Good to Be Bad (Double Dare Book 1)

by Patricia Ryan

  “They’re good, they’re not the soy kind. I make them with egg protein.”

  “Yum.”

  “One of those, and you’ll be—” he moved closer to Emma and ran a meaty hand down her arm, his gaze fixed on her unencumbered breasts “—superenergized.”

  “Nice try, pal.” Gage closed a hand over Ronald’s shoulder; the brute jumped and spun around. “But you’ll have to pick some other girl to energize. This one’s drinkin’ out of my blender.”

  “You!”

  “You two know each other?” Emma asked.

  Ronald adopted his silverback-male stance, up to and including the flared nostrils and glaring little eyes. “Mr. Hill and I have met.”

  “Call me Sam.” Gage stuck his hand out.

  Ronald studied the hand, his lower jaw thrust out. Any second now he was going to start screeching and swinging from the light fixtures. Finally he grudgingly took the hand and squeezed, igniting a bolt of pain that left Gage’s fingers throbbing.

  Ronald looked back and forth between them. “So you two are, uh...”

  Gage said, “You bet,” and Emma said, “Not really,” at the same time.

  Ronald smiled knowingly. “Seems to be a difference of opinion here. Don’t forget, baby,” he told Emma, “I’m right there next door any time you need me. You’ve got my number.” With a cocky glance at Gage, he turned and swaggered back to his apartment.

  Emma shot Gage a pointed look. “‘You bet’?”

  He went for a blasé shrug. “Just trying to get that clown off your back.”

  She smirked and led the way into Zara’s apartment. “It’s not my back he seemed interested in.”

  Gage followed her into the kitchen, where she used his phone again to try Zara and her voicemail—nada—before whipping open the freezer. “Pay dirt!” She withdrew a half-gallon container of vanilla ice cream. “Want some?”

  “Hell yeah.”

  Emma scooped them each a heaping bowlful. “Would you grab a couple of spoons and the pepper grinder?”

  “Pepper grinder? You’re kidding.”

  “Black pepper on vanilla ice cream. Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.”

  “I’m not knocking it.” He picked up the tall wooden pepper grinder, spun it in the air and caught it, then got a couple of spoons out of the drawer. “I have tried it. And I like it, too.”

  Halfway out of the kitchen with a bowl in each hand, she turned and blinked at him. “Seriously? I never met anyone else who could stand the thought of it.”

  “Ditto.” Curiouser and curiouser. She made a detour to the white bedroom, where she layered a zippered, lime green sweatshirt over that white T, worse luck. When they returned to the terrace, they took turns cracking pepper onto their ice cream. Emma sat cross-legged on the lounge chair. Gage, unwilling to put up with those unforgiving little iron chairs any longer, moved the afghan aside and sat next to her.

  Night had fallen, making the jungly little terrace seem all the more intimate. Emma’s heady, shower-sweet scent enveloped him; he felt her warmth as the air cooled. They ate in silence for a while, absorbed by their own thoughts. The pepper-dusted ice cream reminded Gage of Emma: sweet and spicy, hot and cold. Irresistibly delicious. He considered telling her that, then mentally smacked himself silly.

  The altogether different direction of Emma’s thoughts became evident when she said, “No one was supposed to know about the sale of the ray gun, right?”

  Gage swallowed a mouthful of ice cream. “Right.”

  She pointed her spoon at him. “Mac told Zara to keep quiet about it—that’s why I had to impersonate her. He said if anyone else found out about it, the deal was off.”

  “But someone else did find out about it,” Gage stated. “The gold-eyed man.”

  “Right.” She began vigorously stirring her ice cream into a pepper-flecked mush. “I really doubt Zara told anyone but me about it. The only other person who knew about it was Mac. So that means the gold-eyed man is related somehow to Mac—an employee, friend, relative. Either that or...” She stopped stirring.

  Gage shifted so that he was facing her, and met her strangely intent gaze. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said, “but isn’t that guy a legitimate dealer in these things?”

  She reclined against the lounge chair’s half-raised back and stretched her legs out next to Gage, crossing them at the ankle. “Dealer, yes. Legitimate? I don’t know. Zara never did do a proper background check on the guy. She Googled him and called it done.”

  “You expected her to hire a private investigator—”

  “You don’t need a P.I.” She resumed her stirring. “You just need to know where to look. There are professional associations, the city’s business-license records, credit bureaus, the local criminal-litigation index, the federal-court index, the IRS—”

  “You can get information from the Internal Revenue Service?”

  “All I need for a copy of his latest tax return is his name, address and Social Security number.”

  “How are you supposed to get his Social Security number?”

  “By checking New York’s vehicle-registration records. Anyone can do that.”

  Still waters run deep. Gage chuckled. “You really are scary, you know that?”

  “Thanks—I think.” She lifted the spoon and let the soupy confection plop-plop-plop into the bowl, as if testing its consistency.

  “I wish I’d known you when I was writing Open Heart. I could have used some of that information.”

  “You mean to say you actually bother researching those things?” she asked with an impish smile. “I thought they were just brainless pulp fiction and you were some kind of hack writer cranking them out.”

  “Touché.”

  She regarded him solemnly, her head tilted, her eyes liquid black in the dark. “Why do you belittle what you do? You’re a bestselling author. You’ve got the dream career a million struggling writers—including me—would kill for.”

  “Oh, it’s a lucrative career,” he conceded sourly. “And they tell me it’s glamorous. But it’s not exactly the noblest of professions, you know.”

  “No, I don’t know. I don’t see what’s so wrong with it.”

  “You gotta understand.” Gage reached over and set his empty bowl on the table. “I grew up havin’ it drummed into my head that a man ought to do some good in the world, make a difference. I became a surgeon, and I loved it, and I did make a difference. I even saved a few lives.”

  “You have every right to be proud of that,” she said, “but it doesn’t mean that what you do now is any less important.”

  “I write escapist literature. That’s important?”

  “It is if the person reading it really needs to escape. Why do you think popular fiction is so... popular? People need that mental vacation sometimes. Think about it. Most people really do live lives of quiet desperation. They struggle through their days, trying to deal with the myriad problems that plague all of us—money problems, job problems, school problems, family problems. Life can be rough. The human mind can cope for only so long before it needs—I mean, really needs—some kind of break. You give that to them.”

  Her eyes glittered; her cheeks were flushed. Don’t you fucking fall in love with her, Gage admonished himself. Don’t let it happen.

  “You provide a crucial service to the exhausted young mother,” she said, “to the burned-out executive, the despondent teenager. You pick them up and set them down in a different time and place, give them a new and completely imaginary set of problems to worry about. While they’re reading your books, their real problems don’t exist.” She smiled and shrugged. “Think of yourself as a mental-health provider.”

  “You sound like you know what you’re talking about,” he said quietly, remembering her reticence to talk about her childhood.

  Her smile dimmed. She looked down at her bowl of runny ice cream.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “Why?”

&nb
sp; He closed a hand over her foot; it felt cold. “Like I said before, it’s not morbid curiosity. I care.”

  Her eloquently arched eyebrow spoke volumes.

  “I don’t hate you, remember? I hate... what you did. I hate the fact that you could pretend with me, even after we became...” He shook his head. “There’s no point in rehashing that. Look, we both know it’s just not gonna happen between us. Even if it weren’t for... the other, I live too far away. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care about you. Hell, I wouldn’t be here right now if I didn’t.”

  After a moment’s silence, she said, “My parents were... unsuited to each other. Extremely unsuited. My mother grew up dirt-poor on Mott Street in Little Italy. She ran away to Hollywood when she was fifteen, changed her name to Candy Carmelle and did her scream-queen thing. My father was a Connecticut investment banker named John Sutcliffe. I’m not sure how they met or why she married him—maybe it was because he epitomized upper-class respectability and she thought that was what she needed at the time. Anyway, it was a big mistake. He was... a monster of respectability. Cold, controlling. And she was, well, Candy Carmelle. What you see is what you get.”

  Gage massaged her feet as she talked.

  “When Zara and I were fifteen months old, she abandoned us and divorced him, and he got custody. At least, that’s what he told us. He was a real Nazi with us—we had to live by his rules and follow his regimen or all hell would break loose. Zara caught a lot more flack than I did. I was the good girl—sweet, obedient Emma. Zara was different, more impulsive and daring. My father told her she was a worthless slut, just like her mother, and if she didn’t start toeing the line, she’d never amount to anything. He was always punishing her, always putting her down, whittling away at her self-esteem. Of course, he only drove her further away from what he wanted her to be. She became defiant, tried to play the bad girl.”

  “While you,” Gage said, “retreated further into the safety of the good-girl role.”

  “You got it. My father died five years ago. We immediately decided to try and find our mother. It wasn’t easy—she didn’t leave much of a paper trail. She’d moved around a lot. Usually she was living with some guy, so there wasn’t any real estate in her name. The Internet was useless. I got excited when I found a couple of Facebook pages in her name, but they weren’t really hers. They were run by fans.”

  “That was when you learned how to get ahold of folks’ Social Security numbers and tax returns, huh?”

  “That’s right. When I finally tracked her down, it was...” Emma took a deep breath. “Oh, God, we all cried like babies the first time we were together. It was Christmas day, and Mom was just sobbing with joy. She said it was the best Christmas gift ever—the happiest day of her life, in fact.”

  It wasn’t long afterward that her mother got her first and only tattoo, tiny numerals on her righthand inner wrist: 12•25.

  “So I take it she hadn’t actually abandoned you?” Gage asked.

  Emma shook her head. “She left my father, and when he made it clear he would never give us up—he was rich and powerful, had the best lawyers—she tried to go back with him, but he wouldn’t have her. It was revenge, plain and simple. He didn’t want us, but he would never let her have us, knowing how important we were to her. I think he might have threatened her if she tried to contact us, but Mom is real vague on that. Sometimes I wonder what she’s trying to hide.”

  Not for the first time, Gage felt thankful for his Norman Rockwell upbringing.

  “Of course, that’s all in the past.” Emma spooned some liquid ice cream into her mouth. “Sometimes I look back, though, and cringe, remembering what it was like in that house, always being on guard, trying so hard to please my father and hoping he wouldn’t get mad at me. Mostly I tried to avoid him. I spent my entire adolescence in my room reading mystery novels.” She raised her eyes to meet his gaze. “It was my only escape.”

  “Ah.” He smiled. “We come full circle.”

  “Just as writing Incision was your escape during med school.”

  “You’re relentless, you know that?”

  “I’m right. Being a storyteller is a noble profession.” She dipped her index finger in the ice-cream soup; he watched her lick it off, arousal pumping through him. “Admit it.”

  “I admit it.” He watched, enthralled, as she repeated the maneuver, obviously unaware of the effect on him. Sweet and spicy.

  “You’re just humoring me,” she accused.

  “No I’m not.”

  She did it again, only this time she slid her finger between her lips and sucked the creamy liquid off. “Ow!” She yanked her foot out of his grasp. “You’re hurting me.”

  “Sorry.”

  “The pepper adds just the right zing,” she observed, dipping in again.

  Sighing, Gage plucked a dying leaf from a fleshy rubber tree and fiddled with it as an excuse not to look at her. “I make a double-hellfire chili you might like.”

  “Mmm, I love hot chili. What kind of meat do you use?”

  “Any clean-living critter of good constitution will do, but I’m partial to a two-to-one combination of beef shank and kidney suet.”

  “Where do you get the heat?” she asked.

  “Pretty much anything that’ll give you a chemical burn on your tongue if you bite into it. I’ve got these tiny little pequin peppers that grow wild around my horse pasture, no bigger than berries, but they’re the hottest things I’ve ever tasted. I like to use them, but any good chile pepper will do—serranos, jalapeños, habaneros.”

  “I’ve never used anything but chili powder.”

  “That’s all right, if it’s good chili powder, but there’s no substitute for the real deal.” He tossed the leaf away and moved closer to her on the lounge chair. “First you have to roast ’em and peel ’em, but before you even touch ’em you want to put on some rubber gloves. I use latex surgical gloves.”

  She smiled in the darkness. “Of course.”

  He edged closer. “You take a scalpel—or you could use a knife—and you slit the chili pod open. And then, if you’re a weeny, or you’re makin’ supper for weenies, you might want to take out some of the seeds and veins, ’cause that’s where most of the heat comes from.”

  “Okay.” She was watching him intently.

  He took the bowl out of her hands and set it on the table. “Then you put ’em on a hot grill. You gotta keep turning them till they’re good and blistered, and then you stick ’em in a bowl of ice water. That slaps ’em awake. Then, if you want ’em really well done—” he brushed the back of his hand down her cheek, over her jaw, along her throat “—you gotta steam ’em in a wet towel. And then those skins get nice and loose. And all you have to do is slip ’em off, real easy.” He tugged on the zipper to her sweatshirt, which peeled open slowly.

  “What’s going on here?” she breathed.

  “I think I’m trying to get around to asking you if maybe we shouldn’t finish up what we started this afternoon.”

  The barn kitten. “You mean—”

  “It’s probably a bad idea.” But he kept pulling that zipper down.

  “It’s definitely a bad idea.”

  “But that doesn’t necessarily mean we shouldn’t do it.” He opened the sweatshirt and saw her tight little nipples pushing at the cotton of her T-shirt.

  “Actually,” she said soberly, “it does.”

  “It doesn’t really have to be such a bad idea as long as we both understand that it’s just tonight, and that—”

  “That it’s not gonna happen between us,” she supplied, using his own words. “You’re flying back to Arkansas tomorrow and we’ll probably never seen each other again.” She wasn’t smiling.

  He met her gaze steadily. “I don’t want to leave things the way we left them this afternoon.”

  “Half-finished, you mean? I can always take out an ad on Craigslist, remember?”

  He winced. “I shouldn’t have said that. I was a little
hot under the collar. But I can’t help thinking, you know, that some guy’s gonna come along, some guy like that clown Ronald—”

  “Ronald is not in the running.”

  “Well, some guy, and... he’s gonna want to finish what I started, and...” He sighed.

  “And what?”

  “And I think it should be me.”

  “Because it’s your responsibility?”

  “Because I’ll do it right.” He pulled a hairpin from the careless knot on her head; an inky tendril slid loose, and he wrapped it around a finger. “I didn’t this afternoon. I didn’t know it was your first time, and I was way too rough. I hurt you. I want to make up for that. I’ll go slow. I’ll be careful. I’ll make it as good for you as it can possibly be.”

  “That’s the only reason?” she asked tersely. “Because you’ll do it right? That’s very noble of you, as usual, but you’ve done me enough favors al—”

  “And because if I don’t make love to you right now,” he said gruffly, straddling her and closing both hands around her face, “I’m gonna lose my fuckin’ mind.”

  He kissed her, an honest, hungry kiss, no holds barred. He exulted in his heart when, after an interminable few seconds, she kissed him back, her arms encircling him, drawing him close.

  She kissed a path down his throat as she unbuttoned his shirt, then tore it open and scrubbed her fingers through the hair on his chest. He yanked all the pins out of her hair, luxuriating in its satin heaviness.

  He caressed her breasts through her T-shirt; her nipples grew hard as pebbles against his palms. He pulsed with need; it consumed him.

  Sitting back on her thighs, he slid the top button of her jeans through the buttonhole... and the next... and the next. He didn’t know what he expected—white cotton panties, probably. What he found when he got her completely unbuttoned was much better.

  “You’re not wearing any underwear,” he murmured, lying next to her and slipping a hand beneath the loosened denim.

  She turned on her side to face him. “I forgot to pack any.”

  “You could have worn your sister’s.” He stroked her slowly, exploring her silken heat, her slick, hot, half-hidden mysteries.