She shrugged. “My mom used to hang around with an MC out in Jersey. She was hoping to marry one of them, but once it became clear that she didn’t care which one it was, they stopped taking her seriously. She started stripping after that.”
“Did she get you into it?”
Bex laughed and shook her head, sadness in her eyes. “No way. She wanted way more for me. She was convinced that she’d given birth to the smartest, most brilliant, most innovative thinker of all time. She wanted me to go to college.”
“What happened?”
Bex glanced at him and quirked her lips to one side. He could tell that she was trying to decide exactly how much to tell him.
“She died after my freshman year in high school. I was going to have to go into the system because I didn’t have any family other than her.”
“You quit school so CPS couldn’t find you.”
“You’re pretty sharp yourself.”
“Who’d you stay with?”
“Different people. I was always bouncing around. For a while I still had friends from school. But when you’re homeless and broke, there’s only so much socializing you can afford. My friendships just sort of dried up. I stripped for the first time at sixteen, mostly because I didn’t have a place to sleep that night and I thought I could crash in the club after hours. I didn’t do it again for two years after that.”
“What was it like? Your first time?”
“Um. Bad. But not terrible. Just icky. I was embarrassed. I was sixteen, you know? I felt like a kid. I was a kid. I had no boobs. And acne. I’d never worn a thong before. I’d never even been properly kissed.”
Atlas felt rage rise within him like white noise. For a moment, it overwhelmed him. He felt sick to his deepest parts that she had been so young and lost and unprotected. When she was sixteen, he’d been in his twenties. And his shit hadn’t even been close to together. But still, he wished like hell he could go back in time, get his ass to Atlantic City, and rescue her out of that mess.
“If it makes you feel any better, Bex… You still don’t have any boobs.”
Her mouth dropped open in shock and she whipped a pillow around, whacking him hard in his grinning kisser. They both laughed hard when she got him again and again.
“Don’t kill the messenger!” he shrieked.
“You ass. I think I’ve caught you ogling my chest enough to be assured that my boobs are very much there.”
He shoved the pillow away from her and grinned some more. He couldn’t deny that he had a thing for her itty bitties.
She walloped him again with the pillow and he held up his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. I admit. You have beautiful boobies that are very much present and accounted for.”
She was halfway leaning over him, pillow in hand and her hair all a mess from sleeping on it.
“If you’d let me,” he continued, “I’d show you exactly what I think of them.” His voice had dropped a register again and he was delighted to see lust flare in her eyes.
She slowly lowered the pillow, her eyes on his. “What exactly would you do?”
His heart banged in his chest. She was… playing with him. He’d known that she had trouble with being touched, and he’d wondered, with dread in his gut, if she had issues with arousal. If she just didn’t have that certain gas pedal that most people had. If life had beat it out of her.
But you couldn’t fake that look in her eye. She bit her lip between those white teeth and let her eyelids fall halfway down. Her shoulder peeked out from the collar of her t-shirt and Atlas had to shift around to accommodate for one very stiff part of his body.
He stretched his arms out and laced them behind his head. Bex eyed his muscles with something like a mixture of lust and trepidation.
“First, I’d just touch you through your shirt. You always wear such thin shirts. And I’d kiss you right there, at that little triangle on the bottom of your throat. I’d wanna feel how soft you are.”
She inhaled and filled her chest up, her cheeks going pink. “I’m not that soft. I’m bony.”
“You’re soft in the right places,” he assured her, trying to make his voice as soothing as possible. “Trust me. I’ve felt it when you’ve hugged me. A man doesn’t forget something like that.”
She shifted so that her palms were on the bed on either side of her knees. Her eyes were fastened to his lips. “What would you do next?”
“Just that, for a long time. I’d kiss all the skin I could see. And I’d feel on your chest through your soft shirt. I’d tease you. Try to get your breasts standing up and aching for me.”
She shifted her weight, her mouth coming open to make way for her deep exhale. “I’ll bet you like to tease,” she whispered.
Atlas shifted again, but he kept his arms behind his head and his eyes on hers. He watched her look at his body. He watched her eyes trace his exposed biceps, the smattering of hair on his chest, his colorful tattoos. He watched her gaze slide down his stomach and bottom out between his legs. He had on boxers and a sheet was draped over his hips, but other than that, he was doing nothing to hide his desire for her. Without moving her head, her eyes slid back to his face. She licked her lips.
“You know I get off on teasing,” he said, his voice gruff, even to his own ears. He cleared his throat and decided to up the ante. “So, I’ll tease you until you’re nice and warm and soft and vibrating and purring—” She smiled, and he smiled and continued, “I’m gonna slide my hand under your shirt. Nice and slow.”
“Will you taste me?” she asked, pressing her knees together and leaning forward even more.
He damn near swallowed his tongue. “Do you want me to taste you? You want me to lift your shirt and kiss your little flat chest?”
Her eyes flared. “Yes. I want that.” She looked down at her chest. “You like that they’re small?”
“Like?” he scoffed. “I’m obsessed with it.”
She chewed her bottom lip and her eyes skated down his body again. “I like your size too,” she whispered.
He groaned and scraped a hand over his face before he laced his hands behind his head again.
“No! I didn’t mean it like that!” She went bright red. “I don't know anything about the size of your… I just mean that I like the way you’re built. You’re sturdy. Like a house. Like a pitbull. I’m just gonna shut up now.”
His eyebrows raised higher and higher the more she talked and he laughed when she covered her face with her hands.
“Baby, you can talk about my body as much as you want. Never stop, as far as I’m concerned.”
She lowered her hands just enough to see over the tops of her fingertips. “I want you so bad it scares me,” she whispered.
Atlas’s entire body flexed with the desire to scoop her up and rub her all over himself like a loofah. He wanted to do intimate, personal, wildly rude things with her.
“Come here,” he said in that gravelly tone that he barely recognized.
She slinked toward him, all nerves and lust and vibration. She watched his mouth, not his eyes, which in retrospect should have tipped him off. But when her mouth crashed down on his, his brain just sort of clicked off.
Her mouth was hot and opening and his hands were, finally, finally tangled in her short hair. He felt the sharp press of her elbow against his chest as she slammed her weight against him. And then the full length of her was there, soft and pushing and writhing.
He groaned into her mouth, but she still wasn’t giving him her tongue. He was painfully aware that he’d yet to taste her tongue. He’d kissed her a handful of times but she’d never given him her tongue. He wanted it now, and badly.
He traced her bottom lip with his tongue and one of his hands found its way to her ass. She had a small ass, proportionate to her slim figure, but he found that it was more than a handful and he helped himself to a squeeze.
Bex made a helpless sort of noise and sucked on his bottom lip, she pressed harder against him and their hipbones
knocked together hard enough that Atlas was sure he was going to have a bruise the next day. He didn’t care. She could strike him dead with that gorgeous hipbone of hers and he’d gladly take what was coming to him. No better way to go.
His fingers slicked over the silky hot skin of her lower back before he even fully made the decision to touch her under her shirt. She was liquid and undulating against him and Atlas felt as if he were swept away on a strong wind.
Her lips lifted from his and he chased her upwards, sucking at her bottom lip, his hand skating all the way up to her bare shoulder blades.
“Baby—”
Her hand slashed through the air as she pushed away from him and Atlas barely had time to catch her by the wrist. This time, part of him must have been expecting it.
She sat fully up, straddling his stomach, with her wrist caught in his hand and they just stared at one another.
He saw the exact moment her eyes filled with tears.
“Bex, don’t cry. No. Baby.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.” She scrabbled away from him and he reluctantly let go of her, instantly feeling cold and uncomfortably weightless where she’d just been sitting on him. She grabbed a pillow and hugged down on it, tears rolling down her cheeks. “I’m so sorry.”
Atlas sat up and reached for her, but instantly let his hands fall. “Bex, that was my fault. Completely my fault. I got too caught up. I went too fast. That wasn’t you, baby. That was me.”
She shoved the pillow away and stood up next to the bed, her eyes bright on his. “How can you say that, Atlas? It is not your fault that I almost slapped the shit out of you again. You’re the last person I’d ever want to hurt.”
“Bex, I’m an idiot. I should never have moved things so fast. No matter how sweet you look or how sexy you smell or how much that dirty talk turned me on. I never should have started touching on you out of the blue like that. I’m sorry. I’m the one who’s sorry.”
“I…” She raked her hands through her hair and then covered her mouth with her fingertips as more tears appeared. He’d never seen tears fall from cheekbones straight to the floor before, but that’s the path that Bex’s took. “I need to get dressed.”
She turned on her heel and left the room. Atlas hung his head between his bent knees and cursed himself for his impatience.
***
Atlas gave Bex space that day, and boy did she take it. He heard her leave the apartment a little bit after the bed debacle and she didn’t come home for hours. When she did, she locked herself in her room. He left his bedroom door open, sat in the living room, tried to make himself available.
When he couldn’t stand it for another minute, he knocked on her door around dinnertime. “Bex.”
She came to the door in her pajamas, her eyes puffy and cast down to the floor.
“Oh, baby. You been crying?” He put his hands on the doorjamb, where she could see them and tried not to lean into her space too much.
She shrugged.
He sighed. She still wasn’t looking at him. He was getting flashbacks to the woman she’d been before he knew her name. Withdrawn and skittish and suspicious. “I just wanted to apologize again. I took things too fast and too far this morning. I’m worried you’re beating yourself up for something that was my mistake.”
“Touching someone while you’re making out with them is not a mistake, Atlas,” she said in a low voice that didn’t sound like her at all.
His brow furrowed. He wanted to make his case, but she was already closing the door. “I need to go to bed.”
Atlas sighed and rested his forehead against her door. He didn’t go back to his room. Instead, he went over to his brother’s house.
For the first time since Bex had moved in, he let Sequence and Naomi feed him. He knew there were plenty of leftovers in the house for Bex to eat so he didn’t feel too guilty about it. But still, he couldn’t help but feel as if she were missing from the equation. Typically, Atlas felt completely filled up, warm and fulfilled when he was with his family, his niece in his arms. But that evening, as Brookie crawled at full speed to knock over Atlas’s tower, he wished Bex were there to see it.
He gave Brookie her bath that night and tucked her into her crib. It hit him, as he stood in the doorway of her room, how much he wanted that someday. What Sequence had. A kid with a good woman.
When he returned to the living room, Naomi had already gone to bed, but Sequence sat in the living room, a cold beer waited for Atlas on the coffee table.
“I’ve been thinking about this,” Sequence said, and it startled Atlas. Because his brother never started conversations.
“About what?”
“Bex’s situation.”
“Ah. Yeah. Me too.”
“Did you get her that ID?”
“Yeah.” Atlas sighed and scrubbed at his beard. “I just hope that Rook doesn’t find out. He’ll suspend me or fire me if he knows I’m dabbling in that illegal shit.”
“Don’t be dumb. Haven’t you figured out that Rook has a soft spot for love?”
Atlas turned and raised his eyebrows at his brother. “What do you mean?”
Sequence leaned back on the couch and looked at the ceiling, his feet propped up on the coffee table. “He should have fired Cedric and me for getting romantically involved with clients.”
“You and Naomi weren’t still working together when you hooked up and Cedric waited until—”
“I know that there are technicalities that make it all kosher. I get it. But seriously, any other boss on Earth would have fired us. We were personal security who started screwing people we were hired to protect. That’s a no-no, Atlas. So, why do you think he didn’t fire us?”
“Apparently, you think it’s because he has a soft spot for love.”
“Actually, Naomi thinks that. She thinks that he knew we were in love before we did and didn’t want to do anything to screw it up.”
“Why would he care so much about us finding love?”
“She’s got an answer for that too,” Sequence said with a wry chuckle.
“Naomi’s got an answer for everything.”
“Don’t I know it.” Sequence rolled his head to one side. “Figures that I’d endure your loquacious ass for my entire childhood only to fall in love with someone just as chatty.”
Atlas was quiet for a minute. His eyes went to the front door, where, across the hall, Bex was. Then his eyes went to Sequence, solemn and quiet and secretive. Then his eyes went back to the hall. And back to his brother. “Shit! I did the exact same thing! I fell in love with someone exactly like you!”
“Psychologists would probably have some very fucked up things to say about that, my brother.”
The twins laughed and clinked their beers together. Atlas wiped the condensation off his bottle. “Wait, we got sidetracked. What was it that you’re thinking about Bex’s situation?”
“Two things, I guess. First off, we need to take a little field trip and figure out whatever we can about these two guys who’ve been murdered and their relationship to Bex. You said that she thinks she’s done something illegal. But she hasn’t killed anybody or paid to have anybody killed?”
“Yeah.”
“But she won’t say anything else.”
“Right.”
“Look,” Sequence sighed. “We’re gonna go talk to a lawyer and see what we should do next for her, what’s the best thing for her to do, but so far, we don’t know enough. If we go to a lawyer, tell him half the story, he might tell us to do one thing and that one thing lands Bex in jail. At this point, in order to keep her safe, we need the information. If she’s not going to give it up, we need to get it another way.”
Atlas had been there when Sequence’s baby was born, the day he’d become a father. He’d been there on his wedding day. He’d seen his brother look all kinds of grown up. But right now, it was the first time it truly hit Atlas. They were not kids anymore. Not even close.
As he stared at his
brother, another thought hit Atlas. It was almost painful in its clarity. He couldn’t believe that it hadn’t occurred to him before.
But before he could say anything else, Sequence kept speaking, “And the second thing you need to do is to tell Rook everything.”
Atlas opened his mouth but Sequence cut him off again. “If you think that’s gonna betray Bex’s trust, or whatever, then let me tell him, but he has to know.”
“Why?”
“Do you think for one second that he wouldn’t drop all this bullshit with Cliff Dodd and concentrate on her? Whether or not she can pay, Rook is not going to let Bex twist in the wind. He’s going to assess her situation, make a judgment call, and then keep her safe for as long and as effectively as he possibly can.”
Atlas took a swig of beer and eyed his brother. “He hasn’t even met her.”
“He’s met you, dumbass.”
“And you and Naomi think that Rook is just so obsessed with love that he’ll do anything for it? Including working for free?”
“He’s not obsessed with love. He’s just still in love with May and wants to make sure that people like you and me don’t fuck it up, the way he did.”
Atlas pursed his lips and nodded. He’d never spoken about it out loud before, but Rook’s feelings for his ex-wife weren’t exactly under wraps. “I guess that makes sense.”
“We need to keep her safe, Adam. Even if it means that she feels some type of way about it. Even if it makes her spitting mad. Even if things get wonky between the two of you. We need to go to Jersey and figure this shit out, and then we need to keep her safe.”
Atlas froze at his brother’s use of his real name. It had been years, decades, actually, since anyone had called him Adam. He knew that his brother did it now to remind him of what their lives used to be like. When there had been no one to protect them but each other.
***
Atlas took the next day off of work and so did Sequence. The brothers got in Sequence’s Escalade and made the drive to Atlantic City.
They didn’t talk much on the drive down and Atlas could feel Sequence’s concern. Atlas was definitely someone who filled the silence naturally, but right now, he wasn’t sure he had it in him. He wasn’t coming down here to spy on Bex’s former life. But he was coming down here to confirm a thing or two about who he was pretty sure was after her.
Rook Security Complete Series Page 68
