Figuring it would lighten the atmosphere slightly, I decided to tell him what I thought was a funny story - at least I thought it was funny now. At the time, not so much. “Five months ago when I got home, it looked like someone had tossed the place. There were big holes in the wall, and the curtains had these long cuts in them. Ellis and DB came over and did a walk through, and then called me in to look around and tell them what was missing, but nothing was.” I watched as his eyes narrowed, probably wondering why this was the first he was hearing about all of this. “Come to find out, I’d bought one of those plug-in things that’s meant to keep cats calm when they’re home alone, because he used to tear things to shreds while I was out, but instead of calming him, it’d…”
“Had the opposite effect on him,” he choked out, obviously trying not to laugh.
“It’s ok, you can laugh. Hell, even my insurance company laughed when I rang them about the damage.”
“Under any other circumstances, trust me I would be,” he said, looking around us like he was trying to find any residual damage. “Something’s bugging me, though, Rose. I live right there,” he pointed out the window at his house, “and you live right here. I’m also a deputy which means I’m a police officer living right there,” he pointed again at his house. “Do you see why I might not be laughing?”
Wincing, I nodded, biting down on my lip and trying to figure out how to explain why I hadn’t involved him. Really, the best option was the truth, but I didn’t want to go with the truth because it sounded really bad now. Shit.
“Ok,” I started, trying to get up so I could explain it with some distance between us, but the big shithead tightened his arms and stopped me from moving. Groaning because it really was going to sound stupid - even though at the time it hadn’t been - I covered my face with my hands and just jumped in. “That was the same day I set those alarm clocks to go off all over your house at three o’clock in the morning.”
That had been a good prank, but he’d been furious and had hammered on my door for twenty minutes to wake me up, too. I’d spent all day looking over my shoulder in case he tried to get revenge on me at work, so I’d been a wreck by the time I got home as it was.
“And you thought maybe I’d been the one to break your house apart,” he guessed, looking offended that I would even consider it.
“I mean, you love your sleep and all, and man were you pissed!” I blew out a breath, thinking back to the glare he’d shot me as I’d driven to work that morning. “Then I realized you wouldn’t go that far, at least I hope you wouldn’t,” I gave him a nervous glance, “and that’s when I panicked and called Ellis and DB.”
Deciding that picking my finger-nail was better than seeing the glower he’d no doubt be aiming at me, I focused on it and went to town. I could feel his eyes burning a hole in the side of my head the whole time I worked on that nail, but I stayed strong and true to the nail cause, not looking up once.
Finally, after long minutes of silence, picking, and glaring, he lost patience with the situation. “Rose.”
Eyes still on the finger prize, I replied, “Mm?”
“Look at me, Rose.”
“In a sec.”
That apparently was the wrong thing to say to an officer of the law, because he picked me up and turned me around so that I was facing him, with my legs straddling his thighs. I would like to point out, not once did I stop what I was doing - although I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t sorely tempted to, especially when he’d picked me up with no warning. Cupping my neck with his huge hands, he used his thumbs to lift my chin so that I had no option but to look at him this time.
“Now, I want you to listen to everything I have to say, and not interrupt. Do you understand?” he growled in a tone that sounded not unlike one I’d expect him to use when he was questioning a suspect. It made me think of him questioning me in a room with handcuffs involved, which would mean I was totally at his mercy, wouldn’t it? “Jesus,” he muttered, his eyes sweeping over my face. “I want to know what’s making you blush, but I’m not sure I’d survive it if I did.”
That just made me blush even harder, wincing at the thought of him finding out that fantasy. Stress makes bitches be dumb – lesson to the bitches. “It’s probably best you don’t know.”
Shaking his head, he breathed in and out a couple of times, and then went back to what he’d been saying. “Rose, no matter what’s going on between us - not even if I’ve dug a grave for you in my backyard - if something like that happens, you call me. It could be the middle of the night, and I still want you to call me,” he said firmly, waiting for me to nod, which I did but I doubted I’d make that call, regardless. “No, baby, you’ll call me, because if you don’t I’ll spank the ever-loving shit out of you. Do I make myself clear?”
Staring at him open-mouthed, I digested what he’d just said, focusing on two parts of it in particular to ask him about. “I have questions” I began. “First off, if you dig a grave for me in your backyard?”
“You piss me off badly, sometimes,” he shrugged, not looking at all phased by it.
“But it’s got fake grass down,” I argued. “You’d have to cut a patch out or lift it up and then dig the hole. And what if you didn’t pat it down properly when you filled it back in? You’d end up with a big lump in the middle of your garden, and your fake grass wouldn’t lie right.”
He blinked once, then twice, and opened his mouth to say something before shutting it again. When he’d done this a couple of times, I rolled my eyes and gestured at him to spit it out. “That’s what you got from that? A lump in the middle of the yard being the overall issue out of the whole scenario?”
I didn’t even need to think about an answer for that question. “Damn fucking right, doggy. Have you seen what Ranger did to my garden? That shit makes a difference, and there’s no ignoring uneven landscaping.”
Groaning, he tipped his head back and muttered something at the ceiling, and was still staring at it when he asked, “And the next question?”
“Ah, yeah, I’m glad you asked,” I said, bouncing slightly which made him tighten his grip around my waist. “So, let’s say it was the day that I came home to my house being ruined, and I’m scared that someone broke in at some point during the day and invaded my home. My emotions are swirling around,” I circled my hands either side of my head, “and I’m crying because I’m so scared. I do the rational thing and call my big brother and his best friend, the Sheriff, and get them to come and check that the person isn’t still in my house. You’re saying that you’d come over and spank me, after all of that?”
“Damn right,” he growled, not even taking a second to think about it.
“While I’m scared?”
With a firm nod of his head, he pulled me closer until our noses were almost touching, and I watched as the dark blue shade of his eyes got even darker at the same time as the lighter blue shade got lighter. It was like watching lightning.
“I live right across the road from you, I’m a police officer, and I have a gun. And make no mistake about it, I will do anything and everything in my power to keep you safe. If you’re scared, you call me. If you think someone’s in your house, you call me. If you think someone’s outside your house, you call me. No matter what, You. Call. Me. Do you understand?”
“Not really,” I mumbled, starting to shake my head, then changing my mind when our noses bumped because of it.
That’s when things got even weirder, and a new dynamic was added to my day. Confusion, specifically a fuck-ton of confusion. His hands moved from where they’d been holding me in place down the way so that he had one of my butt cheeks in each hand, which he then used to pull my crotch into direct contact with his. Once we were crotch-to-crotch, he moved his left hand slowly up my back until he was cupping my neck, pulling my face towards his, close enough that I could feel his breaths on my lips.
“Your safety is my priority, anything to do with you is my priority, Rose Beauregard. So in the fu
ture, you pick up your phone, you find whatever you have my number saved under…” which was funny because he was saved under ‘Asshole from hell,’ “and you call me. I swear to God that I’ll drop everything and get to you as fast as I can,” he told me, not letting me look away once, not even when I tried to look down to watch his lips moving as he spoke.
And then I made a fundamental mistake, a total lapse of judgement given our close proximity. I licked my lips and the tip of my tongue skimmed along his bottom one. His grip on my neck tightened, and the next thing I knew, our lips were tightly pressed against each other and his tongue was the one now licking along my lower lip, asking for entry into my mouth. And I was about to grant it, in fact I’d just started opening my mouth, when his fucking phone rang interrupting us. What made it worse, was the way I was positioned over him meant that my vagina – which was already screaming at me as it was – was resting on it as it started vibrating in his front pocket. I wasn’t sure if I was more disappointed about the kiss or the fact he was going to deprive me of a couple more buzzes of the device.
Not letting me get up, he held my eyes as he reached for it, his eyes heating even more as his knuckle skimmed across the area when his fingers wrapped around the phone, and didn’t look away once as he answered it and listened to whatever was being said. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” he muttered, hanging up as he blew a breath out slowly. “I’ve got to go, baby. This isn’t over, though,” he warned, pecking me on the nose. “Not by far.”
I wasn’t sure if he meant the war between us or the kiss. I’d find out later that it was a scenario I hadn’t thought of – he meant both.
Chapter Four
Raoul
There’s a legal process with every arrest that we have to go through, and some are straightforward, but others not so much. The mother we’d arrested today had undergone a psych eval, and was now being taken to a secure facility, while CPS and the boy’s father dealt with his recovery and safety. I know Rose felt for her - mental health was a minefield to navigate - but I knew that she felt most sorry for the child, and the fact that it had been his mom who’d put him through what he’d been through.
That was where I was on my way home from right now. The dad had arrived in Piersville and had immediately wanted to meet the people involved with helping his son. When DB had called to tell me to meet him at the hospital, he’d had suggested we didn’t involve Rose tonight - knowing that she was upset about the case - and I’d been fully onboard with that.
I’d also wanted to meet the boy’s dad to make sure that he was capable of looking after him given what his mom had been like. All it had taken was seeing him standing beside the hospital bed with tears running down his face for me to know he was. His despair at what the boy was going through along with his relief at finding him, was clear for everyone to see. What cemented it, though, was when he turned around and hugged us all, including Doctor Simpson, and thanked us for saving his son and helping him find him.
After an hour with the man and two women from CPS, I walked away with a riot going on in my head and heart. During the divorce, he’d been awarded custody of his son after it had been deemed that the mother needed further psychiatric help. He’d gone to collect him right after the ruling and had been searching for him since, along with CPS.
Now the poor kid faced extensive therapy, and would always live with the fact that his mom had repeatedly made him sick to feed something inside her. As someone with two loving parents and shitheads for siblings, that was hard to stomach. Don’t get me wrong, I’d come across things like this before with work and it was never easy to accept, but to deliberately make your child sick, when there were so many parents who’d give anything to take an illness away from their kid?
Right now I reckoned that I felt what Rose had been trying to describe to me earlier. It was a darker side of life that you rarely touched on, but when you did, it would always be there in your mind for the rest of your life.
“Yo,” DB called from behind me before I could get into the cruiser I’d driven here. Stopping with my hand on the door, I turned and watched as he jogged toward me, stopping when he was a couple of feet away from me. “How’s Rose?”
Deliberately keeping my expression blank, I countered his question with one of my own. “What makes you think I know the answer to that question?”
Grinning widely at me, he confused me by walking backward toward where his own cruiser was parked, tapping the side of his nose as he did it. “I’ll take that as she’s fine.”
What the hell?
Shaking my head as I got in, I started the engine and began the short drive home, watching Rose’s house as I parked in my drive. If my phone hadn’t rung earlier, I had no doubt that I’d still be in it with her, but a part of me wondered if that would have been a mistake. Would it have been too fast for her and make her back away from me completely?
In fact, now that I thought about it, a lot of questions were hitting me. In a perfect world where it wasn’t too fast for her, would I have stopped at kissing her if my phone hadn’t started ringing? Would I be in her bed right now? Was her brother going to kill me? Did I care that her brother might kill me? And why was I being such a teenage girl about the whole thing and over analyzing all of it?
And finally, did this mean a ceasefire to the war?
* * *
5am the next morning…
The irritating blaring of the alarm on my phone woke me up in the middle of one of the best dreams of my life. It wasn’t often that I went into an REM cycle while I was sleeping, and given what I’d been doing to Rose in the dream, this meant I was in an even shittier mood than I normally was in the morning. After I’d hit the screen three times, though, I had to accept that if I had to get up, or I’d be late for work. And seeing as how I was never late for work or took a day off – I had to get my ass up out of bed.
My normal routine consisted of stumbling through to the bathroom, turning the shower on to heat up, answering the call of nature, and then getting into the shower which is exactly what I did this morning. In fact, everything was so routine, that it took me a while to notice something – my soap wasn’t foaming. No matter how hard I rubbed it between my hands and then on this poufy thing Mom had bought me to use in the shower, nothing happened.
Bringing the bar up to my face so that I could look at it closely, I didn’t notice anything obvious except for the fact that water was just running off it. I can’t say that I’d ever inspected soap before, but I was fairly certain that it didn’t normally drip off it like it was at this moment. It wasn’t until I lifted it to sniff it, though, that I realized what she’d done and my head fell back against the tiled wall behind me with a thud.
“For fuck’s sake!” She’d played my own trick on me and I’d fallen for it.
Two months ago, I’d climbed in through her bathroom window and swapped out her bar of soap with one that I’d painted with clear nail polish. That’s what I was holding in my hand – the exact same fucking bar. And I knew it was because my thumb had stuck to the wet polish when I’d been brushing on the stuff, and the rough and blatant fingerprint on the bar in my hand was considerably larger than Rose’s. It also sucked because I hadn’t bought another pack of soap during my last visit to the grocery store because I’d been in a hurry and had forgotten.
This left me with one option – the shower gel that my sister had left behind when she’d stayed here. The one that came with her perfume, so I was going to smell like a chick all day. Fucking awesome!
Knowing that I was safe from any other pranks - because we only ever played one at a time - I finished up, brushed my teeth, and made sure the beard I’d started growing in three months ago was neat and tidy, before getting dressed. The smell of my sister Catalina’s perfume followed me through it all, and my mood sank even lower as I put the pod in my Keurig and hit the button. The only thing that could fix my shitty morning moods normally was caffeine and the smell of coffee, but seeing as how
I couldn’t smell it this morning because of the perfume, that first cup was going to need to be strong. As soon as it was done, I added a splash of creamer and lifted it up, taking a large gulp and relishing in the taste of…
I only just made it to the sink in time to spit it out, gagging as the taste registered and I spat repeatedly into the basin. “She wouldn’t have…” Oh, but she apparently had because the taste in my mouth wasn’t the taste of coffee – it was the taste of dirt, like the soil she used in the pots in her precious front yard.
It took a full five minutes of brushing my teeth and gargling with mouthwash to get it to a tolerable level – and even then the word ‘tolerable’ was pushing it – for me to go and look at the pod which was still sitting in the machine. The smell as I walked into the kitchen was further proof, but when I lifted the pod out the protective covering on the top of it didn’t look any different to me than it normally did. Not that I inspected them normally – although, I would be after this – I just lifted them out of the box and put them in the holder, but it looked ok. Ripping it off, I poked the soggy dirt where the coffee should have been and growled.
It was on. A man’s shower and his coffee were sacred things, and she’d ruined both of them for me. Even my brother and sister, Cat and Garrett, knew not to mess with both of those things, and we’d done some awful things to each other over the years.
Stalking through to the window in my living room that overlooked her house, I pulled the edge of the curtain closest to the wall to the side, and rested my shoulder against the wall to watch her house. Every so often her curtains would shift slightly, like someone was looking out of them, and then finally her front door opened and her head poked out.
It took her five full minutes to get the courage to leave her house, and then she ran to her car and almost slammed her leg with the door trying to get into it as fast as she could.
Classy AF: Cheap Thrills Series Book 3 Page 4