“Sorry,” I said.
“No worries.” He moved in the bed, and I wondered if he slept in the nude.
Probably not tonight, unfortunately.
Crawling into Justice’s bed, I tried not to inhale too deeply and let him know that I was sniffing him.
I wasn’t sure that it was him as much as his sheets, though.
“Is this your usual side of the bed?” I asked casually.
“I sleep wherever,” he murmured into the darkness. “Sometimes over here. Sometimes over there. Sometimes turned around backward. It’s why there’s a phone charger over there. Wherever I get comfortable first is where I’m at.”
I smiled at his words.
“I’m going to sleep badly, aren’t I?” I questioned.
He was quiet for a long moment before saying, “I don’t know. Guess we’ll find out.”
And I did.
Spoiler alert—he moved a lot. Oh, and he was totally a cuddler.
***
The next morning dawned bright and early, and the annoying bleating of Justice’s alarm clock startled me out of a very sound sleep.
A sound sleep that was filled with dreams of a naked Justice doing very naughty things to me.
When I woke, it was to find Justice laying his head against my chest and drool forming on my shirt.
“Ummm,” I said, shaking him slightly.
The only thing I accomplished was his face moving farther down my breast, and his mouth now fully open, his hot breath making the tip of my nipple peak.
Shit.
“Justice,” I whispered.
He didn’t so much as twitch.
I poked him in the forehead, then wiggled some more thinking all he needed was just a little push.
Turns out, he didn’t need a little push. He needed a big one.
Oh, and also, Justice was heavy.
Really heavy.
So heavy, in fact, that despite my desire to move him off of the top of me—because Jesus Christ did the man generate some heat—I didn’t so much as budge him an inch.
He was heavy as hell, and with the way he was on top of the covers and I was underneath them, I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of moving.
I then resorted to yelling.
“Justice!” I cried out. “I have to pee!”
That got me a groan.
Jesus Christ, the man slept like the dead.
“Justice…” I kept prodding him with my one good hand. “Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey.”
“Why are you so loud?” he asked, his lips moving against my nipple.
I felt things inside of me tighten—things that definitely shouldn’t be tightening seeing as I hadn’t known this man for long, and he still scared the shit out of me sometimes.
“Because I have to pee, and you are pinning me to the bed,” I answered.
Oh, and also your mouth is perilously close to my nipple.
He groaned and rolled over, freeing me from my blanket prison.
I got up and rushed to the bathroom, making it just in time for my bladder to go into Defcon one mode.
I sighed, long and loud, as I relieved myself.
Afterward, I washed my hands and my face then brushed my teeth.
I looked at my bag, then the toothbrush holder that was holding the pink toothbrush and deposited my bright green one right next to his.
I opened the bathroom door.
“You forgot to flush again,” he groaned, face halfway smashed into the pillows.
I growled low under my breath and went back to flush.
“I haven’t forgotten to flush the toilet since I was a young kid,” I said. “And all of a sudden I move in with you for the night, and bam, I’m regressing to when I was six.”
He cracked open one eye, and I smiled at the most adorable Justice I’d met so far.
He looked so cute all sleepy and grumpy.
“I take it you’re not a morning person?” I teased.
He looked at me with a glare, then closed his eyes again without answering.
I chose to study his back, loving the way he’d conveniently left it so open for me to stare at.
“You have a tattoo of a unicorn on your back,” I said, noting the obvious.
It was a very detailed unicorn, and pretty to boot, but a unicorn nonetheless.
“Yeah.” He cracked open one eye again. “I got it right out of bootcamp. Fucking hurt.”
I could imagine.
And it was the size of half his back.
“It’s kind of cute,” I said, eyes trailing lower.
Way lower, in fact.
So low that I could see the dimpled indentations right above his ass.
A nice, firm ass that was quite round for a man.
An ass that a woman would kill for.
“Do you work out?” I asked.
He laughed and then rolled over.
And, since I was staring at his ass when he rolled over to his front that in turn meant that I was staring at his penis.
His penis that was rather large.
His underwear were doing a piss poor job at containing the thick length of his erection.
“It’s the morning,” he said.
I swallowed hard.
“Yeah,” I confirmed. “It is.”
“My cock is always hard in the morning,” he said in his thick, deep drawl.
I felt things inside of me tighten.
Mostly my vagina.
“Yeah,” I said again.
I wasn’t able to coherently form words at this point. His cock was that big and nice.
Jesus Christ.
“Why are you still staring at it?” he wondered.
I swallowed hard and said, “Because I can’t help it.”
He reached for my pillow and put it over his lap.
I nearly whimpered at losing the sight of that magnificent beast.
And, not wanting to let on that I was feeling things that I probably shouldn’t be feeling, I crawled back into the bed beside him and stole the pillow back.
But I closed my eyes and rolled over until my back was to him so that I wouldn’t stare at his penis anymore.
The move left my backside exposed, which was about the time that I went to reach for the covers.
“No,” he laughed as he pulled them farther away from me. “Fair’s fair and all. You stared at my dick. I can stare at your ass.”
That was true.
Fair was fair.
But I could feel that part of my panties were stuck up in my ass crack, and I couldn’t risk reaching backward to pull them out because I didn’t want to draw attention to it.
So instead, I tugged my t-shirt down, hoping that it covered enough that he wouldn’t be able to see.
But also, I was kind of worried that I was getting wet, and I didn’t want to embarrass myself and let him see how much I wanted him.
He groaned and stood up.
I looked at him over my shoulder and sure enough, his penis was still very hard, and his ass was nice and perky.
Two very mouthwatering combinations.
“You need to get up anyway,” he said as he walked to the bathroom. “We have to leave in an hour.”
I yawned. “It’ll take me twenty minutes to get ready.”
He scoffed. “I’ve never met a woman that could get ready in that small of an amount of time.”
He closed the bathroom door on that comment, so I thought to prove him wrong by getting up and getting ready to go.
In fact, I was so dressed and ready to go that by the time he arrived into the kitchen with a confused scowl on his face, I had breakfast ready and coffee in hand.
“That’s my Pop-Tart,” he said.
“There’re more,” I said. “In fact, I saw like eight boxes in the pantry.”
“But that’s the last cinnamon one,” he said.
I paused with the
Pop-Tart halfway to my mouth and then handed it to him without another word.
He took it with a scowl.
A scowl that lasted on his face only long enough for him to get his first sip of coffee.
He handed the Pop-Tart back to me with a single bite taken out of it.
“I like them all,” he said. “But today is cinnamon day. Tomorrow is chocolate.”
My mouth twitched. “You only eat certain flavors on certain days?”
He nodded.
“Monday is strawberry. Tuesday is cinnamon. Wednesday is chocolate. Thursday is blueberry. Friday is cookies and cream. Saturday, if I don’t eat out for breakfast, is mystery day. Sunday, I make bacon and eggs,” he answered.
“What’s mystery day?” I questioned.
He pulled a box of unopened Pop-Tarts out of the pantry and pointed at them.
“Mystery day is the day that I choose one of the ones out of the package,” he answered. “Since they don’t label what they are, it’s a mystery.”
“How do they get out of the package?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Sometimes the box breaks. Sometimes my mom brings over a shit ton. My dad just opens all the packages and dumps them all into a big box. My mom cleans them out every time she comes for a visit because it drives her crazy.”
My mouth twitched.
“That’s actually kind of funny,” I admitted.
“Yeah,” he shrugged. “He’s weird.”
“And mystery day isn’t weird?” I questioned.
He shrugged, then said, “I’m going to visit my parents this weekend. You’ll come.”
I opened my mouth to deny that when he said, “This isn’t an option. I don’t want you here by yourself for a while.”
I sighed.
I most certainly didn’t want to go to work with him.
But…money was money. And even if I wasn’t living in my apartment right now, that didn’t mean that I didn’t have to pay for said apartment.
“They’ll pay me to be there?” I confirmed.
Justice’s eyes cut to me.
“They’ll pay you,” he promised.
I sighed and went to the pantry to grab a mystery Pop-Tart.
All the while, I wondered if this was the right decision—being here with this man.
It was either stay with Justice or leave. And I didn’t have anywhere to go yet.
I didn’t have much savings, either.
And there was no way in hell that I was dipping into my trust fund. The moment that I did that, my father would know. He would also give me hell for it, seeing as I’d told him he could take that trust fund and shove it up his ass.
I decided a few years ago that the only reason he’d given it to me in the first place was so he could control me.
Granted, a lot of the money in my trust fund had been given to me thanks to my mother’s death—she had a sizeable life insurance as well as money of her own when she’d passed thanks to a rich grandparent—but that wasn’t the point. In the end, my father was the one to make the trust fund for me, and using it would be bad.
At least, in the long run, anyway.
A little more pissed than I’d meant to be, I ripped off the wrapper of the Pop-Tart.
Then started to laugh.
Justice came up to where I was standing and looked over my shoulder at what I was looking at and grunted.
“I get half of that,” he said.
I handed him one half of the cinnamon Pop-Tart, then started eating the other half.
He took it and took a rather large bite of it before saying, “It’ll be okay.”
And, for some reason, I believed him.
Chapter 11
No one tells you that you’re getting old and wise. You have to come to that realization on your own when you’re reading Amazon reviews for dildos.
-Royal’s secret thoughts
Royal
It took me three days to understand how to do the job.
Tanika, the preceptor who taught me the ropes of being an emergency dispatcher, leaned back in her chair and grinned.
“I think you’re good,” she said. “You know everything that I can teach you for now. The rest will come in time.”
I grinned at her and pointed at the screen.
“If you hadn’t told me how to do all of this,” I said. “I’d still be fumbling around half-blind. Thank you for taking the time to show me the ropes.”
Tanika smiled. “Pamela just threw me in there and made me figure it out. At times, I agree with her approach, but there is a learning curve here. Granted, like she said, Kilgore is a small town—well, smaller than where she used to work—which was Dallas. But I feel like that wasn’t fair. And despite their suggestion that you could figure it out, the idea of letting you bumble around and do it yourself made me remember my first week on the job.”
I grinned at Tanika.
I liked her.
She was a married mother of three, and her husband was on the police force. Her husband being Yao—the steely-eyed Asian man that’d been among the men that Justice had talked to when he’d told them he was asked to kill me.
“I can’t imagine having to learn all of this on my own,” I admitted.
“Granted,” Tanika said, “I also came from a dispatcher background. But I came from a town with four thousand people to this place. And granted, thirty thousand isn’t that much compared to other surrounding cities, but it more than tripled my usual call load.”
I couldn’t even imagine.
“What’s the worst call you’ve ever gotten?” I asked, then immediately regretted it when I saw the look on her face.
“Yao was on shift.” She shivered. “He wasn’t in the new unit—the undercover unit—yet. He was still working as a beat cop. He was working Eleventh Street, running a call on a suspected drug dealer called in by a passing motorist who’d gotten lost. When Yao showed, the drug dealer had immediately opened fire on my husband’s car. I had to listen to his panicked cries over the radio.”
God, I couldn’t even imagine.
“That’s why he wants to clean up Eleventh Street, isn’t it?” I asked.
She nodded. “That day shaped who he became. He wants nothing more than to tear that place down brick by brick and build it back up again so it’s a safe place for people to drive down once again.”
But before we could do any more talking, chatter came over the airwaves.
It didn’t take me long to place the voice.
Justice.
“Dispatch, this is Unit M4. I have a report from a citizen of a suspicious vehicle parked across her street. We’re at 733 Shady Grove Lane. License plate for the van is M34-9999. Texas plates.”
Tanika had explained to me that when Justice wasn’t putting himself in harm’s way while undercover at his garage, he was working regular shifts with the new motorcycle unit for Kilgore Police Department.
“10-4,” Tanika said. “Let me run those plates.”
I sat back and let her work, watching and learning.
Tanika tapped away on her keyboard for a few minutes before saying, “Plates are registered to the address across the street. A Johnson Brown.”
“10-4,” Justice rumbled.
Then he was gone.
I knew it was coming before Tanika said a word.
“Are you sure you’re not doing anything more than sleeping in that man’s bed?” she challenged.
My lips twitched.
“I’m painfully aware that I’m not doing anything more than sleeping,” I said. “Trust me.”
She snickered.
“Maybe you should just act like you’re asleep and roll over on top of him. Accidentally do it naked…and you know, go from there,” she suggested.
I laughed.
“I wish I could,” I said, being completely honest. “But Justice sleeps like the dead…and when I say that, he usually sleeps like the dead on to
p of me. He sleeps on top of the covers, and I sleep underneath them. And he pins me there with his body. He’s totally a cuddler.”
The first night that I’d slept in the same bed as Justice hadn’t been a fluke.
In fact, he only got worse.
Now, there was touching and kisses involved.
But it never moved past that point.
And he wasn’t even aware that he was doing it, thanks to the medications that he was still on.
He was so drowsy in the morning when he woke that there was no way in hell he was aware of what he’d been doing in his sleep.
Justice Rector was not a morning person.
And it usually took him ’til his first sip of coffee before I was even willing to talk to him.
He was mean.
Not just a little bit mean, either. A lot mean.
So I’d learned to wait until he had his first taste of caffeine before I asked him anything or said a word, really.
“He doesn’t look like a cuddler.” Tanika grinned wickedly. “In fact, he looks like an assassin. I told Yao that once, and he didn’t call me weird, so I’m assuming that Yao at least thinks he’s dangerous.”
I didn’t dispute her on that.
Justice didn’t look like a cuddler.
I wouldn’t say that he looked like an assassin, but he definitely didn’t come off as approachable.
“And their uniforms!” she cried.
Now that I could get down with.
I had no other recourse but to talk about the uniforms.
“He calls himself an extra off of Chips,” I wheezed. “Personally, I don’t care what he calls himself, as long as he keeps wearing it.”
She made a curving motion with her hands.
“His ass in those pants.” She growled. “Roooooar.”
The motorcycle patrol team wore tight uniforms. And when I say tight, I mean tight.
The pants were skin-tight and tucked into tall, shiny leather boots that any hooker I knew would kill for—and I knew quite a few hookers since I worked on Eleventh Street. His uniform shirt, which was a beautiful dark blue, was also tight. And always nicely tucked into his uniform pants. The entire outfit—I mean uniform—was topped off with a black leather utility belt.
Oh, and did I forget to mention that his pants had a thin strip of white that ran down the outer seam that reflected? I found that out as I was going to the bathroom one morning and nearly scared ten years off my life when I saw their refection from where they were hanging on the back of the bathroom door.
Make Me Page 8
