated, “A bad idea.”

  “So what’s the problem?” He wanted to know. Despite what his uncle and probably a large portion of Carson thought, Cody did not pursue every woman, and he certainly did not get every woman that he pursued. Plenty had told him no, and he had been more than happy to take his charms elsewhere. So why Donna? What was it about her that had him continuing to try?

  She took a long swig of coffee before answering. “Would you prefer them alphabetically or chronologically?”

  “Is there that many?”

  “Of course there is. We can start off with the fact that you are exactly what I shouldn’t be getting involved with. If I were a kinky coed with aspirations of getting my picture taken for a living, then you would be my first choice. But I’m not. I’m a businesswoman who has very clear goals in mind for my future, and you simply aren’t in them.”

  “I’m not asking for a marriage proposal.”

  She held up one hand. “Well, that’s certainly one of the problems.”

  He frowned. “You want me to want to marry you?”

  She sighed and rolled her eyes. “Not you in particular, Cody. However, I no longer wish to be involved with a man simply for the fun of it. I want commitment, building for the future, all of that. Explain that one away all you want, but you can’t deny that we have a far more important task at hand.”

  He didn’t need her to explain that one. Understanding swamped him, and he took another healthy bite of his sandwich. “Kyle.”

  She nodded in agreement and opened the bag of chips that had come with her meal. The crinkle of plastic filled the silence that spread between the two of them. It wasn’t until after she finished her second chip that she said, “Yes, Kyle. There is something going on with him. I’m sure of it.”

  He had to admit that he was sure of it too. “He doesn’t talk to me as much as he used to.”

  “What do you mean?” She dumped her chips into a neat little pile next to her half-eaten sandwich and plucked at them without much appetite. He hated to see her not eat. He wondered if Kyle’s text had been true. Could she not cook? Sure, she had money now, but he knew that she hadn’t come from wealth. How had she not learned to cook?

  He pushed his own nearly finished sandwich aside and opened the cookie he had gotten in lieu of chips. “I mean that he used to come by and sweep up the shop, or learn something about cars. Uncle Gary had taken him in first. He’s like that with kids, did the same with me. I was okay with it because Kyle seemed like a cool kid, and before I knew it he was my friend. We’d spend a few hours there more days than not, yacking about everything while fixing something.”

  Her chin dipped just a little. “Part of that is my fault. It’s part of the agreement we have with the department that he comes directly home from school.”

  “No,” he said, tilting the cookie at her in offering. “That’s not it. He was coming by less and less before you showed up. He was getting distracted and everything. I thought that he was just bored, maybe a little distracted because of that girl he had been talking about. But I dunno. This goes beyond being girl crazy.”

  She lifted a brow and broke off a small piece of the cookie for herself. She ate it with slow mouselike nibbles, as if eating smaller pieces meant that she could savor it. “Girl crazy? Is that similar to being boy crazy?”

  He laughed and pushed the rest of his cookie toward her. She eyed it for a moment before shrugging and picking it up. “Yeah, a little. Just tends to be stupider when it’s a guy.”

  She smirked at him and tilted her head to the side so that her hair made a curtain of color on one side of her face. “I find myself wondering just how stupid you have been for a girl.”

  “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours,” he teased. It was the wrong thing to say. He knew it as soon as the words were out of his mouth. The small amount of comfort they had gained in the sharing of a meal and talking about Kyle had evaporated in a snap.

  “Fair.” She finished off her own food and crumpled the paper up. “So what are we going to do?”

  He thought about it for a moment. “I mean, I could keep sleeping in the car, making sure he doesn’t skip out on you.”

  “How is that working for you?” she asked, crossing her legs, comfortably this time.

  “Terribly,” he admitted, reaching up and rubbing the back of his neck. “Backseats were a lot more fun when I was a teenager.”

  The chair scraped as she stood up and plucked the garbage off the table, then plunked it in the outdoor container. She used a napkin to sweep the crumbs into her palm and sent them chasing after the other detritus. “What other options do we have?”

  “We could put a car alarm on his bedroom window.” He jerked his thumb in the general direction of the body shop. “I have like thirty of them.”

  “That seems a little extreme.” She plopped herself down in the plastic chair and began to arrange her things back into a neat little order. He wondered if she liked to organize everything just so. Probably. She seemed like one of those type A personalities. “Besides,” she went on, “I’m fairly sure that’s against my temporary lease.”

  “Desperate times call for desperate measures and all that. We could download one of those apps to his phone that let us know when he’s not where he should be.”

  She wrapped her arms around herself, clearly not comfortable with that. “I… I don’t know. I understand the why. I just don’t think I agree with the how. It feels a little like I am trying to control my brother.”

  He nodded. “I get that. You want him to be free. You also want him to be the good kid.”

  “Yes,” she said, conviction making the words into a prayer. “I do.”

  “Problem. He’s already proved he isn’t being the good kid. He’s done some stupid shit, and worse, he’s gotten caught doing it. That’s hard. So we will put the app on his phone. He’ll have to know about it.”

  “Well, we don’t want him to think we are spying on him.”

  “We are, a little bit, but yeah. Besides, he’ll see the app on his phone anyway.”

  Donna sighed. “I’ll agree to the phone thing, not the car alarm. How are we going to tell him?”

  “Together,” he said. He hefted himself out of his seat and stood up. He wanted to sit here all day and talk with her, maybe find out what it was that had taken the light out of her eyes and made light teasing into something that made her freeze up. He wanted to, but knew that pushing right now would only get her guard up again. “I’ll still swing by and check on things.”

  “Deal.”

  Chapter Nine

  Donna

  Donna’s work had been finished before Cody even showed up at the Deli. It co
ntinued to be a mixed blessing. Donna never enjoyed feeling useless, and when she realized just how competent her people were without her, feelings of uselessness were setting in. She sent out a few e-mails to people at the company, congratulating them on a fantastic job and offering some ideas about how the next week should go, but she had the sneaking suspicion they weren’t ultimately necessary.

  What was she supposed to do with the rest of the day? It was shaping up to be a warm afternoon, meant for having lunch with friends or getting her nails done. She glanced down at her hands and decided she didn’t need to do anything about her nails just yet, and it wasn’t as if she had any friends she could call upon to waste a few hours in idle relaxation. Cody, she realized with bemused horror, was the closest thing she had to a friend around here. Well, there was Jerry or Twitch or whatever name he was going by now, but he was probably being a small-town businessman somewhere. Possibly with Cody, who had returned to his own job but promised to come by later that evening to handle Kyle’s cell phone.

  It felt good to have help. At work, she might have run things, but she relied on the people around her. She had a knack for utilizing their strengths and skills and placing them with the projects that worked for what they could do. Her entire life had worked that way, when she thought about it.

  Even her romantic life, she admitted to herself as she perused her e-mail. There were a few from men that she had gone out with, wondering if they were going to see her again. She sent each of them a similar response of “I’m out of town handling family stuff, I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

  “Can I get you anything else?” a voice asked as Donna hit Send for the last time that afternoon.

  It was the pretty girl, the model. The smile on her face, Donna decided, was like an empty decorative tissue box. Pretty, but lacking anything of substance. A very nice decoration to top off a well-wrapped package.

  “No, thank you.” Donna slid her laptop away and laced her fingers over the remnants of her lunch plate.

  “Okay, then.” The girl started to turn away. Her hair made a pretty fan behind her as she moved. It was surprisingly graceful, but Donna thought that it was intended to be. A primal little move from one woman to another that said “I’m hot, and I know it, and that guy we were both talking to? He knows it too.” Donna resisted the urge to smirk.

  “Amber,” Donna called out, making the other woman skid to a stop. “Our mutual friend explained to me that you are a model?”

  Amber blinked, her luminous brown eyes taking on a careful but friendly look. It was the pleasantly guarded expression that a woman might have if she was expecting to talk about something she liked that other people didn’t. “I’ve done some photography work.”

  Donna nodded and motioned to the empty seat on the other side of the table. “You go across the States to do it?”

  “Yeah,” Amber said slowly, but she couldn’t quite stop herself from continuing on, “I work for a company that works with the resorts in the New England area. I mean, it’s not a lot of work, and the pay is crap, but I like it.”

  It was clear that the girl liked her work. As she talked about it, her eyes took on a tender shine and her shoulders squared out beneath the cheap apron she had to wear for the eatery. For the first time, Donna got to see real pleasure on the girl’s face, and it suited her well. If she looked half this pretty beneath harsh lights and quick camerawork, then she’d go far… so long as she was given the opportunity.

  “It’s great to love your work. I know that I love mine.”

  Amber slid into the seat, relaxing a fraction of an iota. “What do you do?”

  “I’m run a productivity improvement firm.”

  “What?”

  It was Donna’s turn to square her shoulders with pride. “My job is to go in when a company’s production is low. I try to figure out why and solve the problem.”

  “Oh, that sounds…” Amber trailed off.

  “It sounds boring.” Donna smiled and took another sip of her long-cold coffee. “I know. But honestly, I love it. People being happy with what they do professionally means a lot to me. And why not? The relationships that you build inside of your professional life last longer than most of the personal ones. They ought to be good. I want to make sure that everyone is getting the best out of their work.”

  “Okay,” Amber said, clearly trying to be polite. It was clear to Donna that she didn’t know why this conversation was happening but wasn’t yet sure she should leave.

  “Do you like working on the east coast?”

  Amber hesitated. “Not really. My aunt—she raised me on account of my parents passing away—she’s sick. Alzheimer’s, early onset. It’s… rough. I don’t make the kind of money to get live-in help, and we can’t afford to send her to one of those nice places either. So I am the main caretaker. Being away isn’t easy for either of us.”

  Donna felt an ache of compassion and respect take root in her chest. It was one thing trying to build your career. It was another thing entirely to attempt that while having to take care of another human being. “I’m really sorry about that. Maybe I can help.”

  “Wait. What?”

  Donna nodded again and waited long enough to make sure the girl was listening. Amber wasn’t just sitting in the seat now; she was leaning forward, with a hand on either one of the rests. Her eyes narrowed and her lips thinned as if she was waiting for the proverbial shoe to drop.

  “One of my clients is Marissa Quinn.”

  “The cosmetics lady?” Amber gushed. “Are you for real?”

  “Very much so.” Donna set her now empty cup aside and leaned forward. “I know for a fact that she needs new models for the upcoming spring line. Your look is very fresh and very natural. Perfect for that kind of work. I would be happy to put a word in for you.”

  A flurry of emotions crossed across Amber’s pretty face. No, Donna decided, the young woman, and she was a young woman, wasn’t just pretty. Pretty was the word you used for a vase or a well-done but uninteresting piece of artwork. Amber was striking. Her lips had that perfect pouty quality that photographers went nuts over, and she had the long body of subtle curves that would age well. She even had the natural sun-kissed color that wouldn’t need much to keep picture-ready. When her expressions finally settled, Amber’s eyes were back to being narrowed. “What’s the catch?”

  “Halvsies on your free cosmetics that you’ll get as part of your contract.”

  “You want free makeup?”

  “I do wear it nearly every day.” Donna motioned to her face.

  “You don’t want me to stay away from Cody?” Amber sat back in her seat, crossing her slender arms over an equally slender chest.

  Donna laughed and shook her head. She couldn’t quite stop herself. “Cody isn’t mine.”

  “He seems to think he is.” Amber flicked her eyes in the direction that Cody had left. “He thinks a lot of girls are.”

  Donna shrugged. She agreed with the words, if not the bitter sentiment behind them. “We kissed once.”

  “He’s good at that.” Amber’s pouty mouth twitched into a shy smile.

  Donna agreed. “He certainly is.”

  “Most women I know would be jealous if they found out the guy that they kissed had been mackin’ on me.” Amber tossed her hair over one shoulder. For just a moment Donna was very aware of how young the other woman was. It had nothing to do with her age; there were some ladies who could be eighty and still be young.

  Donna steepled her fingers in thought. “I don’t get jealous.”

  “Everyone gets jealous,” Amber shot back.

  “All right, I don’t stay jealous.” When Amber continued to look disbelieving, Donna continued. “Okay, so let’s say that Cody was my man, and he was, as you put it, mackin’ on you before we were dating. I can’t really hold that against him. It happened before me. If he was cozying up to you during our imaginary relationship, I might feel a smack of jealousy… right before I tossed him to the
curb.”

  Amber chuckled. “I like that.”

  “But even if that were to happen, that jealousy still doesn’t extend to you. Not really. You are an attractive woman, and my man might think about seeing you naked. I can’t blame him for that; I think about naked men all the time. But that doesn’t mean that he has to act on those thoughts. If he does… the wrong is on him.”

  “You don’t think that a woman should tell a man no if she knows the man is taken?”

  Donna shrugged yet again. She crossed her legs and motioned flippantly with one hand. “If that woman is free and single and willing, that’s her life. He’s the one breaking the rules.”

  Amber sat there for a long moment. “I think I like you.”