by Rie Warren
I rubbed my forehead in defeat. “I’ll try to get something signed for you.”
Her voice softened. “Now, reading these romances sometimes gets me to thinkin’ about your dad.”
Suddenly it felt like I’d taken a crowbar to the stomach. “I know, Ma.”
“I miss him. I sure do wish he was around to watch your baby boy grow up.”
The dryness in my throat made it almost impossible to speak. “I think about that every day. He would’ve been a great grandpa.”
We were both silent for a while, swimming in our own wishes for what should’ve been.
“You okay, Ma?” I rubbed my eyes, my fingers coming away damp.
“Yep. So long as I got you and JJ and those boys at Stone’s, all those families, I’ll be all right. Y’all don’t need to worry about me, son.”
“I love you, you know?”
“Oh sugar, save that for the ladies.”
After we hung up, I fell back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. It would be nine years this November since James Stone had died. The pain had dimmed from the initial shock and disbelief to months of bewilderment. Even now it sometimes felt like my dad should still be in charge and large at the garage on those solitary mornings when I drove to Stone’s. Sometimes I’d sit in my Bronco, cradling my coffee cup, remembering his long lope across the parking lot. The keys had always jingled from his belt loops. I held the mirage of him inside my mind those days when I couldn’t shake the loss.
The biggest regret, the hardest sadness to swallow was he’d never met JJ.
So they’d always be close in one way or another, I kept a picture of Dad and me on my dresser alongside the first photograph I’d taken of JJ when he’d come out squalling his lungs off. With a wrinkly red face and unfocused eyes, he’d been a little shrimp I was too scared to handle in the beginning. But when he’d latched tiny fingers around my thumb and immediately stopped crying like he knew I was his daddy, I figured out pretty damn fast being a father was going to change my entire life. He was and always would be the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
The photo of Dad and me was taken outside of Stone’s when I’d joined the team straight from high school. I was a healthy six-foot-three and broad-shouldered, but Dad—who used to call himself the old goat—never failed to rag on me about the extra two inches he had over me. Handsome, rugged, and an old crooner of Chet Baker songs when he got his sauce on, he’d been Ma’s silver fox.
She used to work the desk at Stone’s back in the day, swishing around the place like it was Buckingham Palace and she the queen. Hell, she still did on Tuesday and Thursday mornings when the kid was at preschool. And she’d always had the smackdown ready for any dame making eyes at Dad—not that he had a tune for anyone but her.
I rolled over and shut my eyes. Behind them, I saw the dresser with his picture, him and me standing side-by-side, arms slung around each other. That photo was right next to where I dropped my wallet, keys, and grease rag so I’d make sure I said goodnight to him each and every night, no matter how much it hurt.
There were other framed photographs around the house, too. Mom and Dad’s wedding picture, every milestone moment and then some of the kid, shit and shenanigans at Stone’s . . . It was a good house, a good home I’d made for JJ. I’d bought it ten years ago as a bachelor during the bust, thinking of it as an investment. Later it became a place for my own family as it grew quickly with Claire and the kid. The two-story Victorian wasn’t a spread by any means, but it was a prime piece of real estate in the middle of the Old Village, which I’d bought for a penny compared to what it would cost now.
I’d restored it that first year with Dad. Aside from the loose toilet handle in my bathroom, it was perfect. Neat as a tick just like the garage, the house was pretty as a picture from the white picket fence outside to the glossy finished floorboards inside. And it was nowhere any chick would expect to find Josh bad boy Stone. I intended to keep it that way.
But that jiggly toilet flush—we went way back, all the way to November 2, 2004, the day Dad and I were finally going to fix it together. The day he died. He went hunting that morning before our noon fixer-upper date. I’d been waiting for him to show when I got the call. It had been a hunting accident. That was the day the project stopped, that time stopped, and a piece of my heart broke away.
I could fix that damned toilet handle if I wanted to. Could’ve done it years ago. But I didn’t because doing so would mean truly letting Dad go, and I wasn’t ready.
That was why we’d named JJ Joshua James. And that’s why I usually called him the kid, because most days I couldn’t stomach the thought of Dad’s early death.
I wiped my eyes then blinked them open at the same sterile hotel room ceiling. Yeah, it was time to get out of my head.
In the hotel gym half an hour later, I was in full work-it-out mode the old-fashioned way. I grunted, groaned, and cursed my way through a circuit on the weight machines complemented with CrossFit training designed to make me keel over. At least then I could stop thinking.
Having to pretend I was into Nicky while ignoring the fact I was one hundred percent attracted to Leelee was gonna make me mentally unstable. Not to mention her last relationship broke off because Patrick was bi and lied to her about it. I didn’t stand a chance with Leelee even if I was on the up and up with her, not with her history and my Rom-Con con. Shit, her bad break-up story more than rivaled my own.
So my plan of the moment was sweating it—her—out of my system PD-fuckin’-Q. If that failed, I was going to masturbate over every single sex scene in her book until my dick was raw, even if I had to bust my nut in the shower with Nicky in the next room. Maybe then my bastard cock would learn to stand down in her presence.
Right then, as luck would have it in some form of twisted fate or some other writerly term—like foreboding or foreshadowing or whatever—the door swung open . . . and Leelee swished inside. Wearing exercise gear: hip-huggin’, boob cuppin’, ass-lovin’ Lycra.
Her life might be worse than a bad romance novel, but mine was beginning to resemble a har har fucking har romantic comedy, minus the romance part.
Trying to ignore her so I could get my workout done and get the hell out of Dodge, I continued to torture my body. Sweat dripped like bullets down my bare chest and into the low waistband of my nylon shorts. My muscles huge and heaving, I rolled up to a squat from another set of sit-ups and came face-to-tit with Leelee.
When I rose to my full height, topping her by a good nine inches now that she wore sneakers instead of fuck-me heels, my gaze fell to her face. Her pouty bottom lip was tucked half between her teeth, and I wanted to use my mouth to tease it out. Her eyes were brighter than ever, her hair pulled into a high braid, all the better to wrap around my fist and draw her up for a long, deep kiss.
And the room just got a whole lot hotter.
I rolled my neck, bouncing on my feet while I reached for my discarded tank top to mop up my face. Pushing the neck of my tank top into the waistband of my shorts, I was well aware the extra weight dragged my shorts even lower over the cut muscles of my pelvis, almost to the point where my pubes peeked out.
I grinned when Leelee peeked too. “So, what brings you here?”
She took a seat on one of the blue mats, averting her eyes. “The gym’s a great place to hide. I only started workin’ out when I began coming to these things. You know, me and crowds.”
“Yeah, I’m hiding from those vicious writers too.”
She laughed, and then her gaze flickered over me, not with a quick glance but with the attention of a woman who liked what she saw. I held still, held my breath and felt like she electrocuted every one of my nerve endings until my muscles jerked in excitement rather than exertion.
And that was all before she even stretched her legs to either side of her in a near split and began limbering up.
What had I thought this morning about wearing a hard cup jockstrap? Yeah, that. I needed one now. My cock rose and
the thin material of my shorts was not gonna hide a single goddamn inch of thick erection for very long.
I covertly slipped the tank top over so it fell on top of my crotch. Resuming my workout on the pull-up bar, I watched Leelee as she watched me. I pumped up and down at a strong, measured pace. She performed some yoga-type moves that immediately put me in mind of inventive sexual positions. I hopped down and moved on to weighted squats, and she bent over from the waist, walking forward on her fingertips, round ass in the air.
The tank top wasn’t gonna last very long concealing my raging erection at this rate either. And it was pretty damn hard to do squats with my dick as iron-hard as the barbell in my hands. I was so revved up, my only hope was to outlast her. My very, very best dreams come true . . . and my worst nightmare of the moment right in front of me:
Soft, voluptuous Leelee
Who writes fuck-hot, steamy sex
And works out
In tight ass Lycra and boob-hugging spandex
Long wavy red hair
Beautiful southern drawl
Hard as nails and sharp as a tack underneath it all
The kind of girl I could take home to Ma . . . and the kid. Fuck fuck fuck.
“Spot me?”
I almost fell on my ass when I heard her request. I brought the barbell slowly to my shoulders and then lowered it to the floor. “What?”
“Could you spot me?” Her face was flushed from all the yoga cum Kama Sutra contortions.
I groaned and pretended to massage a hamstring to cover the quick jerk in my shorts. Jesus. I’d spot her all right, all the way down to the mats. “Sure.”
She lay back on the bench after calibrating the weights. I stood behind her, thighs opened on either side of her head. This was a very bad position for me to be in. If things went south, my cock was gonna end up in her mouth.
Through deep and determined inhales and exhales while she pumped iron, she asked, “Did you get a chance to check out Ride?”
I tried real hard not to think about where I’d left off reading: Jase and Avery desperate to fuck, yet deliriously as cockblocked as me. Every hot word written by Leelee. I definitely couldn’t admit I’d been about to tug my tackle over it either.
“Yeah, a little. Not bad.”
Leelee nodded her chin, signaling me to put the weight back on the rack. As soon as she was clear, she swiveled up and around. “Not bad?” She playfully punched me in the ribs.
I couldn’t tell her what I really thought, so I shrugged. “The guy-girl thing doesn’t cut it for me, ya know?”
“Hmm.” Leelee reserved her opinion on my opinion.
After that, we went around the machines together. Sexual tension hovered on the sidelines, but it was broken down with talking, teasing . . . and sweating goddamn buckets.
An hour later, we sat against the wall, arms hanging over our knees.
“You remind me of my ’69 Camaro.” I had an oilgasm every time I thought about the muscle car I kept babied in the garage beside my house. Sleek, bright red, and just gritty enough, the car was an American classic, like Leelee. Not like the fancy foreign made motors I was making a fake career over.
I braced myself for the backlash. The last time I’d said something similar was to Claire about her resemblance to my full-sized Bronco. I meant she could handle anything, not her post-baby weight. Shit got ugly after that.
“That was supposed to be a compliment,” I added when Leelee made no comment.
Her smile was slow in coming but it lit me up like the rays of the sun when it hit me. “I know. My daddy’s a gear-head. He always wanted to get his hands on one of those. I grew up with my head under the hood.”
Lovely Leelee, a tomboy in grease-stained coveralls? Va va vroom and va va voom. Damn if she wasn’t the woman of my dreams.
“You’re not the tough guy I first took you for, Stone.” She patted my leg.
Begging to differ, I scowled in response.
She poked a finger at my biceps that didn’t dent a centimeter. “Frown all you want, I’m still not convinced.”
“It wasn’t a frown, babe, it was a glower.” I jumped to my feet and hauled her up with me, catching her when she stumbled.
Leelee’s lips brushed my shoulder, her breasts skimming against my midsection. Her thighs hit mine as I clasped her waist. “Steady now.”
Heat flared between us but I couldn’t act on it. I couldn’t swing her thigh up to my hip, grip her neck, grind against her. I couldn’t do any of the wild and nasty things I wanted to.
I released her. Slinging a towel around my neck, I held onto its edges, shaking my head at the floor. I looked up just in time to see her pitch a fresh bottle of water at me. As soon as I caught it, I twisted off the cap and spilled it over my head. I shook my wet hair all over her, just like Viper gnashing my favorite, scuffed-up work boots. Maybe that pup liked me after all. Not to be outdone, Leelee tossed the contents of her bottle down my neck too, laughing as I rained more water on her.
When I stopped, she looked at her top, which was almost as drenched as my hair. “You will pay for this, Stone.”
“Lookin’ forward to it, Leelee.”
Walking out of the gym, we both grinned from ear-to-ear. Smelly, sweaty, and wet, we waited for the elevator to arrive once again. Other convention-goers gave of us wide birth, packing into the first elevator like sardines.
When the next one arrived, I bowed formally, bare-chested, wet body and all. “Going up, Miss Songchild?”
She started into the car, beaming at me. Two steps inside, she pulled up short, her face blanching. Against the back corner of the elevator, the creeper agent slouched, a slimy smile on his mouth.
Five
Wednesday: It Takes Two to Tango
THE AGENT DIDN’T LOOK so smug when I followed Leelee into the elevator. My bulky mass and heavy scowl put the fear of a beat-down in his deeply hooded eyes.
The doors closed and he straightened his tie, brushed off his cuffs. He held out his hand to Leelee. “We meet again, Miss Songchild.”
“So it would seem.” She gave him the barest amount of her fingertips to shake, and I tried not to chuckle. I didn’t bother to hold back my laugh when she used my tank top to wipe off her hand after he released it.
From within his jacket pocket, he pulled out a business card, flipping it from finger to finger like a poker chip. “You know, you really should consider signing on. We have the power to get you where you need to go.”
“Which is where, exactly?”
“The Big Six, of course. One book out in the Ride series and success on Amazon merely makes you a one-hit wonder. Without big backing, you’ll likely be fly-by-night, forgotten-by-dawn just like millions of other writers.”
Although LaForge appeared calm, there was something of a coiled snake in the way he sent his jabs, bearing his fangs before the strike. I was beginning to get an idea of how he worked, first using his glossed-over metro-man looks to hook his victims, and if that didn’t work, he sank his teeth into the first weakness he could find. I maintained my stance just slightly behind Leelee, making sure he didn’t forget I was there but letting her handle the scum herself . . . before I beat his head against the wall.
“But self-publishing has made me an instant hit and puts bucks in my bank instead of your pocket.” Her braid swished back and forth across her shoulders in agitation.
“And how is that second manuscript coming along? Almost done, my dear? The fans are waiting. Isn’t the point of doing it yourself to get your work out faster?” His lips curled in a sneer.
“The point of self-publishing is to retain control.”
“Control, hmm? Is the lack of control around a lot of people why you’re not much at handling crowds?” He continued to needle her. “An agent could help you navigate conventions, press, promotions.”
Leelee paled as he hit her weak spot, and my pulse hammered.
The business card flew faster and faster between his fingers. “I c
an take you to the big leagues, Leelee.”
“So you can take fifteen percent and the publishers can have seventy-five and I’ll get less than one dollar a book.” She threw her head back to glare at the numero uno asshole.
Asshole kept pushing it, leaning forward, invading her space. “You should really bite now. Offers like this won’t last long, not with the non-stop crop of new writers popping up everywhere.”
I broke from my self-enforced cage and rolled up in front of him. Menacingly huge, I was in his fucking face.
“Guard dog?” He stepped back.
Leelee opened her mouth, but I shoved the agent’s shoulder before she could get a word out.
“Yeah, that’s right. I’m the protection detail, so you might wanna rethink it before you open that mouth again.” I grabbed Leelee’s hand and gave it a squeeze of reassurance.
A frown formed between LaFuck’s brows while he watched her hand gripped in mine. Then his face brightened. “You’re Nicky Love’s partner, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. What’s it to you?” Sliding my fingers from Leelee’s, I crossed my arms over my chest.
The gleam in his eyes turned positively predatory. “So you, and Miss Songchild . . .”
“Are friends.” I prodded him back into the corner, not liking the two-and-two connection he was making. It wouldn’t be good for Nicky, Leelee, or me if he figured out the lie. I picked up the business card that had dropped from his hand. Andrew LaForge. LaForge and Associates Agency. Helping you LaForge ahead with your writing career.
“Clever.” I slipped the card into my waistband and muscled up to him. “But don’t you forget, I will LaFuck you up if I catch you skulking around Miss Songchild again.”
The elevator pinged. Whether it was his floor or not, the dude slithered out. But he stood outside the doors, watching us until they closed.
