by Abbie Roads
Had to be the caffeine. He’d never drunk so much coffee and been around people at the same time. Lesson learned. Too much caffeine affected his control.
He needed to leave, get away from the people before the SMs tried to take over, but he couldn’t leave her alone, unprotected against Junior and the Strategist.
The vision in his left eye wavered, then disappeared as one of the trucker’s memories played.
Her ass swayed, luscious in its movements as she walked away from him. She shouldn’t be a waitress. She should be a stripper. He imagined her at a classy joint like Barely There. Topless. Perfect tits. Nipples tilting skyward just how he liked them. On the stage, she melted to her hands and knees and crawled toward him. She bowed low, lifting her ass in the air like a satisfied feline.
Lathan pinched his nose closed and inhaled sharply through his mouth. The SM was some asshole’s memory of imagining her in a strip club. He tried to shove the SM out of his mind—focus on the diner—
Her tongue crooked, beckoning him like a finger. She cupped her full breasts, pinched her nipples.
No, those weren’t her breasts. They were some asshole’s imagination of what her breasts looked like.
Lathan shot to his feet, bumping against the table. I need to get the fuck out of here before—
Honey was in front of him. Her lips moved, but he couldn’t concentrate on reading her words or even trying to hear them. He closed his arms around her, buried his nose in the skin of her neck, and sucked in her scent. The SMs retreated as if they couldn’t exist in the same space she did. She was a miracle. His miracle.
Her jaw moved against his chest, and he faintly heard her voice. He pulled back to see her words.
“What did you say?”
“Are you okay now?” She touched the space between his eye and his hairline and kept her gaze riveted on his left eye. “What happened?”
Holy Jesus. He had probably looked like he’d been possessed by the Antichrist. “I’m fine now.”
He could practically see the questions lining up in her brain, and he didn’t want to lie. “It’s just something that happens sometimes. Not a big deal. Nothing to worry about.” Please, don’t ask, he pleaded with his eyes.
She must have understood because she changed the subject. “I just clocked out.”
A woman emerged from the hallway next to the kitchen with a tray of food.
“That’s Brittany. My roommate. Tonight’s her first night. She’s trying to stay busy by picking up this job. What happened with Junior scared her. Really scared her.”
Really scared Honey too. And if Lathan was going to be completely honest, freaked him the fuck out. What had Junior been trying to do? Suck the soul out of her? He’d nearly succeeded.
“Junior is claiming she tried to roofie him but accidentally roofied herself. He’s saying that I was trying to rob him and he was defending himself. And of course, the cops believe him.”
He wished he could go back in time and wrap his hands around Junior’s neck—and feel the delicate hyoid bone break as he crushed Junior’s throat and extinguished his life. Instead, he tucked Honey into his side and walked down the row of booths toward the door. He needed some fresh air to calm the murderous impulses.
Outside, he stopped. “You can take your shoes off. Your feet must be killing you.”
“You have no idea.” She slipped the glossy black heels from her feet, then reached for his hand, tugging him gently. “Come on. I’ll show you my new place. It’s dilapidated, dirty, and definitely disreputable, but it’s home. For now.”
Inside her room, the noxious fumes nearly singed his nostrils. Sex. Drugs. Depraved acts that should be illegal. And that wasn’t even mentioning the mice feces and cockroach dung. He breathed through his mouth, trying to block the stench.
Lathan stood in the middle of the room. No way could he sit on that ratty bedspread and have those smells stuck to his clothes. She sat on the edge of the mattress. He dragged the wooden chair from the corner and positioned it across from her.
“I know it’s gross.” The spoiled dairy scent of her embarrassment accompanied a sad smile. “You probably had better things to do than just sit there all evening, but I appreciate it. If I’d missed work today, Ernie would’ve fired me.”
“He wouldn’t fire you. He’s got a thing for you.”
She seemed surprised. “Why would you say that?”
“It’s in the way he looks at you.” Did she really not see it? “The way he shot hate bullets in my direction all night.”
“That’s just Ernie’s normal face. He always looks like he wants to commit murder.”
“Why don’t you get a better job?” Even as the words left his mouth, he knew that was exactly the wrong thing to say.
Burning cinnamon filled the air. “Do you seriously think that I’d be working there if any other place in Sundew would hire me?”
Any words he could say were going to land him on dangerous ground. “Give me a moment.” He left her sitting on the bed, went into the bathroom, got a faded but semi-clean washrag, soaped it up, and returned to the room with it and a towel. He might look weird still wearing gloves, but no damned way was he taking them off in this place.
He yanked the chair up close to her, sat down, then lifted her feet to balance across his legs, and washed the stench from the pavement and the carpet off her. Starting with her left foot, he massaged the red indentation cutting into her skin. “I hate to see you work so hard. I hate to see what it does to you.”
“That wasn’t exactly an apology, but you’re forgiven.” She closed her eyes, her head lolling to the side. “As long as you don’t stop.”
“Tell me what happened that you ended up at Sweet Buns.” He stared at her, waiting for her to answer, but she didn’t speak. He shouldn’t have asked. Not when he couldn’t give her any answers about himself.
“I don’t have a lot of work experience.” She didn’t say anything for a minute. Slowly she began shaking her head—not an act of denial, but one of resignation. “You might as well know the truth. Do you know what a kitten is?”
A kitten? Did he read that right? The word kitten didn’t really fit in the conversation they were having. He hated asking people to repeat themselves, but that was the only way to understand. “Did you say kitten?”
“Yeah. Kitten. You know what a kitten is?” she repeated.
It seemed like some sort of trick question, but he couldn’t find the trick. “A baby cat?” he asked hesitantly.
She smiled, the scarred side of her mouth tilting up while the other side angled down a bit, making her look oddly sad. “No, not like a baby cat. Kitten as in a young woman who is taken care of by a much older man.”
Ooohhh. The implications of what she was about to say forced him back in his seat. But he didn’t let go of her foot. Nope. He held on and kept the massage going, as much for him as for her. Touching her—even through his gloves—grounded him.
“When I hit eighteen, I was desperate to get out of the house. Away from Junior. Did you know he’s my stepbrother?”
Lathan managed to make his head bob up and down on his shoulders. He wasn’t sure he could’ve spoken if he’d needed to.
“I didn’t have a job or money or friends—those things were all forbidden to me. But I needed out of there. I don’t even remember how I heard about kittens. I just joined this kitten site and started chatting with some guys. I found a guy here in town—someone I knew of, someone who was rich and powerful in the community. I knew Junior would never mess with me if I was with him. We set up a meeting, and we…well…we hit it off, I guess. I became his kitten.” She looked up at the stained ceiling tiles. “He took care of me. Got me a place to live, a car, spending money. In exchange, I’d be his eye candy at conventions, provide a haven from his work, go on dates with him, and you know…whatever he wanted.�
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Sex. She meant sex. The tangy scent of pine laced with burning cinnamon—jealousy and anger—practically seared his nostrils. He wanted to mutilate and murder this older man who’d taken advantage of a vulnerable girl.
“Basically, I was a whore.”
All his bad feelings evaporated. He couldn’t hear the self-loathing in those words, but he could see it on her face. See that she thought less of herself because she’d lived through desperate times that called for desperate measures.
“Honey, no.” He tore off a glove and settled his bare hand against the side of her face. Her skin was cool and soothed him. Did she feel as comforted by mere touch as he did? “Don’t ever say that.”
She looked him in the eye, and he could tell she was determining whether to believe him or not.
“Were you safe from Junior with this guy?”
“Yeah. Junior and my stepdad wouldn’t have dared to mess with me.”
“Then it was worth it. Right?”
Her gaze never left his. “I guess. It just makes me feel—I don’t know—not good about myself when I think about it. Back to your question about how I ended up working at Sweet Buns. When things ended, I had nothing of my own. Everything was…”
Lathan couldn’t read her last word—the guy’s name. Probably good he didn’t know it anyway. He might be tempted—if he thought too deeply about it—to seek him out and… Yeah. That wouldn’t end well. He slipped his glove back on and started in on her feet again.
“He was nice about it. Gave me a few months to find a job and a place to live. Gave me some cash. But no one wanted to hire me. I had no real job experience. Sweet Buns was it. On the bright side, the tips are great and it’s a free commute to work.”
She stopped talking, closed her eyes, and leaned back on her elbows while he worked over her feet, massaging her arches with his thumbs.
He focused on working out the deep cleft her shoes had made. When he looked up, she had an odd expression on her face.
He stilled his hands. “Am I hurting you?”
She shook her head, then lifted her hand to cover her mouth. The side of her jaw moved.
He heard the sound of her talking, but couldn’t shift the odd pieces into words.
She was testing him—and he’d failed. She fucking knew he had hearing problems. Now would come the sympathy and the exaggerated lip movements and treating him like he’d lost his brain instead of his hearing. He set her feet on the floor and stood, trying to turn away, but she grabbed his arm. “Were you just going to keep it from me forever?”
Forever? She thought they’d have forever together, when he never dared to think beyond the moment? Each second she spent with him was a gift he’d never expected, when his entire existence had been dominated by his genetic anomaly.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
From the moment he’d awakened in the hospital after the attack, he’d realized that having trouble hearing wasn’t the worst thing. Dealing with everyone else was the problem. “I don’t want your pity.”
Her eyes snapped with anger. She smelled of burning cinnamon, not pity. “Good. Because I don’t pity you. I’m pissed at you for not telling me. I feel like everyone was in on the secret except me. I just got done telling you about being a kitten. That wasn’t easy for me. And you couldn’t share this one thing about yourself?”
“I hate being treated differently.”
“I hate being made a fool of.”
“That was never my intention.”
“What was your intention?”
“For you to know me first. Before my hearing problems. To see that I’m normal.” The words rushed directly from his heart and out his mouth. Who the fuck was he kidding? Like the tattoo on his face made him normal. Or the SMs.
“So, you read lips?”
“Mostly. I hear some things but not others; there’s no reason to it. The combination of reading speech and what hearing I have left works for the most part. Sometimes I miss a few words, but usually I understand everything from the context.”
“Is it hard? Reading speech.”
His parents, Gill, none of them had ever asked him that. “It takes a lot of concentration. Lots of words are formed inside the mouth, so I only understand them within the context of the sentence. Some words look exactly the same. The better I know a person, the easier it is for me.”
“Have you had trouble reading my words?”
“Only a few times. I didn’t know your name for a while. V’s and f’s look the same, and I’d never seen the name Evanee before.” Whoa. He hadn’t exactly written a novel on being hearing impaired, but he’d just talked about it more with her than he had with anyone else. It felt kinda…good. To not hide it. To be able to be himself.
“So that’s why you called me Honey. Because you didn’t know my name.” Nothing in her words conveyed disappointment, but her eyes spoke it.
“I call you Honey because you smell sweet, like honey, to me.”
“I smell sweet?”
Damn. Damn. Damn. Don’t go down that road. Not now. Not yet. “I couldn’t read your guy’s name either.”
“Matthew Stone. Everyone calls him Matt.” She wrapped her arms around herself like she got cold just mentioning him.
Lathan wanted to go to her, to hold her, but he wasn’t certain yet if he would be welcome. “Got it.”
“Were you born with hearing problems?”
How should he answer the question? He couldn’t tell her about being in the psych unit. Couldn’t tell her about the other patient jumping him from behind and jamming sharpened pencils into his eardrums to kill the demon he believed lived between Lathan’s ears. Couldn’t tell her that he half believed he did have a demon in his head. He hadn’t known the visions were SMs until he underwent extensive testing as an adult. “At thirteen I was attacked. My ears were damaged.”
“That’s why you’re jumpy when someone comes up behind you?”
“Yeah.” Change the subject. Quick. “Come stay with me for awhile. It’s nicer than this place.”
“Why?”
Why was a lot better than a flat-out no. “I don’t have any expectations. I’ll even sleep on the couch.”
She shook her head. She was about to reject him for this nasty motel room.
“I don’t have a ride back and forth to work.”
“I’ll bring you and pick you up.” He tried to keep the relief, the excitement out of his voice. “As long as you don’t mind riding on the back of the bike.” He was gonna need to get a car. Never thought the day would come.
“Why would you do all this for me?”
“Because you and I both know Junior isn’t done yet. And I won’t let him have an opportunity to hurt you again.” He’d wait to mention the Strategist until she was good and moved in.
In her eyes, he saw complete trust. And something more. He couldn’t exactly place a name on it, but he recognized it because it exactly mirrored what was inside him.
“You don’t have to sleep on the couch.”
“You stay with me, you’re not sleeping on the couch. You’re sleeping in the bed.” His barely resisted the urge to say my bed.
She stood on her tippy-toes. “You aren’t sleeping on the couch.” He started to protest, but she put her hand over his mouth. “And neither am I.”
Chapter 9
The sky was the color of gloom. Or maybe doom. Definitely doom. Impending doom.
“Eight a.m. is too early for an appointment. Especially since I didn’t get off work until midnight and didn’t get to bed until after two.” Damn if she hadn’t fallen asleep the moment her body hit Lathan’s mattress. That hadn’t been her intention.
Gill didn’t answer with words, but he gave her a look in the rearview mirror that said he might be enjoying her misery a teensy bit.
She
stuck her tongue out at him. “You sure we actually have an appointment? Or are you just trying to torture me?” Snark dominated Evanee’s tone. She couldn’t help it. She supposed Gill and Lathan thought she wasn’t a morning person, but it went way beyond not getting her morning cup of wake-up juice in her rush to get out the door.
At least Lathan was with her. She wasn’t going to have to endure entering Matt’s domain alone.
The car crested the last hill before their destination. Alongside the road, the bear totem caught her attention. The animal had been there her entire life, but it had been something that lived on the periphery of her vision, never gaining her full attention until now. The carving was exquisitely detailed and so lifelike that she turned in her seat and studied the inanimate wood, half expecting the bear to turn his head and watch them drive down the hill.
When she turned back around, she caught Lathan staring out the back window toward the bear totem too. Maybe he’d never seen it before.
Gill slowed the car at the bottom of the hill, and Lathan turned to face front again. “You realize this is the place you sent me to work a few months back?”
A confused look passed over Gill’s face.
“The Isleen Walker case.” Lathan said as if Gill should remember.
Lathan had worked the Isleen Walker case? Just what kind of job did he have? Everyone knew Isleen Walker. Her story had been all over the news. She’d spent years being tortured before Matt’s nephew, Xander, had saved her. Only for her to be kidnapped again from this property. Shortly after all that went down, Matt had broken it off with Evanee.
Gill shook his head and let out a low whistle, then pulled into the driveway. He turned to Lathan. “I didn’t realize the Institute of Oneirology was on the same property.” He faced the driveway again, gassing the car to gain enough momentum to carry them up the steep driveway.
