by Vi Keeland
Gray threw his head back in laughter. “I take it poor Danny lost out.”
I grinned. “He did.”
“Did you go away to college?”
“I did. That was probably my most uneven list. The cons had that I’d miss my mom and friends. And that I was afraid. The pros took up a front and back.”
“Boots?” he said.
“I’ll wear them for you next week.”
I really loved the little crow’s feet around his eyes when his full face smiled.
“And you’ve kept all the notebooks where you do these pros and cons lists?”
“Yep. Seven full notebooks dating back close to twenty years. They’ve sort of become my own peculiar version of a diary.”
“Do you still do it? Make lists?”
I bit my bottom lip and debated telling him the one I’d started working on last week. “On occasion. I find it soothing for some reason.”
His eyes roamed my face. The man had an uncanny ability to read me. It unnerved me almost as much as I found it fascinating. When our eyes met, I knew he had the answer before he’d even asked the question.
“Have you made one for getting involved with me?”
***
Class had ended ten minutes ago, but I still had a few people waiting to talk to me one on one. The more I taught them about the appeals process and researching case precedents, the more it sparked questions on the viability of overturning their own cases.
A guard I had seen once or twice, but never spoken to, stopped by the classroom.
“Time’s up, boys,” he said from the door.
My eyes flashed to Gray’s. He walked over to the guard, and the two of them spoke for a few minutes. Their eyes occasionally flickered up to where I stood. When they were done, Gray walked back to the front of the room and spoke to the stragglers hanging around.
“Kirkland’s gotta clear the room before the end of his shift. You guys are going to have to ask your questions next week.”
Without much complaint, the last of the students walked to the door. Dealing with the majority of the guys housed here felt no different than dealing with people at work. These men were white collar, many of them educated better than I was.
The guard yelled back to Gray with a warning tone. “You got ten minutes, Westbrook. That’s it. Then I need to take her for sign out.”
I waited until the door clicked closed to ask any questions. “What’s going on?”
“Fourth stack from the library door. It’s a blind spot for the cameras.” Gray lifted his chin. “Take that book with you that you used for class like you need to put it away.”
“But that’s from my firm’s library. I brought it with me.”
He looked me in the eyes. “Trust me. I’ll meet you over there in two minutes.”
By the way his black pupils pushed away almost all the green in his eyes, I suspected I knew what was about to happen. And even though just thirty seconds ago I had felt completely normal, my entire body immediately changed in anticipation. I nodded and walked to the adjoining library, counting the stacks as I went. The skin on my face burned, yet my fingers and toes seemed to go cold and lose their feeling. My head spun while I tried to walk normally on wobbly legs and act natural, knowing that cameras had eyes everywhere.
Unsure what to do with myself when I arrived at the fourth stack, I tried to look busy by fingering through the book titles on the spine. If someone had shown up, held a gun to my head, and told me to read the words, though, I would’ve been dead. I was too wired to see straight.
I smelled Gray before I saw him. He had a clean, fresh, yet masculine smell. My back was to him as he walked up the aisle behind me, and one of his big hands gripped my hip as the other pushed my hair to the side. I gasped. If I’d been on a roller coaster, inching its way up to the top, this moment hovered at the summit—my blood pumped faster, full of adrenaline-laced fear and anticipation, waiting for the hair-raising nosedive down.
His low voice tickled my neck. “Stop me now, Layla, if you don’t want this.”
The coaster car rocked back and forth at the precipice. “What about the cameras?” My voice was so husky and breathless, I barely recognized it.
“Trust me,” he said.
Trust me.
As crazy as it was, I did. And maybe I didn’t even care about the consequences, if there were any. I wanted to touch this man more than anything I’d ever wanted. I turned, and Gray’s heated gaze caught mine. He looked into my eyes, seeming to give me one last chance to stop him. Unable to speak, I gave him the slightest nod as my chest heaved up and down.
Before I could prepare myself for what I’d just agreed to, Gray grabbed my face with both hands and backed me up against the bookshelf behind me. His head dipped down, and he planted his lips over my mouth.
The jolt from feeling his body press up against mine made me forget anything else existed. He licked my lips, urging me to open, and groaned into my mouth as his tongue found mine. I whimpered in response. Never in my life had I felt such hunger, felt so deeply desired. A heavy throb between my legs had me pushing into him, but I still couldn’t get close enough.
As if he sensed what I needed, Gray reached his hands around to my ass and tugged my thighs, guiding me to wrap my legs around him so he could press deeper. He crushed his erection against my aching clit and ground up and down. The friction had me so turned on that I thought it was possible he could finish me off with just more grinding.
My fingers laced through his silky hair, pulling and tugging at the soft strands. He groaned again, and the sound caused a ripple from our joined lips straight down to between my legs. One of the hands at my ass moved up to my neck and tightened as his thumb tilted my head more to one side and he deepened the kiss.
The feeling of weightlessness hit my belly, and I began to fall. My roller coaster car rocked back and forth one last time before careening down the long slope. As we panted and clawed at each other, I lifted my imaginary hands into the air and enjoyed the crazy, scary, wonderful ride down.
When our kiss broke, I was mesmerized by the effect this man had on me. Gray’s hands came back to my face as he cupped my cheeks, stroking gently with his thumb while trailing feather-soft kisses from one end of my lips to the other.
His voice was gruff. “This is real.”
I swallowed, not understanding what he meant at the time.
The creak of the door opening and the guard’s loud voice made me jump. “Time’s up, Westbrook!”
Gray leaned his forehead against mine. “I gotta go. Remember what I just said when you start doubting yourself by Tuesday.”
Chapter 10
* * *
Gray
2 years earlier
“My commissary account balance somehow went from zero to the max of two hundred and ninety bucks,” Rip, my bunkmate, announced. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”
I was glad my back was facing him. I continued to fold the laundry I’d just finished on top of my bunk. “How the hell would I know where the money in your account came from?” I lied.
I’d written a letter to Etta and asked her to fill his account a few weeks ago. She had access to all of my personal funds out in the real world. I’d been wondering if he’d gotten it.
“Maybe my Katie did it?”
I felt bad for giving him hope that his daughter had come around. But he wouldn’t take the money from me, and I knew he had a stack of letters he’d written her, but couldn’t afford to buy any postage. Rip and I had been bunkmates since the day I arrived. He’d already been here a few months, so he showed me the ropes.
“Maybe. But at least now you can pick up some of the gourmet foods you like so much,” I teased. “Ramen Noodles, prunes, Pop-Tarts.”
“Not everyone grew up eating caviar off a silver spoon, pretty boy.”
I chuckled. “What’s on your agenda today after dialysis?”
“Probably watch some TV. Th
ey’ve got a John Wayne movie marathon playing in the activity room this afternoon.”
“Ah. So a good long nap, then?”
He tossed a towel at my back.
Rip’s real name was Arthur Winkle. But he’d been nicknamed Rip because of his penchant to catnap. Rip Van Winkle. The guy nodded out in the middle of conversations, during dinner, and inevitably during TV time. He always denied being asleep, claiming to be “resting his eyes.” Whenever the inmates gathered to watch something, they all groaned when Rip joined them because he’d be snoring up a storm within ten minutes of the show starting.
“What time is your lady friend coming today?” he asked.
“Ten.”
Rip knew all about Layla and me. Mostly because I didn’t shut the fuck up about her, ever. Weekdays were basically a countdown to the weekend. And while Saturdays were always incredible, Sundays sucked because it was so long until I’d see her again. Her six months of community service only had another two weeks left, and I’d hesitated to bring it up because it felt wrong to ask her to keep driving here every week just to visit me, yet the thought of not seeing her for more than a year until I got out killed me.
“I think I’m going to write a letter to Katie and thank her for the money, then mail all these backlogged letters.” Rip wrote his daughter every week, like clockwork. She had never written back to him once.
“Sounds like a plan.” I looked at the time—ten to ten—then scooped up the apple I’d saved from lunch yesterday to butter up the teacher. “Better head down to class.”
***
“Tell me something you hated about your childhood.”
I sat back in my chair and folded my hands behind my head. Tell me something had become a weekly ritual for Layla and me. Each week one of us would ask a random question of the other. The experience of wanting to know everything about a woman was foreign to me.
Don’t get me wrong—I wasn’t the kind of guy who went on a date and only talked about myself. I’d had conversations, but most of them were surface—talk about jobs, vacations, that type of current stuff. I’d never wanted to know about a woman’s childhood. It had never even dawned on me to ask that kind of a question.
But I wanted to know everything and anything about Layla—namely, what made this woman tick.
“Thursdays. I hated Thursdays growing up.”
I arched a brow. “Big test day at school?”
“Nope. It was the day my father left every week.”
She’d mentioned that she didn’t speak to her father anymore, but shied away from elaborating. We only had a few hours together each week, and I didn’t want to use them to pry into shit that might be bad memories if she wasn’t ready to share.
“Every week? Did he split his time for work or something?”
“He split his time between his families.”
“He had an ex-wife and kids?”
She looked down and shook her head. “No, he had a wife and kids. We got him from Monday night through Thursday morning. His wife and kids had the other four days out on the west coast.”
“Jesus. So your mom was his mistress?”
“Yep.”
“How long did that last?”
“More than twenty years. Until my mom died.”
“That’s fucked up. And she knew he was married?”
“Yep. And his wife knew he had a girlfriend. Everyone except me seemed to be okay with the arrangement. And I didn’t start to think anything was wrong with it until I was a teenager—because oddly, my dad was a great dad to me. Even though he was only around for a few days each week, he spent more time with me than any of my friends’ dads who were around all the time spent with them. Dad just had two families, and we didn’t talk about it. But once I got a little older, I couldn’t comprehend being able to love two people and need two families.”
“Did he grow up Mormon?”
“Nope. Catholic.”
I shook my head. “Well, I can see why you’d hate Thursdays.”
Layla blew out a deep breath. “You’re the only person who knows that besides my best friend since childhood.”
I held her gaze. “I’m honored you shared it.”
She smiled, then relaxed back into her chair. “My turn.”
“Pretty sure anything I share after that is going to seem boring.”
“Well, I think we could use something less depressing after that share. Let me think.” She tapped her finger to her lips.
God, I wanted to suck on those things so bad.
“Tell me the last lie you told.”
“Easy. I lied to my bunkmate a few hours ago.”
“Rip?”
“Yeah. I stuck some money in his commissary account and said I didn’t. He won’t take handouts.”
She smiled. “That’s sweet.”
“Except now I got his hopes up that his daughter did it.”
“They’re on bad terms?”
“Hasn’t spoken to him since he got arrested. Never came to visit once. No one has, as far as I know. His wife passed away a few years before his arrest.”
“That’s sad.”
“Yeah. He’s a good guy, too. Most of the guys in here are here because of greed. He’s in because he’s selfless.”
“You said he was making and selling Social Security cards. He’s in for federal counterfeiting, right?”
“Yeah. Owned a printing shop for forty years. Had a really sick granddaughter with medical costs, so he started making them for some guy who sold passports, licenses, and all kinds of fake documents. He sent her the money anonymously because he wouldn’t have had the money to give her by any legal means.”
“Oh, wow. And his daughter doesn’t talk to him because of that?”
I nodded. “Families do crazy stuff when the shit hits the fan.”
“Tell me about it.”
I suddenly felt her bare foot on my calf. She’d slipped out of her shoe and lifted my pant leg—one of the few touches we could enjoy without the camera. I loved the way her eyes twinkled when she said or did something she shouldn’t be doing. My eyes fell to her nose. I’d noticed it while she was talking, but hadn’t said anything.
“You didn’t cover up your freckles today. Did you do that for me?”
She smirked. “Maybe. Do you like it?”
“I love it. They’re sexy as hell, but the fact that you did that for me is more of a turn-on than anything.”
She rubbed her toes higher on my calf, and I groaned. “You’re going to give me a hard-on from a fucking foot on my leg.”
The light in her eyes danced. “Well, we have another hour before class starts. Might as well make it a good one.”
I squinted, unsure what she had up her sleeve.
“Remember when we played that little game where you described how you would kiss me?”
“Yeah, Freckles. Not much I forget about your visits.”
“Well, how about we play that again, but I describe how I would kiss you below the belt?”
Chapter 11
* * *
Layla
“I need a drink like you wouldn’t believe.”
“And here I thought you came to visit me because of my winning personality.”
My best friend Quinn owned a bar less than four blocks from my office. O’Malley’s was a local pub that her dad had owned as far back as I could remember. After he decided to move to Florida a few years ago, Quinn kept it running while he had it up for sale. Six months later, she’d discovered what her dad had loved doing his whole life and decided to keep the place herself.
For the most part, it was an old man’s day bar. But it was the perfect place to come hang out after work—no young guys to assume a woman sitting alone at the bar was looking to get laid. It was a good thing I was a workaholic, or I could’ve easily spent all my time in this place and become a different type of -holic instead.
Quinn pulled two shot glasses from the rack and reached down below the bar for a bottl
e of something. Seeing no label, I knew what she was trying to feed me.
I covered the tiny glass with my hand. “No way. I had a headache for a week after drinking that stuff.”
“It’s a new batch.”
“You made it?”
Quinn smiled proudly. “Sure did.”
“Then no thanks.”
After watching one too many episodes of Moonshiners, Quinn had decided she could make her own liquor. She could—only it was undrinkable and tasted like nail polish.
Quinn pouted and poured herself one before reaching for the private stash of my wine that she kept behind the bar. “Busy day at the office, honey? Wait, let’s start with the good stuff. Have you ended your drought and slept with the new guy you’re dating yet? What was his name again?”
I traced the rim of my wine glass with my finger. “Oliver. And, no. But we have a date tonight. He’s meeting me here in an hour.”
She arched a brow. “You don’t sound too excited about that.”
Quinn knew me. We’d been inseparable since February 2nd of fourth grade. That was the day I’d been sent down to the principal’s office to bring the new girl to class. She’d had on mismatched socks and carried a bullfrog in her cracked lunchbox—her peanut butter and jelly had been squished at the bottom of her backpack in a brown paper bag.
I sighed. “I am. Maybe not as excited as I should be, but I do enjoy spending time with Oliver.”
Quinn put her elbows on the bar and rested her head atop her hands. “Spit it out. What’s going on? You were all excited about the first date you had with this guy a month ago. Wait…let me guess. Halitosis? Talks about his mother all the time? Stuffed animals in the back window of his car?”
I laughed. “Nothing like that. It’s just…well…I sort of took on a new client.”
Quinn’s eyes lit up. She’d married her high school sweetheart at nineteen, so she lived vicariously through me—not that she’d gotten to hear anything exciting over the last year.
