“Getting married just isn’t as easy as you make it sound, Daddy. I would like to fall in love and do things the old-fashioned way.”
“You’re not waiting on Levi to come back and sweep you off your feet, are you?”
“What? Marrying Levi King has never once crossed my mind,” she said truthfully. They hadn’t seen each other once in thirteen years. And he was her friend. She loved him, but he was just her friend.
“Good. Because he leads a different kind of life. A faster life. He’s not meant for a quiet family life.”
Shelly knew her father kept up with Levi’s career, that he saw all his scrapes with the bad side along with his successes. Levi was the opposite of the nice God-fearing man he wanted for her.
“I know Levi isn’t meant for that life. I knew it the first time I saw him launch himself off the roof.” She felt a little disappointment as she said it. Not because she wanted him to lead a quiet life, but because she wanted to lead a life that wasn’t so quiet.
In her letters, she could communicate to him in a way that she never could with anybody else. Write all those little naughty things that popped into her head, without fear of judgment. Things that she was terrified of saying aloud to anyone else. Levi was her safe place. She wasn’t sure if another man could do that for her.
“I know a man that you could maybe go out with.”
Shelly returned her attention to her father, afraid that he could read her mind in that moment. “One of your prisoners?”
He shot her a displeased look. “You know Henry Maxwell?”
“But he’s like a hundred!”
His frown deepened. “He’s my age.”
“I stand by my statement,” she said, trying to keep a straight face.
“I was thinking about his son Sid. You met him at the church picnic this spring.”
“Yeah.” She nodded, remembering the chubby blond guy. He was pleasant-looking and polite. He even fetched her another lemonade when her glass was empty. “He works in IT at that firm in Canter.”
“He thinks you are beautiful. He asked his father to ask me if you were seeing anyone.”
“Really? Is he going to pass a note in study hall next?”
“You’re getting sassy in your old age.”
“Well, that’s what happens when you’re an old spinster who needs her father to find men to marry her off to.”
“You don’t have to marry him, Michelle. I’m just letting you know that there is a very nice man that is interested in you.”
“Okay, family!” Her uncle Terry came back to the car and slid into the backseat. “We’re all set. Off to the airport we go.”
Shelly was glad her uncle was back, because she wanted the conversation to be over. Too bad her thoughts about it didn’t end the entire ten-hour drive back home later that day.
She hoped it was just a onetime conversation that her father would forget about as soon as he landed in Florida. There was nothing more uncomfortable than talking about your lack of love life with your father. But her mother kept sneaking into her thoughts.
She knew her mother would want to see her married. She would have loved to be a grandmother, to have more children in her life. And even though her mother wasn’t here anymore, Shelly still wanted to make her proud.
She drifted off to sleep thinking about that.
She wasn’t sure how long she had been out when she felt a warm heavy mass slide into bed beside her.
At first she thought she was dreaming, but when she smelled the scent of leather and spice she knew she wasn’t.
There was a man in her bed.
Her heart slammed against her chest and she rolled on top of the body, shoving the vee of her hand into her intruder’s throat, cutting off his airway.
If there was one thing she’d learned from being a CO’s daughter it was how to disarm a man with her bare hands. “Levi King, this better be you because if it’s not you I promise you that you aren’t walking out of this room with all your parts.”
“It’s me, Shells,” the man croaked out, and she knew it had to be Levi.
Nobody else in the world called her Shells. Nobody else had the balls to climb into her bed in the middle of the night.
She leaned over to turn on her bedside light. It was him.
Her Levi. As if her thoughts of him earlier that day had made him magically appear.
He was finally home after thirteen years away. She was so overwhelmed that the only thing she could think to do was kiss him.
*
Levi King was very rarely shocked nowadays, but when the light switched on … He could only describe the feeling as shocked. Literally shocked, as if a lightning bolt had come from the heavens and zapped the hell out of him. The woman on top of him was a stranger. A sexy, super-luscious-feeling stranger who was straddling him. But she had Shelly’s voice and Shelly’s smile and Shelly’s big green eyes.
She sure as hell wasn’t the Shelly he remembered, and for a moment he thought he’d climbed into the wrong window.
“Shelly?” He stared up at her, unable to remove his eyes from this woman he didn’t recognize.
She had thick dark-blond hair that was softly curled instead of the tight frizz he had been used to seeing. It was sexy and tousled with bangs that swept across one eye and made her look almost mysterious. And her body … It wasn’t the chubby, unformed girl’s body he remembered. It was definitely all woman, ample and curvy. On it she wore a thin tank top with no bra, her nipples straining against the tight, nearly see-through material. Her waist looked like one a man could wrap his hands around. He couldn’t see her behind but he could feel it and it was round, just the right amount of fleshy, just the kind of ass he would love to cup in his hands.
She wasn’t his friend. She was some kind of seductive sex goddess. And now she pressed all that body against his, attacking his face with sweet warm kisses.
Maybe she was Shelly, he thought as her lips traveled across her skin. He had been kissed a lot, but never like this. Never with such sweetness. He almost didn’t want it to be her because the woman on top of him had given him an erection to end all erections and there was no way he could explain that away.
“Quit it, Shells.” He put his hands on her shoulders, trying to halt her sweet attack. He couldn’t think with her lips on his skin.
“Okay.” She stopped, but she didn’t move from on top of him, she just rested her head on his shoulder and hugged him and that was probably worse because without the kisses he could really concentrate on how her body felt against his. How her full soft thighs felt wrapped around his body. How her large luscious breasts were warming his chest. How her bare skin felt against his and her smell made him want to bury his nose in the side of her neck so he could inhale more.
This just couldn’t be happening.
She had sent him hundreds of letters since he had last seen her. Hundreds upon hundreds of letters and never once did she mention that she looked like a new person.
“Get off me, Shelly.”
“I’m squishing you.” She rolled off and he got a full look at her luscious figure. “I’m sorry. I was just so happy to see you.”
“You weren’t squishing me,” he said truthfully. She wasn’t a petite flower, but he liked the feel of her soft weight on top of him. “I just needed to get a better look at you.”
He touched her face, brushing her hair out of it before he stroked his thumb over the curve of her cheek. The girl he knew was still in there—he could see that now after his shock was over. “What happened to you? You got so damn pretty.”
“Pretty?” She frowned at him for a moment. “You mean my hair? I didn’t tell you about that because I was embarrassed. I had a very bad at-home waxing experience and took off one of my eyebrows. You should have seen it. I looked like a total freak. I called out of work the next day and I never call out of work, but it was truly an emergency. I ran to Zanna. Have you met Zanna next door? I’m sure you have. But anyway, I asked her
to fix my hair so it would cover the monstrosity that was my face. But my hair was too frizzy just for bangs so she put some kind of straightener in it and gave me a new cut. And I can see your eyes glazing over, which is why I didn’t bother writing to you about it.”
There was his chatty friend. She was just inside a disturbingly beautiful woman, who didn’t realize how gorgeous she was.
She was insane.
Or maybe he was because the urge to seal his lips to hers and kiss her until she went slack nearly overwhelmed him.
He brushed the bangs away from her eyes to see that one brow was a little punier than the other, but nothing too horrible.
“It grew back,” she told him.
“You’ve got to tell me about stuff like that.” He stroked her face again, unable to stop touching her. “You’ve got to tell me when you take off your eyebrow, or change the way you look. We had a deal.”
“You really don’t get sick of my letters?” she asked, sounding unsure.
“Best days of my week.”
It was the truth. He had made sure they had gotten to him no matter where he was in the world because they were his only stability. He had traveled a lot. He never did the same thing every day or saw the same people, but her letters were always there. He had thirteen years’ worth of them. He told her she could email him, but she never would and he liked that. He would hate to go to the mailbox and have nothing to look forward to but a stack of junk mail and bills.
“But I don’t have to send them to you for a while because you’re here.” She propped herself up on an elbow, giving him a spectacular view of her chest. He forced himself to pull his eyes upward. “Why are you here, Levi?”
“We’re all back. Lolly is in the hospital.”
“Oh, no! How is she? She seemed fine when I talked to her last week. She said the mailman was a pervert and was always delivering packages when she was getting ready for work just so he could see her ta-tas. She said she still had a great set of ta-tas for an old broad.”
“She’ll be fine, but damn it, Shelly. Don’t tell me things like that.”
“I wrote it in my last letter to you,” she said earnestly. “I just mailed it the other day. I guess you aren’t going to get it.”
“I will.” He went silent for a moment and just stared at her. There had to be a man in her life. She was too beautiful for there not to be one. He’d suspected it last night when he found her room empty, but seeing her now, he knew every single man in town probably wanted her. “Where were you? I came by last night and you weren’t here.”
Maybe he didn’t have the right to ask, but he couldn’t stop himself. He needed to know.
“Dropping my father off in Vegas. He and his brother are going to be in Florida for a month.”
“You were in Vegas and you didn’t even try to come see me?”
“Fat lot of good that would have done since you were here in Destiny.”
“You could have emailed me.”
“You could have called me,” she countered. “The number hasn’t changed.”
“No,” he said. Not a lot had changed in Destiny, but Shelly sure hadn’t remained the same. It was then he realized she had said her father and uncle were going away for a month, leaving her alone in the house. The thought excited him. “Your father didn’t make you go with him?”
“He can’t make me. I’m twenty-eight. Besides, I told him that I had some very important teacher training over the summer that I just couldn’t miss.”
“Do you?”
“Nope.” She grinned at him.
“You big fat fibber,” he teased. Shelly always listened to her father. She always followed the rules, but there was a little mischievous side to her. “I have two questions for you. How did you know it was me in your bed, and what were you going to do if it wasn’t?”
“Well, nobody else has ever tried to climb into this bed with me. You’re the only one.”
“You don’t bring men here?”
“Ha!” She actually threw her head back and laughed, exposing the smooth skin of her throat. “Are you insane? I don’t bring men anywhere.”
“There’s no man in your life?”
“No one. I would have told you,” she said, and for some reason he felt ridiculously relieved. “Why are you asking? You planning on setting me up, too? Afraid I’m going to become a spinster, start collecting cats and wearing a housecoat to the store?”
No, he wasn’t afraid of that at all. It was probably the opposite. “Who else is trying to set you up?”
“My father.”
“Your father?” That was the last answer he’d expected.
“He thinks it’s time for me to settle down and give him grandkids.”
“Oh.”
“Oh? Is that all you have to say? You agree with him, don’t you?”
Shelly seemed like she was born to be a mother and a wife. She was loyal and loving and caring. “It’s not about what I have to say, it’s about what you think.”
She was quiet for a long moment. “There’s so much I dreamed I would do with my life.”
“Like what?”
“Travel. Have fun. Just live. But those were all dreams and I haven’t done anything to make stuff happen. I guess that’s why they call them dreams. Having that kind of life wasn’t meant to be my reality.” She sighed, sadness crossing her face momentarily before she grabbed his hand and squeezed. “Let’s talk about you now. How long are you going to be in town? It might be another thirteen years before I see you again.”
No, not that long ever again, he thought. “At least a month. Lolly wants us to stay.”
“Save some time for me?”
“I will.” Right now spending time with Shelly was the only thing on his to-do list.
Chapter 4
Dear Shelly,
The bigger the boobs the closer to God.
And that woman was downright heavenly.
“I like your room now, Shells,” Levi said to her a couple of hours later as he looked around for a moment. “When you told me your father was going to redo it for you, I didn’t think it would be bigger than my first apartment.”
“Thank you.” She followed his gaze around the room, still not believing he was in it after all this time. “It’s my special place.” She had so many memories of Levi here.
Her father had knocked out a wall and turned it into a suite complete with a bathroom, a living room area, and a giant flat-screen TV. He had done it for her just after the last time she’d mentioned moving into her own place. His way of getting her to stay. She never really thought she could move far away from her father. The thought of him alone here made her sad. He spent a lot of time at church, but he was still a lonely man, too in love with his wife to ever move on.
“I think you’re going to have to start sending me pictures with your letters,” Levi said, drawing her thoughts back to him.
“I never thought to take pictures.”
“Maybe you should,” he said as his eyes settled on her once again. “I dated a girl for a few weeks who took a picture of herself every four and a half minutes. I wanted to break her damn phone but that’s what people do nowadays. They document every single aspect of their lives. You don’t even have a Facebook page.”
“The kids in my class told me that Facebook is out.”
“Yeah, once elderly people start taking over something it’s no fun anymore,” he said with a slight smile as he seemed to drink her in.
Her heart sped up a little. She had kept up with him over the years. She watched every episode of King’s Customs Creates and every interview he had done and read every article about him and his brothers. So she knew what he looked like, but seeing him up close was something different entirely. He had always been heart-throbbingly cute as a kid, but as a grown man he was … otherworldly, as if he were created by some other supremely being because mere mortals didn’t look like him.
Or maybe they did. Maybe she just felt that way about h
im because he was her best friend and she loved him and she was so incredibly proud of him she could burst.
A television host. A race-car driver. A bad boy millionaire. It seemed like the stuff little-boy dreams were made of.
He was really living life while she only seemed to be observing it. It was no wonder he never came back here. Life had gotten so much better for him the moment he left this place.
“Why do you keep looking at me like that?”
“Like what?” He got up and stretched his long body. She got a glimpse of his hard-muscled back as his shirt lifted.
“Like I’m an alien or something.”
“You’ve changed, Shell.”
“No, I haven’t!” Nothing had changed for her at all. She had done exactly what she had planned to do, what was expected of her. All-girls college. Master’s degree. Teaching job. She got up for work and did the same thing every day. She followed the same routine, came home at night to nothing new, nothing exciting. No, she was definitely the same. And painfully so.
“You have. You should call me more,” he said. She could hear the irritation in his voice, and just a bit of accusation. “Not just on my birthday and holidays.”
“You could call me more, too. Anytime you want. Phones go both ways.”
“I will! Why don’t you come see me sometime? We live in the same state and I don’t travel as much as I used to. It’s stupid that we don’t see each other. There’s no damn excuse.”
She stood up and placed a hand on his shoulder. He was definitely agitated, only she didn’t know why. “What’s the matter, Levi?” She wrapped her arms around him, holding him close. She tried not to think about how much his body had changed since he was fifteen. He’d gone from thin and sinewy to thick and rock-hard. It felt good against her softness. “Is it Lolly? Are you worried about her?”
“No,” he said as he pressed his lips into her hair. “I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me.” He smoothed his hands down her back. “I think it’s just being back here. I never thought we would come back. People really hated us after Duke sent Patrick Andersen to the hospital. It was like when my father caused that accident all over again.”
Heart of a Bad Boy (Bad Boys of Destiny #3) Page 4
