by Julie Kriss
She sucked on my thumb until I slid it out and put my mouth back over hers, replacing it with my tongue. Then she sucked on that. She tasted sweet as wine, her mouth hot and welcoming, and I wanted everything in there—my tongue, my cock, my come. I wanted her to taste nothing but me. I had never, ever wanted a woman the way I wanted Tara Montgomery. I could have fucked her until the cops came, fucked her until next week, until we both grew old and died.
I cupped her breast through her shirt, pinched her nipple lightly. She made a sharp sound and ground against me, half-breaking the kiss. “You’re going to make me come,” she panted against my mouth.
“Not tonight,” I said against her lips, rubbing my thumb over her nipple again.
She moaned. “Jace, you’re going to kill me.”
“Not tonight,” I said again. I put both my hands on her hips and moved her back an inch, taking the pressure off.
She slumped her shoulders, her hair dangling, and let out a breath, the tension going out of her body. “Can you at least tell me why?”
“Because you don’t want me the way I want you.”
She gave a laugh with only a little humor in it. “I thought we wanted each other the same way.”
“We do,” I said, “and we don’t.” I ran my thumb over her lower lip one last time because her mouth was the sexiest thing I had ever fucking seen. I let the pad of my thumb drag her lip down, let it run softly over the flesh inside. She turned her face toward my thumb, moving to take it in her mouth again, and I pulled away.
“Go,” I told her, not unkindly.
Tara paused for only a second. Then she got off my lap and moved back into the passenger seat. She picked up her purse and opened the passenger door. A second later, it slammed.
And she was gone.
Fifteen
Tara
I should have been mad at him. Insulted. Was it me? I should be in a tizzy, calling Jace Riggs names in my head, wondering what was wrong with me that he didn’t want me. I should be finished with him. Instead I lay on my bed in my bra and panties, still high from the feel of him. I wasn’t mad at all, because we didn’t feel finished. I half-dozed and thought about the sensation of his thumb in my mouth, feeling the electricity from that single thought zip up and down my skin, over and over again.
It was late. Midnight, maybe—I didn’t really know. I was just drifting off when the phone rang on my nightstand.
I didn’t know the number, but somehow I knew who it was. I’d given him my number a few hours ago, after all. “Hello?” I said, answering the phone.
“Okay,” Jace said on the other end of the line. “Now that I’ve beat off in the shower, I suppose I can tell you.”
Did he have to turn me on with everything he said? I pushed away the visuals in my brain and said, “Tell me what, Jace?”
“I’ve never had sex.”
I went still, unable to say a single word.
“Most people think it’s weird,” Jace said into the silence. “I get that. But it’s true.”
I couldn’t process this. Not even a little bit. “Never?” I asked.
“I’ve had the oral kind,” he explained bluntly. “Not very often, and not since prison. The other kind, never.”
I spent a second unpacking that. My file had said Jace was twenty-five. He’d never had sex with a woman at twenty-five. Though at some point, some girl—more than one—had given him a blow job. The crazy, illogical part of my brain wondered who the fuck those girls were, and whether I could scratch their eyes out. Because, it was time to be honest here, I really wanted that to be me.
“Does that answer your questions?” Jace asked me.
“Not even a little bit,” I told him.
He sighed. “Okay, counselor, I’ll try. Fire away.”
I scrambled, because I had questions. So many questions. I sat up in bed, shivering a little now. “The oral sex,” I said. “Was it giving or getting?”
“Both.”
That didn’t improve the visual. I hated the idea of him with his face between some other woman’s legs. “Were you dating these women?”
“No,” Jace said. “They were mostly girls who showed up at my brothers’ parties. One-time things.”
“So you’ve never had a girlfriend?”
“No, counselor, I haven’t.”
There was a tinge of resentment in the word counselor, Jace with his defenses up, but I could handle that. I talked to people who had their defenses up every day, and I’d certainly butted heads with Jace’s defenses more than once. I didn’t blame him for feeling vulnerable, telling me this. In fact, it was a miracle he was answering so many questions at all.
“Why?” I asked him. “If you were, um, in a sexual situation with these girls, why didn’t you just have sex with them?”
“Because I didn’t want to,” Jace said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“I know, but it’s the answer I have. I’ve never wanted to randomly fuck someone I don’t know or particularly like. My body might want to, but my brain never has. My brain puts the brakes on every time.”
I was tense, my breathing shallow and raspy. My counselor’s brain was fired up, but so was my sex brain, and my whole body. I was sitting here in the middle of the night, on my bed in my bra and panties, completely turned on while I tried to analyze Jace Riggs. It was by far the weirdest situation a man had ever put me in.
“I was twenty-three when I went to prison,” Jace said to me. “My head’s been fucked up since I got out. I can’t just introduce myself to a woman and screw her. It’s not what I do. And before prison, I was stealing cars and informing on my father for years. I had secrets, a double life. I couldn’t date. It was tense, I had to be careful, and I was dealing with a lot of shit. So I could go to a party every once in a while, and sometimes one of the girls there would suck my cock and I’d eat her out. Then I’d go home because I was done. There you go. That’s your explanation.”
“Okay,” I said. What it must have cost him to tell me this. The pure, raw courage it took.
“I didn’t want you to think I turned you down because of you,” he said. “That wasn’t the reason. That’s all I wanted to say. Now go to sleep and forget about me.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you’re better off,” he replied. “Good night.”
Sixteen
Jace
My brother Ryan showed up at Riggs Auto the next day with his seven-year-old son in tow. I had just finished with a customer’s car, and Luke was in the office, wading his way through the numbers shit. I was better at numbers than he was, but Luke was a stubborn ass, and he maintained that he’d never get good at it if he didn’t sit in front of the little computer we’d bought and figure it out. So he sat there cursing while I cleaned up in the bay.
I was tired from lack of sleep, but I was used to that. What I wasn’t used to was feeling like I’d ripped off my clothes, ripped off my skin, and exposed myself. I felt jagged, uncomfortable. My stomach was in knots and my head buzzed. I worked hard and silent, trying to make the feeling go away.
She knows. Tara knows.
My virginity—fuck, I hated that word, but technically it was true—wasn’t something that bothered me every day. It was a thing that bobbed up in my life from time to time, but mostly I tried not to think about it. I knew it was weird for a guy of twenty-five not to have fucked someone. I knew my brothers had very different experiences, and I’d rather die of embarrassment than tell them. I also knew that I needed to take care of it.
Take care of it, like it was an appointment I needed to make to get rid of a rash. But I wasn’t leading a double life anymore, and I wasn’t in prison anymore. I’d made the decisions I’d made, but I didn’t need to head further toward thirty with my lack of experience hanging around my neck.
That, of course, made me think about Tara again.
She probably wasn’t interested, but I thought about her anyway. I thought about how she ta
sted and how she’d felt in my lap. She’d probably back off and go find some experienced guy. If I were her, I would.
“Jay-Cee,” Ryan said, giving me a nod as he came in the shop. He liked to try and piss me off by mispronouncing my nickname. His son, Dylan, came in behind Ryan, wearing a Tigers ball cap and an oversized sweatshirt.
“Hey, Uncle Jace,” Dylan said, cool as a cucumber. I hadn’t seen Dylan since I left for prison, not too long after he’d been dropped on Ryan’s doorstep by his grandparents, but the kid took it all in stride, like we saw each other every day.
“Hey, Dylan,” I said. “You’re a big kid. Better looking than your dad, too.”
“Can I see what you’re doing?” Dylan asked.
“He loves cars,” Ryan said. “It’s genetic.”
I put Dylan under the car with me and pointed out some stuff. He wanted to look at the engine of the old Mercedes we had parked in one of the bays, so I opened it up and left him to it.
“What are you doing here?” I asked Ryan, wiping my hands with a rag. By now Luke had been drawn out of the office and was sitting in one of the shop’s folding chairs. He’d given Dylan a high five, which Dylan, of course, was totally cool with.
Ryan shrugged. “Just decided to get out of the house for a while.”
I shared a look with Luke. We Riggs boys weren’t all that sociable, especially with each other. We’d grown up in the same house, but we’d fended for ourselves, and we hadn’t even liked each other all that much. Ryan, especially, was nowhere near the rest of us.
Ryan had been the Riggs brother who was actually going to go places. He’d been born with good looks and incredible baseball talent, and though Luke, Dex, and I always knew we’d be the kids from the wrong side of the tracks forever, Ryan was going to be something else. Ryan was going to get out. It was easy to hate Ryan for that, but at the same time we secretly hoped he’d make it. At least one of us would get away from Westlake.
He’d almost done it. Almost. Ryan had hit the minor leagues, but he’d never gone further than that. He had a temper and tended to get in fights both on and off the field. Then Dylan appeared three years ago—the four-year-old son Ryan hadn’t known he had, who he then had to raise by himself. And finally, last year his shoulder gave out, and he’d been benched for months, going through training and therapy and God knew what else in an effort to get back on the field.
It hadn’t worked, at least not yet. Ryan lived in the Detroit suburbs, well over an hour’s drive from here in shitty traffic. There was no way he’d just drop in at Riggs Auto. Something was up.
“How is the shop doing?” Ryan asked, leaning back against the car I’d been working on and crossing one ankle over the other. He really was a good-looking asshole—if he hadn’t been a baseball phenom, he could have been in movies. Now he was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, his face clean shaven and his dark brown hair neatly trimmed, and he looked like an underwear model on his day off. He’d been cocky about it in high school, but that cockiness had vanished. Now he watched his son from the corner of his eye, making sure he didn’t hurt himself poking in the old Mercedes.
I said nothing, and Luke gave it a long, meaningful pause before he gave a slow drawl of an answer. “The shop,” he said, sprawling back on his folding chair, “is doing just fine.”
“Good, good,” Ryan said. He looked around, somehow still managing to keep the corner of his eye on Dylan—some kind of parenting talent. “You two really cleaned this place up after Dad made a shit show of it.”
Our father was in prison for trying to run someone over in his car. That someone was his business partner in the stolen-car enterprise Dad had run through here for years, the one I’d worked for and informed on. We Riggses weren’t exactly the Brady Bunch.
But with Dad put away for a long time and the stolen car ring broken up by the cops, Luke and I had decided to make a go of an actual shop—a legitimate one. We’d put in an actual bookkeeping system instead of a bunch of handwritten slips, and we’d gotten a new sign and done some local advertising. We’d hired a couple of employees, casual mechanics who came in a few days a week for now in the hopes that we’d be able to take them on full time. We actually had customers, a small steady trickle so far. The shop’s notoriety probably accounted for some of that, but we hoped to win people over with good service.
“We do okay,” Luke said. “You just said shit in front of Dylan.”
“I’m used to it,” Dylan said from under the hood.
Ryan shrugged. “He’s used to it. So the place is making a profit?”
“What’s this about?” I asked him.
Ryan gave me a look from those dark eyes that girls had gone batshit for all through high school. My limited sexual experiences had usually been courtesy of Ryan and the trails of women he left in his wake, though he probably wasn’t aware of it. “You’re awfully suspicious,” he said to me.
“Money,” Luke said. “It’s definitely about money.”
“It isn’t about money,” Ryan said. He glanced at Dylan. “Okay, it’s sort of about money.”
Dylan peered around the hood at us. “Dad needs money,” he said. “He can’t play baseball anymore.”
“I thought you were getting the shoulder looked at,” I said to Ryan.
Ryan looked pained. He glanced up at the ceiling, then scratched his chin. “The shoulder is toast,” he said finally. “It’s done.”
We were quiet for a second.
“That sucks, man,” Luke said.
“Since Dad can’t play,” Dylan said, “we can’t afford the house anymore. Dad says we might have to move. And he needs a job.”
Ryan scratched his jaw again. “I raised him to tell the truth,” he said. “I’m regretting it at the moment.”
“I thought you were doing okay,” Luke said. “You said you have a nanny and everything.”
Dylan’s head popped around the hood again. “Kate’s not a nanny. She’s a pet sitter.”
“She was a pet sitter,” Ryan said. “Now she takes care of Dylan instead of dogs and cats.”
“You hired a nanny with no qualifications?” I asked him.
“She works cheap,” Ryan explained, “and Dylan likes her.”
“I like her,” Dylan agreed.
“Plus, she’s hot,” Luke said. He grinned at Ryan’s expression. “Just a wild guess.”
“It’s purely professional,” Ryan said firmly. Maybe too firmly.
“Kate is pretty,” Dylan said. “She has red hair. She constantly has guys calling her for dates.”
A muscle in Ryan’s jaw twitched. “Why do I take you anywhere?” he asked his son. “At home, I can’t get you to say a damn thing.”
“Okay, okay,” Luke said, cutting in. “Ryan, if you want to come work at Riggs Auto, of course you can.” Ryan had learned cars by kindergarten like the rest of us. “It isn’t a big-money job, though. We’re still rebuilding.”
I knew what Luke was thinking. I was thinking the same thing. Ryan was the closest thing to a celebrity that Westlake, and the Riggs brothers, had. To have him working in the garage would probably bring customers—most of them women. I was no marketing expert, but notoriety plus Westlake’s almost-famous almost-ex-baseball player was a good way to get traffic.
Ryan nodded. “I’ll let you know,” he said, like he didn’t give a shit. Because he was a Riggs, and we’re incapable of saying Thanks, that’s great, I appreciate the help. It’s impossible for us to form the words.
In my pocket, my phone buzzed on silent. I slid it out and saw I had a text. It was Tara.
Don’t even try to avoid me after that conversation last night, Riggs. I have questions.
My stomach twisted while I tried not to smile. You think you can analyze me? I texted back.
I plan to try, was her immediate response.
“What’s this?” Ryan and Dylan were standing at my Thunderbird, and Ryan was walking around it in a circle. “Who brought this awesome piece of metal
in?”
“It’s mine,” I said. “Some guy sold it to Luke for a few hundred bucks. I’m getting it road ready.”
Ryan whistled in admiration, and Dylan opened the driver’s door to pop the hood. He already looked like he belonged in the shop. Maybe we could use a seven-year-old intern.
My phone buzzed again. Free therapy session, Tara said. Limited time offer.
Give up, I texted back. I’m too screwed up.
So sue me, Tara texted. I like a challenge.
I shook my head and ran a hand through my hair. Okay, I wrote. My place. Tonight. See you at eight.
“Who’s that?” I looked up to see Luke watching me texting.
“No one,” I said.
Luke opened his mouth to say something, but Ryan interrupted. “Guys.”
His voice was deep with alarm. I turned and saw that he’d opened the trunk of my Thunderbird and was staring inside.
“What?” I said. “There’s nothing in the trunk. I’ve looked a hundred times.”
In response, Ryan turned to Dylan. “Leave the room, kid.”
“I want to see,” Dylan protested.
“Nope,” Ryan said. “Go in the office and close the door. Give me ten minutes with your uncles. Three, two, one.”
Dylan dragged his feet, dying of curiosity, but he went. When the office door had closed behind him, Luke and I walked around the car to see what Ryan was looking at.
He’d pulled up the bottom of the trunk, opening up the space where the spare tire was kept. I’d never looked in there; I hadn’t had time. Now I saw that inside the space, there was no spare tire at all. Instead, there was something else.
“Oh, shit,” Luke said.
