BARE SKIN: A Dark Bad Boy Romance

by Callie Pierce

  “I’m not going with you either.” Kyle stepped away from both of them. “You are both screwing everything up. I’m old enough to handle this. Just get away from me.”

  Donna and Cody started talking over one another. She couldn’t fully understand what he was saying, but she knew they agreed on the fact that Kyle wasn’t ready to take care of himself. If only they could agree on basically anything else.

  “Goddammit, Cody,” she finally said, slapping her hands on her hips. “You aren’t his family. I am.”

  “And where have you been?” His eyes glittered down at her. His fury was almost palpable. “Off getting your black credit card and your damn fancy car. You haven’t been here. I’ve been helping him. I’ve been taking care of things.”

  What exactly did he have the right to be so angry about? This was his fault. Kyle would never be here if Cody hadn’t made criminal life seem normal. “Yeah, and you’ve done a hell of a job.”

  “Stop it! Both of you!” Kyle stepped between them. Donna hadn’t realized how close she and Cody had gotten during their screaming match. “You are both being stupid. I’ve got this.”

  “No, you don’t,” Cody said. “You got caught doing this. You were stupid.”

  “Donna, you better make him leave me alone.” Kyle jerked his phone out of his pocket. “Or I send the pictures to every last person that you work with.”

  Donna’s face felt hot, and she was almost positive that it had turned every shade of tomato imaginable. This was not how this night was supposed to go.

  “What pictures?” Cody asked.

  Kyle tilted his phone. Donna couldn’t quite see it, but she caught a flash of skin as her blackmailing brother showed her temporary lover exactly what pictures he was talking about. She had never been more embarrassed. She clapped both hands over her face and made an inarticulate sound. This was definitely not the night she imagined for herself. This wasn’t even the month she imagined for herself.

  “You took pictures of us making out? Are you serious?”

  Kyle shrugged and started to put the phone back into his pocket. Cody swept the phone out of Kyle’s grip. Donna saw a little trash can symbol pop up as Cody began to delete one picture after the next.

  “Hey! You can’t do that.”

  “Can’t do what?” Cody demanded. His moonlit eyes were hard as stone as he got rid of the evidence. “Get rid of your crappy attempt at blackmailing one of the few people who has tried to help you?”

  “That’s my phone.” Kyle tried to reach for it. Cody didn’t even try to block him. He just tightened his grip on the phone until his bronze fingers turned pale yellow. “Give it back.”

  “Yeah, it is. And you’ll be getting it back because that’s the right thing to do.”

  “You’re a White Tiger.” Kyle spread his arms wide. “You break the law all the time.”

  “Yeah, I am. And yeah, I’ve broken the law on many occasions. So what? There is a big difference between following the law and doing the right thing. You think this patch means I go around trying to get the people who care about me to do whatever I want them to do? No, I don’t. Because it’s wrong. It’s not even kind of wrong. You want to know how many laws you broke by doing this? Not just blackmail, which is an epically shit thing to do. You know you could end up on a sex offenders list by taking these pictures and distributing them without permission? Does that sound like a great idea?”

  “No, I—”

  “You didn’t think. You just decided that what you wanted was more important than your sister’s happiness.”

  “What the hell, man, you’re mad at her too.”

  Cody shoved the phone into Kyle’s hands hard enough to make the younger man take a few steps back. “Yeah, I am. But just because you’re mad at someone doesn’t mean you should treat them like crap. That’s part of being an adult.”

  Donna was shocked to the point of muteness. Over the past few days she had imagined how Cody would handle finding out about the pictures her brother had taken. Her mental scenes had covered everything from fierce anger to a cold shoulder of divine proportions. It had not covered the possibility of righteous indignation.

  “What the hell, Cody?” Kyle said, shoving his phone back into his pocket.

  “No, Kyle, I’m tired of defending you to everyone if you are going to pull something like this. It’s time to grow up. Go get in your sister’s car. We will talk about the rest of this later.”

  Kyle scoffed and started down the parking lot. Donna heard him mutter something under his breath. She didn’t hear all of the words, but it was something to the effect of there being nothing left to talk about. This was bound to be a great ride home. She watched the long line of Kyle’s dark back as he hunched his way toward her car, far away as it was.

  The sick feeling in her body had turned into a solid stone weighing her down. Her mind was busily trying to pinpoint just where everything had gone wrong.

  “Hey,” she said. “I’m sorry about all of this.”

  She turned around. Cody’s arms had resumed a position across his chest. His hands were still dark with motor oil and car grease. They left smudges across his shirt. “Is this why you’ve been avoiding me? Why you let him come to this concert?”

  The weight in her belly jumped to a place in her throat. “I… yes. Yes, it is.”

  “Why?”

  It should have been a simple question, but it wasn’t. There were a thousand reasons why she hadn’t wanted those pictures to get out. She took a deep breath and shrugged. “Because, I like keeping my private life private.”

  “I can’t believe you. Don’t feed me one of your boardroom answers. You were embarrassed by this. By me. By us.”

  The breeze from the concert carried with it some heavy-metal music, ripe with heavy bass and thrumming drums. Her hair danced around her face as she stared up into Cody’s face. “There is no us.”

  “Damn you, Donna Mason.”

  His voice shook when he said the words, and Donna began to regret having spoken. He raked a dark hand through his darker hair, and it fell around his face. His cowboy boots sent puffs of dust into the air as he paced in a short little circle.

  “Cody, I—” She didn’t know what she wanted to say. A part of her wanted to apologize, but another part of her thought she shouldn’t have to. It wasn’t a crime to want to have secrets. Even so, she knew that privacy was not the only reason that she hadn’t wanted anyone to know.

  “You’ve done everything to keep distance between us. Why?”

  “I—”

  His hands wrapped around her shoulders, and he hauled her close. His mouth tasted like fire as he kissed her hard. She couldn’t pull away, and she didn’t want to. Her hands went up of their own volition, disappearing into the midnight of his hair. He pulled her away as quickly as he swept her up. “What is wrong with you, damn it? Why are you denying that there is something between us?”

  “We aren’t dating. We are…” She trailed off, struggling for the right words. “We are enjoying one another.”

  “Does it look like I’m just enjoying you? Do you know what I did today?”

  His hands were tight around her arms, holding here there as if he were the anchor to her wayward ship. She was almost afraid of him letting go. “No, I don’t.”

  “I told the boss of my club that I wanted out. Do you know why?”

  “I… I don’t.”

  “Because I love you. I don’t know why. You are the most difficult person I have ever met. You always have to be right. You rarely listen to anyone or anything else. You stick your nose where it shouldn’t belong, and you judge people before you even know them. I should hate you.”

  She tried to swallow, but she couldn’t. The lump in her throat was too large. Donna opened her mouth to speak, but nothing would come out. What had she done?

  “I should hate you,” he continued, “but I don’t. I see your face everywhere. I see cars and wonder what you would look like behind the wheel. I
t drives me crazy. You drive me crazy.”

  “Cody, I’m sorry.” She meant it. Tears, hot as magma, sprang into her eyes. “Please, I—”

  “No, Donna. Just no.”

  He dropped his hands suddenly, freeing her. She was a ship and she was floating on a sea of confusion, and she had no clue what to do. Her hands were shaking as she reached out to him, but he stepped out of the way. Her chest felt too tight beneath the crushing weight of her own guilt.

  “Do you hate me that much?” he scoffed. “I spent this whole day planning how I could change my life, change myself to be a man who fit with you. Have you even thought about bending one of your ideals to give this a chance? No… don’t answer. You won’t even admit that there’s something between us.”

  “Cody, that’s not fair. That’s not fair at all.”

  “Why not? Because it’s true? You want to find some guy who fits into your perfect little world. Fine. How exactly has that gone?”

  Terribly. Every man she had dated hadn’t made her feel anything. Cody had. She had been denying it for days, maybe longer, but there was something about the way he held her that just made her feel good. The way his eyes lit up when he talked about cars or books. The way he looked when he was making food. The smell of him against her sheets.

  Oh no, she realized, Donna was falling for him too. She wasn’t sure when it had happened, or even why. A part of her wanted to pick it apart, make it all line up, write out some pro-con list about what could possibly have happened to make her feel anything but lust and consternation where Cody Bannik was concerned, but it wouldn’t have helped. She cared about the biker, and there was little that she could do about it.

  “Cody, I’m sorry I didn’t—”

  Before she was even finished talking, he had turned his back on her. In a swirl of denim and dark hair, he made his way toward his bike. A cold Nevada wind rushed across her cheeks, making her aware of the tears that were carving a path across her skin.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Away from you,” he said. “I’m going to go get drunk. I’m going to bury myself in women until I forget that you ever existed. Stay out of my life, Donna Mason. I’m done with you.”

  The sound of his bike roaring to life masked the sound of her tears as she realized that she had lost him just as she began to understand how much she needed him.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Cody

  Cody had barely gotten to the other side of the amphitheater parking lot when his phone started to go off. He couldn’t hear it; the engine of his motorcycle was too loud and primal a roar. If his phone hadn’t been in the pocket of his T-shirt and pinned up against his chest, he might not have felt the vibration from it either. He wanted to ignore it. The cold comfort of a long night ride was calling to him. He wanted to get lost in the cold air rushing over his face and the violent tremor of his bike beneath him. But it might be Donna calling, and the thought had him downshifting and pulling over next to a beat-up hatchback with a thousand stickers for every goth-metal band that had ever toured the backwaters of Europe cluttering up the bumper.

  By the time he pulled the phone out, it had stopped ringing. The missed-call message came from the boss. Cody glared down at it. He couldn’t quite shake the feeling that the president of the White Tigers knew Donna well—too well. Maybe it was just him being paranoid; he’d heard that people often got stupid and jumped to conclusions in the first months of being in love, but it all seemed to fit together just a little too nicely.

  He didn’t want to talk to the boss right now. He wanted to enjoy a few hours to himself. Cody needed to just get lost in the ride. He was just about to put his phone back in his pocket when it lit up again, letting him know that the boss was calling a second time. That couldn’t be good.

  “Yeah?” Cody asked, putting the phone to his ear.

  “Someone’s feeling bitchy.” McGee’s voice rumbled through the phone, low enough to be sinister.

  “Been a hell of a night.” Cody took a deep breath and decided that his boss needed to know what had happened with Kyle. “Someone’s selling in our territory.”

  There was a long silence. “You wanna run that one by me again, Lieutenant?” The boss’s tone was dangerous, like glass pressed against skin.

  Cody took a moment to gather his thoughts before he started speaking. “I don’t have the whole story yet, I’ll let you know when I do. A kid got caught selling at a concert. So far he’s been real tight-lipped about where he got them and who his distributor is.”

  “I’ll just bet he has. You working him?”

  Cody knew what his boss was asking. If it had been any other kid, Cody would have hauled him someplace private to make sure he got the information. But this was Kyle. He remembered the way Kyle had looked when Cody had walked in the door of the security office. He’d looked… young. Young and afraid, like some kind of angry baby bunny who had stumbled into a fox’s den. It hadn’t made him feel particularly good to know that he had put that look on the kid’s face.

  “Yeah,” Cody lied. “I’m working it.”

  “You better be. We got a meeting set up, tomorrow night. You can make your case known then. Find out if redhead pussy is better than riding with your brothers.”

  Cody ran his tongue across his teeth. There was a bitterness to McGee’s words that a person just didn’t get unless there was history involved. Cody was more sure now than ever before that his boss had a past with the woman who could be his future.

  “How well do you know Donna?” Cody asked.

  There was another silence followed by a hearty chuckle. “Is that sticking in your craw, Lieutenant? That I might have plugged her first?”

  Cody felt his lip curl into a sneer of frustration. It didn’t bother him that McGee might have slept with Donna back when they were teenagers. Those years were so full of hormones that some folks would have dated linoleum if it would have given them the time of day. It bothered him that whoever it was had treated Donna like crap.

  She’d looked so lost, so broken when he’d left her a few minutes ago. It tore at him to know that he had put that bleak and terrible expression on her face. But what else could he do? She kept pushing at him, keeping him away, and that was tearing at him too.

  “Just answer the damn question,” Cody said.

  “Watch your mouth, kid. I still run this show.”

  Cody shook his head once, hard. “You don’t run Donna. No one does.”

  McGee snorted. “That’s the goddamned truth, isn’t it?”

  “So, it was you.”

  There was a third long silence, this one was interrupted by the sound of a metallic lighter being flicked open. Cody couldn’t see the other man, but he could picture him lighting up a cigarette and taking a long drag. “How much did she tell you?”

  “That there was a guy, got her pregnant, threw some money at her, and told her to deal with it.”

  “Well,” McGee said. “That sounds about right.”

  Fury, hot and liquid, surged through Cody. “Are you fucking serious?”

  “Calm down, Lieutenant. I get that you are angry. Hell, I can’t say that I blame you. Donna’s… well… she’s good people. She was hell on wheels then, and from what I hear she’s not much different now. Yeah, I know she’s got money and a business, but that don’t surprise me much. She was never content to just… exist. She had passion, and I was young enough to think that I could tame it.”

  It was Cody’s turn to snort. It was loud and derisive enough that McGee started to laugh.

  “Yeah,” McGee responded, “I agree with that. I was young and dumb and full of… well… you know.”

  “Did you love her?”

  “Maybe. Hard to say now. She was a beautiful girl just about to be a woman, and I was in that stupid place where I was barely a man. I liked the way she looked at me, mostly because she didn’t look at many people. It means something, you know? It means more when she’s so… discriminating.”

&n
bsp; “Yeah. I get what you mean.” It was hard to get Donna’s attention; it was even harder to keep it. Had he been wrong to turn her away? She wasn’t like other women. She wouldn’t come chasing after him. Donna Mason would wrap all that ice around herself and let it all go.

  “Did you fuck it up?”

  “Maybe,” Cody said, parroting McGee’s words back at him. “Hard to say now.”

  McGee let out a long slow breath. “All right, I’m going to tell you something. I’m only going to say it once, so you better listen. I’ve known countless women, some for an hour, some for a month, and a few for years. I’ve seen women from Ireland, Korea, and everywhere in between. Of all of them, only two have ever really got under my skin and made me a better man. One of them was Donna Mason. I knew I screwed up when I lost her… so I was smart enough not to lose the next woman who made me feel that way. So… suck it up. Whatever is going on, fight it out. Dish it out. If you don’t, you are going to regret it.”