He tried to move past her, but she stepped in his way. “Kyle, don’t do this.”
“Don’t do what?” he demanded. “It’s just a stupid concert. Why are you trying to make this into a big deal?”
“Kyle, it is a big deal. You are supposed to be showing me that you are ready and willing to make your life into something else. That you aren’t wandering around at night joyriding and tagging overpasses.”
His mouth twisted into an angry snarl. “I’m going and you can’t stop me.”
“I can, actually,” she said as flatly as she could manage. “You aren’t allowed to travel without me until the court date. It’s part of this whole setup. If you aren’t there when I am at the school to pick you up tomorrow, then guess what? I will bring in the police.”
“That’s a bitch move.”
“Well,” she said, crossing her arms. “I am a bitch.”
“I know that Cody was here all night. I know what you two were doing.”
She felt an angry flush rise to her cheeks. “That’s very rude, Kyle.”
“I even have pictures.”
Her anger took a sharp turn toward embarrassment with a brief stop in disgust. “You… what?”
“I came out to get some water, and there you two were, on the couch fawning all over one another.”
He jerked his phone out of his pocket and opened up the photos. He tilted the screen in her direction, and there she was, straddling Cody with her mouth plastered against his. She reached for the phone, but Kyle jerked it away from her.
“Kyle, this is absolutely not okay.”
“You trying to walk in and rule my life isn’t okay either. It’s just a concert. Don’t make a big deal out of this. Otherwise I’ll e-mail the pictures to everyone.”
“Kyle!” she snapped. “That’s illegal.”
He shrugged and gave her a cool look. “As you pointed out, I am a criminal. I break the law all the time.”
“I didn’t call you that.”
He shrugged again. “You say it every day by bringing up all the crap that I’ve done. You say it by not letting me have a little freedom.”
“This isn’t you going out for a couple of hours. This is you driving across the state with kids I don’t know and you won’t tell me about, and trying to use blackmail to make it happen.”
“I’ve got school,” he said, pushing past her. “I’ll be back sometime tonight.”
“What do you mean sometime?”
He jerked one shoulder into the air. “Whenever I feel like being back.”
Chapter Twelve
Donna
Donna and her Z4 Roadster were going eighty down the highway, blasting classic rock, when her phone lit up. Her first thought was that it would be Cody, whom she had tried to call at least four times before she had given up and contacted Jerry, who had needed very little incentive to tell Donna where the local enforcer lived. It would, after all, have been polite of the jerk to call back when she had tried to get in touch with him. She might be pissed at him, but he had a right to know about Kyle’s little blackmailing trick.
But no, of course it couldn’t be Mr. I’m-Falling-For-You. Nope, Donna wasn’t that lucky. She resisted the urge to snarl as her mother’s name and number flashed across the digital screen. Her second thought was that Kyle, the budding blackmailer, had reneged on his promise to keep the photos he took and her mother was calling her to berate Donna about terrible life choices. It would fit in with the week she had been having.
There was also a chance that she was calling to apologize for all the crap she had ever said and done, and promise that she was going to be a world-class mother. Yeah, right. And her car was about to become a winged unicorn and carry her off in the sky to live with Prince Perfect.
With a sigh, Donna pressed the Answer button on her steering wheel. Her music became little more than background noise, and her mother’s voice echoed out of the speakers.
“Hello?” she said before Donna had a chance to say anything. “Donna, are you there?”
The question sounded more like a demand, but that was Liz Mason for you. Donna took a deep breath before answering. “Yes, Mom. I’m here.”
“Where are you?”
For a moment, Donna was fifteen again and wanting to lie to her mother about where she was and what she was doing. Donna was an adult; she didn’t have to tell anyone anything about where she had been or why. Wasn’t that the one and only perk of being grown-up? “I’m just outside of town, on interstate 50. Is there a problem?”
Rather than answer the question like a normal person would, Liz just barreled ahead with more questions. “What are you doing back there? Are you going home? Is Kyle coming home, then? Will you be back soon?”
Donna’s knuckles went white on her steering wheel. “Mom, I’m just driving. I needed to clear my head.”
It wasn’t really working. Usually the feeling of going eighty on a long stretch of road with the windows down helped, even more than exercising. There was something about the feel of leather against her back and the rumble of shifting gears that kept the fifty million things that she had to think about on any given day from seeming overwhelming. Food, fitness, and fuel: what more did a woman need?
“So you’ll be back?”
Donna rolled her eyes. “Yes, Mom, I’ll be back. Why?”
“Your father wants to do a barbecue tonight.”
Donna would have been less shocked if her car actually had sprouted a horn and wings. A barbecue? They hadn’t done something so family-oriented since Donna was a kid. They were easily her favorite family memory. Her father liked to cook on the grill; her mother liked attention. Donna and Kyle had just liked the adventure of eating outside. It was a little jarring and ultimately confusing.
“We haven’t done that since I was in middle school.”
“Do you want to break his heart? He got this whole idea last night, and I haven’t been able to put him off it.”
Ah, that sounded more like the truth. It was easy to picture Donna’s dad coming up with the idea and her mother pointing out every reason why it was a bad idea. What surprised her more was that it hadn’t actually worked. Dad usually cowed to Mom pretty quickly. Maybe that show of backbone had been more than just a show. “Tried, did you?”
Her mother huffed loud enough to make the speakers vibrate. “Don’t you take that tone with me, young lady. I just want the house cleaned up for company, and it’s not so easy to do.”
“Company?” Donna asked. “Who else is coming?”
“Well, no one yet, Donna. Jeez. But your daddy had a whole list. He wants everything to be just right.”
Donna felt a pinch of guilt somewhere in her throat. A whole list? Well, that was something special. “All right, I’ll be there. I can pick up Kyle after school and we can come over. Do you want me to bring anything?”
“Some wine, or a dessert.”
Donna made a mental note to pick up both. “I can do that.”
“Good.”
There was a long awkward silence. Donna could hear the click of a lighter through the phone followed by the long inhalation as her mother took a drag of her cigarette. She switched gears and slowed down, feeling the hum of her car beneath her.
“Is there something else, Mom?”
“Lora Edmonton says that a man was coming out of your place at an ungodly hour this morning.”
Donna just barely resisted the urge to curse. “Mrs. Edmonton is nearly a hundred years old and hasn’t bothered to get new glasses since the ’80s.”
It was a deflection, not a lie. Not that Donna felt anything in particular about lying to her mother, but trying to keep fabrications about her personal life in order was more brainpower than she wanted to dedicate to any conversations with Liz Mason.
“So, no bad-boy bikers were coming out of your place half-naked at four in the morning?”
Donna sighed and shook her head. She wasn’t going to have this conversation. As a woman and an ad
ult, she didn’t have to answer to anyone about any part of her sex life. She was certainly long past the age of having to explain her actions to her own mother. “Mom, stop. What time do you want Kyle and me there?”
“Dad’s putting the burgers on at five. If you wanna be here a little earlier than that, I’d appreciate some help.”
Help invariably meant that Donna was going to do whatever her mother had been too frantic or lazy (Liz Mason had the singular ability to be both) to accomplish. Donna could already see herself setting up tables and sweeping up the emptied carport so that people could mingle.
She downshifted again and took a slow turn down a road that barely stood out against the flat Nevada landscape. She was only twenty minutes outside of town but everything looked barren and unsettled. The ground was dusty in some places and cracked in others. A small ranch-style house the color of terra cotta and stucco was the lone exception to the otherwise flat landscape.
“All right. We’ll see you then. I’ve got to go.”
“Bring your boyfriend with you,” her mother responded, hanging up the phone before Donna could say that she didn’t have a boyfriend.
“Oh, grow up,” she told the disconnected line, knowing that she sounded completely petulant. That was just fan-friggin’-tastic. Her palm burned as she slapped it against the side of the steering wheel twice in quick succession. Her ire was bubbling beneath her skin, and she couldn’t do a damned thing about it.
This whole week had been nothing but one frustrating event after another. Her mother calling in the middle of the business week, her brother being in jail, living away from her comfortable apartment in a tiny cheap box with a troubled little brother, the advances of a man who, if he would just be anything but a criminal, might actually be a decent partner. And now, thanks to a retired biddy with no hobbies save for spying on others, her mother knew about it.
“Goddammit!” she snarled and slapped the wheel again.
The front door to the one-story house slapped open, and Cody stood there. He either hadn’t changed since leaving her house, or he owned nothing but jeans. His golden body was silhouetted by a doorway so dark that his obsidian hair got lost in all the shadows. He waited there for a moment, a scowl fixed on his handsome face, before he shoved his thumbs in his belt loops and leaned against the door frame.
“Goddammit,” she said again, this time in a whisper.
With quaking knees and a stomach that vibrated with anger, she pulled to a stop, then slung herself out of her car.
“We have to talk.”
He raised his brow. “Seems like we did plenty of that this morning.”
She held up a hand and swallowed a hundred angry retorts that welled up in her throat. In the calmest voice that she could manage, Donna said, “I am not ready to talk about last night, or… or this morning.”
Her voice broke, and she hated it. She hated that everything seemed to be happening too quickly for her to handle. Donna liked to manage; it was what made her a great boss. At work, she was a goddess of capability. She was perfectly capable of handling twenty crises at once and put out twelve fires while schmoozing a persnickety client. It was what made her a fantastic businesswoman. But solving work problems was vastly different from solving personal ones.
Personal problem number one came tromping down the front steps with a liquid grace reserved for panthers and quicksilver. His eyes were as dark as sapphires in water and filled with concern. Oh God, not that. Anything but that. She could have taken him being cold and distant, or ever bitter. She would have relished in him being angry. It would have made everything easier. But that gentle look, so openly worried about her, was her undoing.
The first tear rolled down her cheek, then a second. She blinked and he was there, standing in front of her. The sun was perched behind him in such a way that she couldn’t see anything but the rugged masculine outline of him, but she could feel him. He was a wave of heat that hummed against her skin.
“Donna…” he started.
“I… I can’t.”
When his arms wrapped around her, she crumpled. He completely undid her. The wide span of his fingers splayed on either side of her spine as he pulled her gently toward him, and the feel of his bare chest against her wet cheek was a deep and abiding comfort to her.
He didn’t say anything or ask, and she was grateful. He just held here there beneath the Nevada sun as she cried out all of her frustrations. His body began to sway back and forth, and she swayed with him. One large hand lifted and brushed the hair off her face, tucking it gently behind her ear. With the other, he stroked up and down the length of her back as if she were a cat. It felt good.
“I’m sorry,” she finally said.
“For what?”
“Crying all over you.” She scoffed at herself, stepping away from the amenity of his embrace. He slid his hands down her arms, letting her step away, but didn’t quite let her pull back. The rough tips of his fingers held her wrists. Now that her eyes had adjusted, she could see lines of her tears down his chest. “God, I don’t normally do that.”
He smirked and gently squeezed her wrists. “What kind of man would I be if I made a woman feel ashamed of her God-given right to cry?”
“Men can cry too,” she said, wiping the tears from her cheeks.
“Oh, no doubt, but they ought to do it into beer, not on my chest.”
His lips quirked up as he said it, and she felt herself smiling in response. He managed, despite all the tattoos and the rock-hard muscle, to look affable. It was strange. Cody literally beat people up for a living, and Donna made people feel better in their work environments, but it was him who was more approachable.
“Perish the thought.”
“Unless it’s Chris Pratt. I’d forgive him wanting to cry on my chest.”
A small laugh worked its way across her lips. She crossed her arms and glanced around. There was a garden, she realized. Nothing was growing out of it right now, but it was clear that there had been recently. Plots of rich, dark earth still formed neat little rows in a fenced-in four-by-four shape. Donna wondered what he had grown. To the other side of the long house she could see a garage, but it was closed-up. There was a small patch of grass, healthy and green, tucked against a small rocked area that surrounded a pond.
“Nice place,” she said.
“It’s not much, but it’s home.” He stepped to one side and slid an arm around her back. “Come on in. Let’s see about getting you some lunch.”
“Why are you always feeding me?” she asked, letting herself be guided into his house. “I’m not scrawny.”
“No,” he said, the sound of appreciation turning the single syllable into a purr. “That you are not.”
The screen door swung shut behind them, and Donna got her first good look at Cody’s personal sanctum. It was cleaner than she imagined it would be, if a little cluttered. There was a long couch covered with a deep blue blanket, a television that must have been twenty years old at least, and a coffee table. All of these things were neat and orderly. It was the bookshelves that were taking up all the space.
There must have been ten of them, lined up from one side of the wall to the other. They were of various heights and widths, but every last inch of them was taken up with novels of every variety. If there was some kind of organizational system, Donna couldn’t decipher it. Worn paperbacks still sporting thrift-store stickers seemed to share space with modern leather-bound classics. Armor-clad adventurers peered out from the bright covers of some, where dark-noir detectives held smoking guns on others. It was, she thought, the strangest collection she had ever seen.
“Holy crap,” she said as she ventured farther into the living room.
“I like books,” he said, stepping around her.
“Yeah, I see that.” She perused the shelves, her curiosity warring with her desire to organize things. “It is a very impressive collection.”
He nodded as he walked past the last shelf and into a good-sized kitc
hen. It was neater here, with only one small squat bookshelf that seemed to be relegated to cookbooks. Their cracked and worn spines showed use.
“I lived on the reservation near Duck Valley with my mother and my sisters. We didn’t have a lot of money. No one really did. Most of the time people were just sort of struggling to get by, you know?”
She didn’t, not really. Growing up in Nevada, she knew that there were reservations and that their populations dwindled, but little else. It hadn’t really been covered in her local history class, and she had been so desperate to get away from here that she’d never bothered looking into it more. She kept quiet and let him continue.
BARE SKIN: A Dark Bad Boy Romance Page 40
