BARE SKIN: A Dark Bad Boy Romance

by Callie Pierce

  He shook his head, trying to get rid of those thoughts. He had things to do today, and if he kept thinking about the way she grabbed him and hauled him to her, he’d never get out of this room in one piece.

  “Yeah,” he said, reaching for his jeans. “But I’ll be back tonight.”

  She sat up and he turned to look at the way the fading moon shone on her pale skin. She didn’t drag the sheet up to hide her nudity. She rested in the middle of their sexual battleground, and he suddenly found himself thinking of nymphs. She looked like she was crafted out of magic with all that rich auburn hair in a tumble around that elegant face of hers and skin that glowed like silver-speckled porcelain.

  “You cooking dinner again?”

  “I was planning on it.”

  She paused and then rolled over, tugging a small fold of bills out of her nightstand. Why she kept money there, he didn’t know. He also didn’t think he liked the idea of her tossing green at him after doing all the things that they had just done. He narrowed his eyes at her.

  “What’s this for?”

  “I don’t want you paying for all the food.”

  “I don’t mind,” he said, looking down at the hundred-dollar bill that was looking up at him. Was that cheap or expensive for a whore? He didn’t know. He hadn’t really done much in the way of buying women. “I make good money.”

  “Don’t do that,” she said flatly, pulling the blanket up over her breasts. It bothered him that she suddenly felt the need to cover up.

  “Do what?”

  Her eyes were like flecks of ice in a storm when she looked at him. There was magic there too, he thought. “Don’t make this some stupid macho thing where you get bent out of shape because a woman offered to buy. I thought that you weren’t like that.”

  He didn’t think he was. He had no problems with a woman independently earning her share of the wealth. Hell, he was fine with a woman earning the most of it. His own mom had been a strong damn woman who did what she could to make ends meet. He tugged his jeans into place and sighed.

  “It’s not that,” he said, jerking a hand through his messed-up hair. “I just don’t want you thinking… that… you know… I can’t help out.”

  She raised her brow at him. Her next words were winter cool. “Not only do you own an auto-repair place, you happen to be part of a lucrative organization that doesn’t always stay within the boundaries of the law. I’m well aware that you are fiscally capable.”

  He frowned at her. There was something about the cool, flat way she used her words that had his hackles going up. “You just called me a criminal again.”

  “I did. Does that bother you?”

  He zipped his pants up and wondered where the hell his shirt had gone off to. “My mom always said that it’s not really what you say, it’s how you are saying it. You say criminal the way other people say disease.”

  She sighed and held up her hand. “I don’t like that aspect of you, Cody. I don’t like it at all. I’ve never made a secret of it, and one night together isn’t going to change my mind on the subject.”

  “Do you know what we do?” he demanded, whirling on her.

  “You break the law.”

  “Yeah, but do you know what we do?”

  She tugged the blanket closer. “Are you going to tell me?”

  “Most of our money is made stealing cars and selling guns. We steal cars because that shit is insured, and it hurts no one but the insurance company to pay out for it. We sell guns because we believe in a person’s right to keep themselves safe. We don’t do drugs.”

  “Hookers?” she asked pointedly.

  “From time to time,” he admitted. “But it’s not like you think it is. Pamela, the Old Lady to our boss, runs that. She has a house that she uses, and she makes sure the girls, and guys if you really want to know, involved are safe, happy, and clean. She firmly believes that there is nothing wrong with paying for a little love so long as the person who’s providing the service is all right doing it.”

  She paused. “There are boy whores too?”

  He laughed. “Pamela is a good businesswoman, just like you. She provides anything and everything so long as everyone is of age and willing.”

  He watched as she puzzled out her emotions. Cody was used to that response when he talked frankly about the business with people. He let her have her moment while he continued trying to set his hair straight. It wasn’t that he cared so much what it looked like, but it kept him from yanking away the blanket that she was still holding to herself like armor.

  “Why not drugs?”

  “Drugs make a whole town go sick, even if it’s just one person doing them. It’s not just someone smoking some weed. It’s a person injecting poison into their body, or snorting it up their nose. Yeah, I’m all about doing what you want with your own damn body or whatever, but the fact is that people throw themselves and their families away for a hit… People don’t do that with other things.”

  “I don’t know that I agree with you on that part. A gun can hurt someone just as much as drugs.”

  “Sure, but no one ever kept anyone safe injecting dirty shit between their toes.”

  She pulled her knees to her chest in contemplation. He let her think about it. She was a smart woman, and she had more than proved she could think for her own damn self. He’d said his part.

  “I’m not a bad person, Donna. And since we are being so honest… I am damn close to loving you.”

  Her lips parted in an O of surprise. “I… what?”

  “Did you go suddenly deaf?”

  “Well… no, I just…”

  It wasn’t the reaction that he wanted, but at least she didn’t sink underneath the covers and tell him to leave. The coldness of her eyes had thawed a little too, so he went on. “Yeah, I’m pretty damn surprised by it too, but there you go. I like your snippy nature and take-no-bullshit attitude. I like that you give a damn about people so much that you have to unwind for hours after the end of the evening just to get to sleep. I like that you dropped everything to come take care of a brother that you hadn’t seen in years. I like that you know exactly who and what you are. If that’s not a cocktail for a woman to love, then I don’t know what is.”

  She blinked rapidly, as if trying to keep tears he couldn’t see at bay. “I don’t… I didn’t—”

  “Don’t respond. I didn’t say it so that you would give me some kind of answer. I said it because it was true and because I thought you ought to know.”

  He walked around the bed and put his hand on her cheek. It was soft as velvet under his callused palm. She didn’t lean into it like he secretly wished she would, but she didn’t pull away either. He’d take that. She wasn’t just any woman, willing to get lost in the romance of the moment. She was Donna, and she had her own shit to handle. He could see the tears now, glittering in the very corners of her eyes like wet diamonds. He wanted to believe those tears were from happiness, and maybe that’s why it took him a moment to see that she was mad.

  “Damn it, Cody, why did you have to go and ruin it?”

  Her words were so softly said that he didn’t understand their meaning at first. They could have meant “that was nice of you to say” or even “maybe I’m falling for you too,” but they didn’t. The words were soft as satin and cut through him like a dagger.

  “What? I didn’t ruin anything.”

  “This was a great night,” she said, jerking away from his hand as the tears started to run down her face. “I’m sorry but it can’t happen again.”

  “Why not?” he demanded, trying to keep the little punch of anger from showing.

  She whipped her gaze on him, and it was filled with so much raw pain that he wanted to hug her. What had happened to cause this passionate woman so much pain? He wanted to know, to help, to alleviate some of it.

  “Because it can’t, damn it. I get that you believe in what you do, and you’ll have to reconcile yourself with that. But I know better. I’ve seen what it ca
n do to a person, to the people around you. This was… this was fun, but no. No more.”

  Her dragged his hands through his hair, ruining what little style he had given it. “Man, you are seriously one of the dumbest smart people that I have ever met.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  He shook his head and reached back to work his hair into a braid. “You think you know everything. You think you have it all figured out. Well, here’s a great big surprise for you, Ms. Business. You don’t.”

  “That makes no sense. I—”

  “Stop,” he snapped. “Just fucking stop.”

  Her eyes went cold and flat as ice cubes on a polar cap. “Don’t you dare tell me what to do.”

  “We were both telling each other what to do just a little while ago, Donna.” He slammed a hand in the general direction of the bed. “Don’t pretend like we didn’t fully enjoy ourselves.”

  “Sex doesn’t equal a relationship.” She crossed her arms and lifted her chin in cool defiance.

  “If you think what happened here was just sex, you are fooling yourself. I’ve had sex before, Donna Mason, and this wasn’t it.”

  Fuck the shirt, he decided. She could keep it. Maybe she’d even like having it when she came back to her senses. He picked up his wallet from the ground and deliberately left the hundred-dollar bill on the stand next to her.

  “Cody—”

  He shook his head. He didn’t want to hear anything else from her right now. If she said anything else he couldn’t handle, he’d walk out and never look back. He didn’t want to do that. “I’m going to go. I have shit to do, and so do you. I’ll be back tonight.”

  “Still?”

  “Donna, I’m not just here for you.”

  With that, he walked out of the room and out of the apartment.

  Chapter Eleven

  Donna

  The living room was a mess, and so was Donna. It wasn’t the first time, just the most recent. She felt like she had stuck her foot in her mouth somehow, but she also felt like she had been right. It was a strange mix of emotions that she couldn’t quite work out. Instead of working on that, she had put on her less attractive pajamas and started to clean. It began in her bedroom, fixing the mattress, the bedsheets. She’d tucked the money he’d been too damn proud to take back into her emergency stores and came out into the living room.

  Maybe she should have gone to sleep. There was every chance that she would have woken up with the ability to really formulate a plan for handling the social fallout of sleeping with the wrong someone, but it seemed pointless. Kyle would be up in a little while, and she didn’t want him to see any remnants of her night of bad decisions.

  Yes, she thought to herself, that’s exactly what it had been. A bad decision driven by stress and a mild interest in a physically attractive, but ultimately inappropriate, man. Nothing more. He wanted to call it more than sex. He was just being foolish. It hadn’t been anything special. Good sex didn’t need to have emotions attached to it. If he was so used to drunk college girls and uptight housewives that he couldn’t handle a woman who knew how to govern herself… well, that was all his fault. There was absolutely nothing that she could do with any of that.

  Donna was just beginning to calm down when she spotted a tank top against the wall. The image of his body being revealed as that scrap of fabric swept up the line of gloriously tanned abs was vivid enough to bring a flush to her cheeks. What had she been thinking? She hadn’t, that was the problem. Her own clothes were a pile of useless fabric puddled on the floor. It was embarrassing to know that she had let him do that when Kyle had been just down the hall.

  “Stupid Donna,” she said to herself, picking everything up with more ferocity than was necessary.

  The shirt smelled of him, that particular mix of Cody and the work that he did. An enforcer, he had called himself. She knew what that was. They could fight. It was strange, he didn’t seem like that kind of man. Then again, she had never been a great judge when it came to bad boys.

  She paused in the middle of the living room with the tattered remnants of her clothes in her hand. For the first time in a very long time, she let her memories take her back to those months, so many years ago, when she had hit the very lowest point in her life.

  The guy had been cute, but they usually were at that age, a little older than she was and a lot dangerous. The patch on his leather vest had been “Prospect” and the rocker on the back had read “Wild Tigers.” It wasn’t like Cody’s kutte. There was no Carson, Nevada, or the big white-and-black tiger ripping its way through flames. He hadn’t been nearly high enough in the ranks to be anything like that. He’d been low rung… but it had been enough for Donna and her teenage lust.

  “Stupid Donna,” she repeated.

  With a growl of frustration and the inability to fix her own past, Donna threw the clothes into her bedroom and slammed the door, as if by putting that piece of plywood in place it would keep all her past, and everything that came with it, at bay.

  Kyle opened his door and she whirled, her heart surging into her ears. He was standing in the doorway, wearing a pair of loose black jeans and the same oversized hoodie that she was pretty sure had grafted itself to him. His book bag was already slung over one shoulder as if he were ready to walk out the door.

  “Kyle?” She snapped the question with enough force to make him frown at her. She wondered if he could actually hear her heart hammering inside of her chest or if that was fallout from her cleaning fit. She took a slow breath and tried again. “Sorry, you startled me. Let’s try that again. Good morning, Kyle. Did you sleep all right?”

  He looked blank-faced and weary. His eyes had a brightness to them that she didn’t particularly like. She wondered if he had even slept at all.

  “Hey,” he answered.

  “Everything okay?”

  He glanced at her bedroom door. “I was just about to ask you that. You were stomping around and slamming things.”

  She felt her cheeks go warm. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to… I just… bad dreams.”

  It was a bold flat lie, and she hated herself for saying it. She hated Cody for being the reason that she had to lie to her little brother. Donna didn’t like being dishonest. It never helped anyone in the long run.

  “Hungry?” she asked. “If you hurry I can take you to the diner by the school. We can grab some breakfast.”

  “Yeah,” he said slowly. “Sure. Is Cody still here?”

  She felt her heart hammer inside of her chest. “What? No. Why?”

  His gaze darted from one spot behind her to another, but he didn’t directly at her. He shifted back and forth on his feet. “No reason. Listen, I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Sure. What’s up?”

  He cleared his throat and readjusted his backpack on his shoulder. His eyes danced around her again. “There’s this concert I want to go to. Becky got tickets.”

  Becky. Becky the blonde. Becky the girl that her brother didn’t want to talk about. Donna wasn’t sure what she ought to feel about any of that. Did she have any right? Probably not. “When is it?”

  He hesitated before saying, “Tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow meant it was a Thursday. A concert on a school night?

  “Where is it?”

  “Henderson.”

  She blinked at him, almost sure that he had gotten it wrong. Henderson was across the state, on the other end of route 50, otherwise known as the loneliest road. Just over three hours away. It did not sound like a great combination to her.

  “I don’t know, Kyle.”

  “Come on. You low-jacked my phone. You’ll be able to know where I’m going and when I’ll be back. Please? I really want to do this.”

  “Do you want to do this?” she asked. “Or does Becky want you to do this?”

  “What, it can’t be both?”

  It could, but she didn’t think so. Kyle hadn’t told her about the band. Or tried to tell her how awesome they were. All he’d
said was Becky was involved and Donna gathered that meant the pretty blonde was the real reason he wanted to go. That was what mattered. “It can be,” she admitted, “but I don’t think it is.”

  “Really?” He tugged his backpack closer. His eyes, so very much like her own, were bright and angry. “Well, I don’t really care what you think. I’m going. Track me all you want.”