by Coralee June
“But Lance doesn’t need to know that. Maybe if I lie enough, I can start to forget how terrible she was.”
Decker lifted his hand up like he was going to brush a strand of my hair out of my wild eyes. He stopped himself though, and I wasn’t sure if I cared or not. He still looked angry and determined to figure me out, but there was something else there, too. “Give me a truth,” he whispered instead.
“I hate dancing,” I whispered, surprised that he didn’t even have to bribe me for this little bit of honesty this time.
“Why?”
“Because last time she dragged me to a dance hall to be her designated driver, her date felt me up,” I replied, making Decker’s gaze turn into a blazing inferno of protective fury. It felt hollow though. Men were painfully generic when it came to caring about accosted women after the fact. Too bad no one was there when I needed them most.
“He what?” Decker asked, taking another step closer. His chest brushed against mine, and I could feel a steady heat rise up my body.
“Don’t make me repeat it. And don’t act like you care. The second I knocked on the door, you had me all figured out. This is temporary, remember? I’ll give Lance the narrative he wants, then be out of his hair. Just don’t pretend like a sad story makes you give a shit.”
Decker looked down at me, his slowly traveling eyes taking me in. I felt breathless and on edge. “When’s your next day off?” he asked, surprising me. I’d expected him to lash out, prove me wrong, or tear me apart.
“Tuesday,” I replied.
“Good. Don’t make any plans. I’m taking you somewhere,” he replied before biting his lip and pulling away, taking his heat with him. It felt like I could actually breathe again.
“I’m not sure I want to go anywhere with you,” I replied before crossing my arms at my chest and inadvertently pushing my breasts up. His eyes traveled down to my cleavage, then snapped back up to me.
“Too bad,” he replied with a smirk before leaving my bedroom, taking his confusing personality with him.
Too bad? Too fucking bad? Decker Harris was one confusingly sexy jerk, and I didn’t like how much I was starting to like it.
6
Decker
I wasn’t up early to see her.
Nope. Not me.
I normally woke up at fucking six a.m. on a Sunday. I normally went for a run to get rid of the tension in my chest. I normally sat at the kitchen table, staring down the hall like some goddamn creep.
I knew the moment she woke up. I could hear her alarm going off through the thin walls of Lance’s loft. I lifted a strategic yet casual glance in her direction as she left her bedroom and strolled into the bathroom across the hall with a yawn.
I was so totally, utterly fucked. Her age was already an issue, but that, combined with the fact that she was Lance’s little sister, made her completely off limits. Besides, I wasn’t even sure if I liked her or not. I was a man of science—double majored at fucking Princeton in Chemistry and Biology. I liked to solve things, rip molecules apart just to figure them out. And Blakely? She was a conundrum of contradictions, an experiment I couldn’t get a hold on, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
I could hear the water running in the bathroom, and my mind wondered how she looked in the damn shower, droplets of water flowing over her perky tits. Nope. Not going there. Not even for a goddamn minute. Get your shit together, Decker.
When Blakely first showed up, I had her right under my thumb. Some long lost sister appeared out of the blue and wanted to set up in Lance’s house? I’d decided: Fuck that.
People like Lance and me had had wagon hitchers breaking down our doors since the day we were born. I might have been a damn teacher, but my trust fund was worth a couple hundred years of my cushy private school salary—and then some.
We were simple guys with simple lives, avoiding the money and bragging rights our parents gave us. But that didn’t mean we were able to go blindly into any friendship, any relationship. When we moved to Memphis, we ran away from that all, but of course Blakely had to show up and tilt our world on its axis.
The bathroom door opened, releasing a plume of steam. And God dammit. She walked out clutching a towel around her curvy frame and quickly disappeared into her bedroom. I gripped the table so hard my knuckles turned white. What the fuck was wrong with me? I needed to do something. Get the hell out of this house, maybe go to a hotel or something.
No. That wouldn’t do. Lance was like a brother to me, and I needed to keep an eye on her.
Or at least that’s what I was telling myself. I couldn’t figure out what it was about Blakely. Every time I expected her to do one thing, she did the complete opposite. I was ripping apart her truth, and every damned layer brought me to a new understanding of the tortured girl walking around our apartment. But that wasn’t even the part that had me transfixed. It was that she claimed she wanted to protect Lance from their deceased mother in her own strange way. I wasn’t sure if I believed it or not, but I wanted to know more.
“Good morning,” she said in a sleepy voice while towel drying her hair and walking barefoot toward me. She didn’t bother to put on any makeup, not that she needed it. It was strangely intimate. I lived with a complete stranger, but she didn’t even bother trying to impress either of us. She always walked around in her damn pajamas, swaying her hips as she hummed to herself, and it was driving me fucking nuts. This morning it was her work uniform. Had I known Rose owned a bar where Blakely would be wearing that, I would have never gotten her the job, not in a million years. She needed to work at a nunnery.
“Morning,” I grumbled back, pissed that the thought of seeing her was making me wake up at the ass crack of dawn just to gawk. Shit, was I really admitting this to myself now? I was fucked with a capital F.
“You’re up early for a Sunday,” she said before pouring herself a cup of coffee.
“I like to start my day with a run,” I lied. I actually liked to start my day with a blow job, but that wasn’t happening.
“So you’re one of those people,” she replied with mischief before opening the fridge and bending over to grab some creamer. Her ass was perched high up in the air, and I wanted to burn my eyes with acid to stop them from wandering in her direction.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“I don’t trust people that run for fun. Masochists, all of you,” she replied with a lazy wave of her hand before methodically pouring creamer into her cup and mixing it with a spoon.
“There’s nothing wrong with being healthy,” I said. I didn’t necessarily like to work out, but having a healthy lifestyle was ingrained in me at a young age. My dad played pro ball for most of my youth, and even though I didn’t follow in his footsteps, working out was one of the few things we bonded over.
I watched her as she leaned against the countertop, sipping her coffee as she took in my basketball shorts and tank. I wasn’t blind. I knew the effect I had on most of the female population. I’d gotten enough anonymous love notes from my students to prove it, not that I’d ever entertained that. I wasn’t some fucking creep. I usually went for older women—women that were sure of themselves in and out of the bedroom. It would be unethical to even think about it, and yet here I was, imagining what Blakely would look like with her lips wrapped around my co—
“So where are you taking me Tuesday?” she asked while rolling her neck. My eyes traveled the defined lines of her collarbone and dipped down to her cleavage. I snapped my eyes back up, realizing she’d asked me a question.
“Huh?” I asked, sounding lame even to my ears.
“I said,” she began while pushing herself away from the counter and sauntering over to the kitchen table. She sat down before continuing. “Where are you taking me Tuesday?”
Ah. And there it was, just the opening I needed.
“I’ll tell you if you tell me another truth,” I replied with a smirk. I don’t know what it was, but hearing her past was like a fucking drug,
and I just wanted another hit. I was addicted to her story, addicted to learning what made her tick. In the beginning, I told myself that it was because I wanted to protect Lance, but now I wasn’t so sure.
“You and these truths. Haven’t you had enough?” she asked in a coy voice I could practically feel in my chest.
“No. Tell me,” I demanded, hoping she couldn’t hear the tension in my voice or how tempted I was to plead for more. I was worse than Lance’s ex-girlfriend, the meth addict that stole thousands from him.
“How about this,” she began while tracing the rim of her coffee cup with her finger. “You tell me one truth of yours, and I’ll tell you one of mine.” My first reaction was to tell her to fuck off, but I stopped myself before I could let the knee-jerk response come tumbling out of my mouth.
“Any truth?”
“Any. But I’d really like to know more about your friendship with my brother. You’re so...protective. That has to come from somewhere. Either you have a massive crush on your best friend, or you have history. Which is it?”
Of all the things she could have asked, she wanted to know about Lance. Another brick in the wall I’d built up around her turned to dust.
“Lance and I grew up in a wealthy neighborhood. We never wanted for anything. Never really had to try hard to succeed. We had life handed to us on a silver platter—literally. But it wasn’t all easy,” I offered with a shrug.
“Why not?”
“Because when you have the world, everyone wants to take it from you,” I replied before cracking my knuckles. “Your turn.”
She sat there for a moment, marinating in my honesty. Based on the sour expression on her face, she didn’t like what I had to tell. That was a first. Usually, when everyone heard that we came from money, it made them want to latch on for dear life. That, coupled with my father’s career, usually ended with girls that had diamond rings in their eyes.
I expected her to share about her shitty childhood, compare and contrast what was different about my privilege and her suffering, but she didn’t. “I once wanted to be a scientist when I grew up.”
“What kind?”
“The kind that discovered shit. Maybe work for a pharmaceutical company. After Mama’s treatments, I learned real quick that they make good money. I could cure cancer or something,” she said offhandedly with a wave of her hand. That didn’t sound very convincing.
“And now? What do you want to do now?”
“Tell me another truth, and I’ll answer that.”
Oh, so she was bargaining now? I felt my chest heat at the challenge. “My dad played professional football.”
“Never really liked the sport. Now tell me something about you, something that isn’t laced with your ego or other people’s achievements.”
“You think I have an ego?” I asked while leaning forward. She matched my stance, propping her tits up on the table as she stared at me for a long while. I had to force myself not to stare down her shirt. I took a sip of my coffee while she mulled over her response.
She then rasped, “I think your ego’s so big it drags on the floor when you walk. Must be hard carrying around all that self-importance on your back.” I spit my coffee out into my palm in shock, looking like a damn idiot in the process. What the fuck had she said? My dick was proudly growing hard at the reference to my ego, but said ego was bruised as hell by what she thought of me.
“I’ve always wanted to be a teacher. Your turn,” I sputtered, trying to gain control of the conversation.
“I’ve always wanted to get the fuck out of Texas.”
“That’s not a job,” I quipped.
“That’s not a legit truth. Tell me something juicy, and I’ll spill all my deepest, darkest secrets, Mr. Harris,” she replied in a sultry tone, or at least it sounded sultry and hot to me. My dick stirred in my pants, and I had to resist the urge to tell him to calm the fuck down. Maybe this was just her sleepy voice. Maybe she didn’t feel the same pull as I did.
“Fine,” I gritted. “Lance saved my life in ninth grade. One of Dad’s super fans broke into our house with a gun. Lance was spending the night and tackled the bitch before she could shoot my mom and me.” Flashbacks. Gunshots. Screams. Terror. It all hit me like a punch to the gut. I squeezed my eyes shut, still remembering the sound of her arm cracking when Lance landed on her. What I didn’t mention was that Dad had been sleeping with her. She was a one-night stand that wouldn’t quit. I felt my body grow clammy with sweat. The reminders of everything else that happened afterward broke through me like a freight train. Mom’s addiction to booze. Dad’s yelling. He could deflect with the best of them.
“Decker,” a voice said softly. “Decker!” it screamed. I blinked. Blinked again. Blinked a third time before digging my nails into the table once more. My eyes went back to Blakely, who looked as terrified as I felt. “I want to be a doctor.”
The smoke cleared. The screams faded. “A doctor, huh?” I choked out.
“Don’t think too highly of me. It’s not because some doctor changed my life while Mama was in the hospital. I just think it’s the only profession that’ll fit with my terrible handwriting.”
“Wait, what? You’re picking a dream job based on the fact that your handwriting is bad?” I asked while shaking my head, all previous thoughts fading from existence.
“That’s why it’s a dream job, Decker,” she said before standing and putting her coffee mug in the sink. She didn’t ask about my parents. She didn’t ask about what happened or where my mind went just now. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say she was distracting me. Why the fuck was that? “It’s a dream. I can do whatever I want. Reality, though? I’ll be lucky to keep this job with Rose.”
Yeah. We’d see about that. Suddenly, I started racing through my knowledge of the admission process for the school I worked at. Something about her answer and nonchalance made me determined.
“We still on for Tuesday?” I asked as she walked down the hall, away from me. I didn’t like that she was leaving so soon.
“Yeah, I suppose,” she called back. And when I heard the door to her bedroom shut, it was like all those bad memories came flooding back.
Yep. I was definitely fucked.
7
Blakely
“This is where you wanted to take me?” I asked as Decker’s classic car, an ostentatious man-machine with black paint and shiny chrome, pulled up to a large, modern school. The manicured lawns and white concrete exterior made the building look polished and welcoming, but I was intimidated all the same. A crest hung over the front door boasting its name: Memphis Academy for Math and Sciences, or MAMS for short.
Decker rolled his eyes while he put the car in park before twisting in his seat to stare at me. “I have to get the labs ready for school. I figured I could give you a quick tour of the place, and you can help me get everything set up.”
I felt myself growing angry at another unexpected twist. First, it was the sneaky bribe to get me to tell my secrets. Now, he was taking me to school even though I hadn’t made any decisions yet. Decker bit his lip as he openly observed me, a small smirk kissing his features. He knew exactly what he was doing, and it was pissing me off.
“Who says I even want to help you? Besides, wouldn’t it be weird for a teacher to be spending his Saturday with a prospective student alone on campus?” I taunted. His easy-going expression slipped a fraction, and I watched in amusement as doubt flickered across his dark eyes. Got him.
He pulled his keys from the ignition before opening the door with a confident shove. “Are you insinuating there’s something inappropriate going on?” he asked in a deep voice that I felt in my core. “Because I was just planning on showing my best friend’s baby sister around. I’d hate for you to get any ideas about this.” He stood up and slammed the car door shut as I sputtered in disbelief. That asshole.
I opened my door and got out with a huff, hating the way light chuckles escaped his lips as I fumbled to stalk over to him.
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Once we were both standing in the concrete parking lot, I crossed my arms over my chest in annoyance before addressing him. “I don’t have ideas about this,” I replied in a whisper before gesturing between us. “I was just looking out for you. I don’t usually go for older guys, anyway,” I added while looking him up and down with scrutiny. Even though I tried to appear nonchalant, my eyes still lingered on his broad shoulders and long, muscular legs.
“Older, huh?” he asked with another chuckle. I hated how self-assured he sounded. Decker looked around the empty parking lot before taking a step closer to me. “I’m twenty-four, by the way. I’m not some old creep preying on high school girls. Besides, regardless of whether I am your teacher or not, nothing would ever happen between us.”
I tilted my head to the side while taking another step closer, my breasts brushing against his chest as I invaded his space. “And why is that?” I asked in a husky voice before quickly adding, “Not that I care.” I hadn’t even realized how turned on I was until my traitorous voice turned sultry and needy. Every inhale had me brushing against him. I could smell his masculine cologne. He was under my skin, and I wasn’t sure how that made me feel.
“Nothing would ever happen between us because you’re Lance’s sister. End of story. Now get your ass inside so we can wash beakers.” Decker then spun around and started walking up the steps toward the main entrance. Gaping, I stood there for a little longer to process his words before following after him. Once at the main door, he pulled a key from his pocket and unlocked it before letting us both inside.
The main hallway had burgundy tile and crisp white walls. It opened up into a large cafeteria where a mural of their mascot, a pirate, was painted on the right side. Large, expansive windows covered the hallways, immersing the entire building with light. I could hear in the distance that a vacuum was running, likely the janitorial staff gearing up for the new school year.