Spiked Lemonade: A Bad Boy Sailor and a Good Girl Romantic Comedy Standalone

by Ryan, Shari J.

  She looks at me, dumbfounded. I don’t exactly expect her to remember much from last night since she was cocked, so I repeat it, “I told you I liked drunk Sasha but I also really liked the Sasha I met at first too.” I step forward and place my hands on her shoulders. “I know this whole thing with Landon blows, and it’s scary, and you’ve had a really rough few weeks. All of that doesn’t make for good timing when you find the man of your dreams, but you have to relax a little,” I say, going out on a limb a bit here.

  “I’m sorry I got mad at you for whatever your relationship is with Greta…Bambi, whatever her name is. It just seems like the women around me lately are all badasses with dirty mouths, and I can’t keep up. At the same time, though, I’m a little tired of watching my mouth too.”

  “Stop watching your mouth. Stop thinking. Just be you. Be whatever you’re feeling inside…even if that means belting along with music like we all witnessed last night, or if you want to sit on a bathroom counter and call me over. Even if it’s just that you want to confuse my cock for a roll of toilet paper or something as silly as pouring a little Jack in your lemonade…because I think together we could make one sick, spiked lemonade.” I grin at the thought, and she smiles in return. “Look, I don’t care how crazy or all over the place you are, just be you. Be the girl I’ve fallen for.”

  She looks up at me, putting down the stack of papers she’s fidgeting with. “You’ve fallen for me?” she asks quietly.

  “I wouldn’t have done what I did this morning if I hadn’t,” I tell her. “I told you, you were never meant to be a one-night stand without a real name.”

  “I don’t know if that’s sweet or creepy, but I think I like it,” she says. Her cheeks brighten to a deep red, and I cup my hands around her face as I lean down to kiss her. Her arms wrap around my neck, and I realize how much I love holding this girl in my arms, even if she makes me crazy sometimes. “Can we do this?”

  “This?” she asks.

  “Yeah, can we be together, start something, see where it goes, see if it doesn’t have to end?”

  “Monogamy?” she asks, looking like she needs to think about her own question. “That’s a lot to ask of me.”

  “I’m sorry, I must be confused. Are you trying to make a joke?”

  She slaps my arm. “You have to make it so hard?”

  “It doesn’t work if it’s soft, doll-face.” To say I get a kick out of her changing facial colors by the minute is an understatement. I know she’ll eventually get used to my dirty mouth but for now, I’m going to take pleasure from knowing the effect I have on her.

  I take her hand and bring her into the shop. “Maybe we should try to help Greta,” she says on the way in. “I feel awful.”

  “Yeah, she’s not the type that likes help. I did as much as I could in there. Her niece is in rough shape. She watched her brother die and saw what happened with Greta. It’s a bad situation.”

  As we’re talking about it, Bambi and Ella come walking out of the back office. “We’re going to go grab some breakfast.”

  “Have a good time,” I say, waving quickly at both of them.

  “Do either of you need anything?” Sasha offers Bambi. I squeeze her hand as she does that because it means a hell of a lot to me.

  “Thanks, Lemonade, but I got this,” she says. “Jags, can you watch the place for a while?”

  “Sure,” I tell her. “Good luck.”

  Bambi doesn’t say much else, just grabs a rag to wipe off her hands with and heads out the back door.

  “Lemonade?” Sasha questions.

  “Ah, yeah…I told her you were as sweet as lemonade.” And I was as hard and rough as Jack.

  “Rightttt,” she drawls. “Oh, crud…I’m supposed to go to work. I was thinking you could drive me, but you can’t now. You know what, don’t even worry about it, I can call Cali back,” Sasha says. “She’s probably parked on the side of the road with Tango somewhere anyway, doing, well…I’m sure you can imagine.”

  “I can imagine,” I laugh. “Well I can lend you a loaner car but, without sounding like an overprotective dick like Tango, do you think running an office downtown yourself is a great idea with Landon still on the hunt for you?” I ask her.

  Sasha hoists herself up on the counter and crosses her legs. “Honestly, I don’t even want to work there. I had to go beg Daddy for a job the other day, and it destroyed some of my dignity.”

  “Work here, then,” I suggest with eagerness. “I’m sure Bambi will give you a job.”

  Sasha laughs and looks around. “Yeah, and what exactly would I do?”

  “Well, a pretty face can always sell a car, or there’s plenty of cars that need to be hand polished out there. I’m thinking about opening up my own place soon so if you can get some experience down, I suppose I could bring you with me when I get my shit together.” Sasha’s still laughing a little but I can see the thoughts running through her head. “I mean, it would require you to get a little dirty sometimes.”

  “I feel like I’ve already gotten a little dirty,” she says, tugging at my shirt.

  “You haven’t seen dirty, doll-face.”

  “Oh, really?”

  I step between her legs and lift her up, feeling every inch of her through the tight-as-hell pants hugging her ass. I take her around the back of the counter and lay her down on a pile of dirty rags. At first, I see her eyes clench, and she swallows hard. “You still okay with getting dirty?”

  She nods her head and floats her hands above her head, allowing me full access. I’m not gentle with taking her clothes off as I hear material tear, but I don’t care very much right now. I loosen my pants and allow them to fall to my knees. Her panties are torn off, and I thank God that I grabbed another condom and put it in my back pocket this morning, just in case. I restock whenever I use one. Always thinking. “We gotta go fast. The shop opened five minutes ago.” Her eyes flash open, and she looks terrified. “Someone could walk in and find us back here.”

  As much as I thought she might stop everything at that thought, she surprises the hell out of me and wrenches her hand around the back of my neck, pulling me down on top of her. Without time for much foreplay, I press inside of her and move as quickly as I can, enjoying the screams she obviously can’t control as they alarm through the shop. For such a quiet, passive chick, she can rock the joint with the volume of her voice.

  I love the way her fingernails dig into my back as I press into her and the way her head falls backward and her jaw drops. The way her ass lifts from the ground and for the fact that I managed to tear her pants off with her fuck-me-heels still in place, this is a fucking dream come true. I run my hands up and down the center of her body, leaving black oil marks along the way. Dirt. Dirt she’s clearly learning to love. As her body convulses against mine, her hands sweep down my chest, and she moans with relief. “You’re filthy,” I grunt as I release too.

  “I like it,” she sighs.

  As we relax into the pile of dirty rags, I find it’s the perfect moment to ask her something important. “Can I take you out?” Those words aren’t the norm for me, not with a beautiful woman. I’m more used to asking if I can buy a lady another drink, or three…however many it’s going to take for them to agree to leave the bar with me. It’s amazing how one girl can make me change my whole outlook on women.

  “Like on a date?” she giggles and reaches up to trace her finger around one of the tats on my chest. “I think that might be nice now that we’ve skipped all the other parts of getting to know someone.”

  “Eh, that’s not the way I see it. You know, like dogs, they sniff each other’s butts before they make the decision to go all in. How do you know if you’re a compatible match if your butt doesn’t smell just right?”

  “How does that relate to what we’re doing?”

  “It’s like testing out the goods before committing. A test drive,” I continue. Digging my hole.

  “So if I
sucked in bed, you wouldn’t have asked me to go out with you?”

  “I’m glad we see eye to eye on this,” I say with a quick wink. At the same moment, I hear the front door bells chime, and I think we’re both in agreement that we waited thirty seconds too long to get dressed.

  Our lax situation turns into a wrestling match of finding what clothes go where and on who. We almost make it on time before a man reaches the front counter, looking around for service.

  “Uh, oh,” he says. “Um. I’ll give you a—Sa—Sasha?”

  It’s the breathtaking moments in life that stick with me forever. In this case, it’s the moment I meet—

  “Dad!” Sasha shrieks.

  Her dad.

  “Ya know, a typical father might be disappointed to see his daughter half naked on the ground of an auto-body shop with some grizzly looking man, but…”

  Where the hell is this going.

  “Dad, stop,” she says.

  “No, sweetie, I can’t tell you how relieved I am to see you not following in your mother’s perfect little footsteps. Your future will be better for it, trust me.” He breathes a sigh of relief during the pause in his words. “Look, son, I don’t want to make things awkward here. I was called by the insurance company, letting me know about Sasha’s car, and I wanted to take a look at it. I’m going to do you both a favor and come back another time, and probably call first. Sound good?”

  I finish pulling my shirt on and debate about reaching out to shake the man’s hand. The hand that was just all over his daughter. Better not. That’s weird.

  “Yes, sir. That’s a good idea.” It takes a lot to make me uncomfortable. This is a lot.

  Sasha’s dad leaves quicker than he came in and Sasha’s the shade of an eggplant, holding her shirt firmly against her bare chest.

  When the door closes, she bursts out in a fit of giggles, hysterical laughter that forces tears from her eyes. “That was the funniest thing I’ve ever experienced,” she cries.

  “And you’ve just experienced me so I don’t know if that’s an insult or a compliment,” I joke.

  She stands up and pulls her shirt over her head, still laughing a bit. “That was perfect.”

  “I might have a different choice of words for what just happened, but we’ll go with it,” I tell her.

  “My dad’s a jackass. He’s cheating on my mother, and I hate to say I understand why, but I do. Not that it makes him any less of a jackass but it’s been a revelation for me.”

  “I don’t understand,” I tell her. “I mean…yeah, I get the jackass part. He called me grizzly. Am I grizzly? I am a little, huh?”

  “Maybe a little,” she grins. “But I hope that doesn’t change your mind about still wanting to take me out,” she says, curling up beneath my arm.

  “Doll-face, I want to take you out every night for as long as you’ll let me.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  TWO HOT AND STEAMY WEEKS LATER

  SASHA

  JAGS RUNS HIS fingers softly through my hair. “Sasha,” he whispers.

  The sound of his deep honeyed voice forces my eyes to lazily open. “Mmm?” I groan through a slight stretch.

  “I’m going to go pick up some breakfast for us. Stay here and relax, okay, beautiful?”

  “Okay,” I whisper through a smile.

  He leans over me and places his lips softly over mine. “God, I won’t ever get enough of you,” he says with a sleepy grin. “How did I get so damn lucky to wake up next to you?”

  “It must be your wooing dirty words and the naked woman dancing on your bicep,” I joke, still sounding groggy. He thinks it’s funny when I tease him about his tattoos, and most of them have actually grown on me a little, or I don’t mind them as much, I guess. Maybe it’s just that I’m so head over heels for him that I don’t notice them anymore.

  “Must be it,” he says, placing another kiss on my nose. “Do you want a coffee too?”

  “Yes, please. Hazelnut…”

  “With milk and sugar, I know.” He does know. He listens. He tends to me. He cares about me like no one has ever cared about me before, yet at the same time, he challenges me. I think it’s what I need. Pushing off the bed, he winks as he pulls his pants up to his waist. “I’ll be quick.”

  I let my head sink back into the pillow as the bedroom door closes, allowing myself to fall back into a hazy sleep with a smile still stretched over my lips. I’ve got the butterflies for this guy, that’s for sure. I get it now—what it’s all about. What it’s supposed to feel like. It all makes sense.

  A minute or two after I hear the front door secure, it reopens. “Jags?” Cali and Tango aren’t around this weekend so he must have forgotten something. I look over to the nightstand to see if he left his wallet and/or phone behind, but both are gone. “Jags, is that you?”

  The bedroom door opens, and my question is answered. I sit up quickly, as my heart pounds heavily against my ribcage. “What are you doing here?” I ask, sounding like a mouse looking up into the mouth of a predator.

  “I’m here. Isn’t that all that matters?” he asks.

  The tape over my lips is making it hard to breathe. My wrists are bleeding from the friction of the cuffs, and I’m not sure how much longer I can sit like this before I pass out, but it’s already been hours. Maybe more.

  “You know what the funniest part of this is, Sash?”

  He knows I can’t answer him, but he keeps asking me questions. Even if I could answer, I wouldn’t.

  I listened to Jags. I listened to Cali and Tango. I stayed away from my house. I’m in the process of selling my house just to really put the nails in that coffin. I’ve quit my job, I got a new job, and then another job so I wouldn’t be anywhere without a big brother looking over my shoulder, and yet with all of those precautions, it obviously didn’t matter. Landon was smarter than all of us this whole time, and he was just waiting for his chance. Tango was sure he’d have this “situation” handled two weeks ago, but it wasn’t as simple as he thought.

  I wonder if anyone knows I’m gone. I wonder how long it will take them to realize what happened. I wonder if they’ll ever be able to find me. I know Jags won’t give up until he finds me, but that doesn’t mean he’ll make it on time.

  “You know, I did love you,” he says. “I wanted to marry you.”

  If I could talk, I might offer him a reminder that he was basically holding me hostage to get closer to Cali’s dad, who is a very wanted man. Landon is money obsessed, and he would go to the ends of the earth for a quick dollar. That includes putting the girl he pretended to love in front of himself if bullets were to come flying. That’s not love. He didn’t love me. I was nothing more than an inch closer to a gold mine. This is why Cali had been on the run. People have constantly used her to get closer to her dad, who basically lives in hiding now. Watching her life made me appreciate mine, even with its abundance of perfection that I never quite wanted.

  “I’m not going to kill you, sweetheart. I just want to make an honest woman of you.” Where is he taking me? I do my best to sit up and look out the window, trying to catch the words on a sign as we speed by. We must be going at least thirty miles per hour over the speed limit, and I can only hope we get pulled over. This isn’t Landon’s car, which means things will go downhill quickly. Hopefully. I can only pray at this point.

  It’s minutes before we fly by a sign and the only thing I can see are the words: Del Rizo. Oh shit! That’s on the border of Mexico! But we haven’t gone through customs yet, which thankfully means we haven’t crossed the border.

  I close my eyes, trying not to think about how much I need to use a bathroom and how the fear I’m feeling is turning my stomach into a mess of knots. With the darkness behind my eyelids, I can only see the look on Jags’s face this morning when he leaned over to kiss me softly before whispering about being back quickly with breakfast and coffee. How did I go from that to this?

  Cali,
Tango, and Tyler went away for the weekend to celebrate Tango’s clean bill of health after receiving all of his test results back, so it was the first time since we’ve been together that everyone was so happy. Everything was so perfect. It was like all parts of everyone’s messy lives were somehow falling into place and into harmony. Tango believed Landon was “handled” but sadly, he was wrong.

  To make this worse, it was the first time Jags and I have had a chance to be completely alone since we started being us a couple of weeks ago. With both Jags and I looking for new places to live, we’ve been at the mercy of Cali and Tango. We appreciate their hospitality; nonetheless, it’s been hard sneaking around to avoid their jittering eyebrows and knowing looks every time we walk in a room. I’m not sure Jags has cared as much as I have, but I was looking forward to this weekend of privacy.

  I don’t know how Landon got into Cali and Tango’s house, but this man is capable of more than any of us have given him credit for.

  Despite my effort to stay awake, the motion of the car lulled me to sleep for a bit, but I’m startled awake when the car jerks to the side of the road. I try to snap myself out of a haze when the door beside me whips open, but reality hits quickly when I’m pulled from my seat. Landon drags me by some trees and roughly tears my pants down to my ankles, his fingernails scraping against my legs along the way. “Go,” he demands.

  I want to tell him I’m not going to the bathroom in front of him, but I have to go so badly I don’t care. I squat, careful not to fall backward with my hands still clasped together behind me, and I do my best to ignore his staring eyes.

  “All those times you made such a big deal about closing the bathroom door when you needed private time,” he mocks me. “See, it’s not so bad having everything out in the open, right?”

  How could this man I had once been so attracted to be such a jerk? Such a horrible person. I have no form of defense. I have no way to protect myself from him. I’m at the mercy of his strength, and I pray for a hint of his weakness to show through, but I’m doubtful he has any mercy for me at all now.