by Quinn, Cari
“I’m sorry it took me forever to say them. It didn’t take me that long to feel them.” He was staring at me so intently that I started to squirm. “What?”
“Hang on a sec.” He released me to go over to the coat closet and pull out his hoodie.
He’d refused to take back his leather jacket, which was a big reason why I’d bought him a new one. The other being that he’d look amazing in the one I’d got.
Because I was still picturing Tray in black leather—and only black leather—when he turned back with a little black velvet box in his hand, it took me a second to realize what I was seeing. I didn’t take a step back, but I definitely swayed. “Um…”
He grinned at my expression and held out the box. “Just open it.”
“That’s twice today you’ve reduced me to grunts.” Steeling myself, I popped the lid and blinked at the tiny gold boxing glove earrings nestled within. “Earrings?”
He pried them out of the box and managed to get them in my ears himself after a couple of fumbling tries. “I’ve been carrying them around since the night of Carly’s party, waiting for the right moment to give them to you.”
“Slater picked them out?” I asked slyly, thinking of the man who had become a friend to me too over the last couple of months. He was hanging out with us more and more, and Tray had a feeling he didn’t want to spend time at home for some reason. But he didn’t push.
Unlike me. I’d get it out of Slater one of these days, preferably when Tray wasn’t around to tell me to stop prying.
“Do you like them?” Tray asked.
“I love them. They’re perfect.”
Tray’s lips curved. “Then fuck no, he didn’t pick them out.”
“Perfect,” I repeated, tracing the tiny gloves. “Even if I don’t fight anymore.”
“Yes, you do. You’re fighting every minute.” He fingered my earlobes, his gaze never leaving mine. “I’m fighting with you too. Always.”
“If you make me cry on your birthday, I’m going to have to kick your ass.” I sniffled.
He flashed a smug grin. “Promise?”
“Oh, I promise.” I nipped the inside of his wrist. We enjoyed fighting as foreplay. If we were weird, at least we kept each other off the streets. “I still owe you for last night.”
“That you do.” He tucked my hair behind my ears to admire my earrings. “They look good on you.”
I snuggled against his chest, amazed as always at how natural it felt now to do so. “They’re beautiful. You have great taste.”
“A ring would look better.”
I didn’t move. Did. Not. Move.
He twirled my hair, still seeming perfectly at ease. “But I know you’re not down with that yet.”
“And you are?” Do not hyperventilate.
“I’m a go-with-the-flow kind of guy. And we have all the time in the world.”
As if he hadn’t just sort of asked me to marry him—had he? I wasn’t sure—he turned to pick up a piece of his penis cake and took a healthy bite. Vanilla pudding oozed out of the corner of his mouth, and he licked it up, grinning.
I barely held back a girly sigh. God, he’d made me stupid for him. And he so knew it.
He motioned to my slice of cake. “Hurry up and eat that. Studying can wait. We need to go home right away.”
I did as he asked. It wasn’t hard. Erm, the cake wasn’t hard, of course, but it wasn’t hard to eat it fast. My sister was one hell of a good cook, even when it came to pudding-filled phalluses.
The instant I was done, he dumped the paper plates in the garbage, covered the rest of the cake, and split up his gift boxes to carry out to the car.
“So why are we in such a hurry, may I ask?”
“Hello, did you see that fucking hot teddy? And someone promised me birthday spankings, though I’m pretty sure we never clarified who got to spank who.”
He grinned over his shoulder as he locked the office. Then he took my hand and we headed up the hall, ignoring the usual catcalls from the guys and Vanity and her crew, some of whom had migrated from the newly MMA-free Mark’s Gym—much to Kizzy’s unrelenting, loud disgust—to The Cage. They loved making fun of us, but we didn’t care. Right then, I especially didn’t give a shit, since I could see my sister through the glass front door.
Unsurprisingly, she wasn’t alone.
Giovanni leaned against the stone wall beside her, his arm above her head. Sunglasses on, cocky smirk in place as she held out her cake-laden fork for him to taste.
“Dammit, he’s eating your penis.”
“Yep. That did it.” Tray glanced down at his track pants. “Teddy boner, officially gone.”
My grin lasted until my sister inched closer to Costas and tilted her head in full-on flirt mode. She was laughing and tossing her hair, and he was sucking on her fork like it had turned into a pronged lollipop.
“If we keep telling her to stay away, we’ll push her right into his arms. You know that.”
Tray was right. As usual. Trying to keep them apart was a losing proposition. Unless I chained her up, I couldn’t ensure she didn’t see him. Maybe I had no right to ensure it.
Loving someone meant letting her make her own choices. No matter how dumb. If she insisted on offering her sweets to dangerous men, I couldn’t stop her. But I could still bitch.
“I hate teenagers,” I muttered. “Full of hormones and stupidity.”
“So does that mean kids are out of the equation?” Understanding I had no desire to walk past my sister and Giovanni, Tray guided me toward the side exit. With his hand on my ass.
The guy gave good distraction, I had to admit.
Instead of freaking out at his question, I decided to take a page out of his book and flow. Lots of flow. “Put a ring on it in a few years, then maybe we’ll talk.”
He leaned forward to hold open the door then followed me out. “I’ll remember that.”
I reached for his hand as we emerged into the sunshine. “I’m counting on it.”
Turn the page for more Mia and Tray, Carly and Gio, as well as the next novella in the Tapped Out series, Takedown.
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When I discover the woman I love is living with my brother, suddenly the code of honor I’ve lived by as a SEAL goes out the window.
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Falling in love with Fox has been the hardest battle I’ve ever fought. But someone is determined to bring my past back into our present—and this time, the fight may be to the death.
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Takedown
CHAPTER ONE
Liam
I’d been shot at. Nearly drowned. Dealt with a serious injury. And none of those things unnerved me as much as trying to mend fences with my little brother.
I stopped outside the door to Slater’s apartment and lifted my hand to knock. Just before my knuckles made contact, I hesitated. A nice elderly woman had buzzed me into the building, but she wouldn’t be any help here.
Did I really want to go down this road again? I’d tried before to erase the distance between Slater and me. Tried and missed the mark. I didn’t think I could stomach another failed mission.
Then again, I didn’t have much choice. I’d flown out to the city for the express purpose of reconnecting with Sla
ter and our little sister, Jenna. I wasn’t about to turn tail and go back—
Where? I’d been stationed in Virginia Beach. After I’d gotten out of the hospital, I’d sold most of my belongings and put the stuff I couldn’t part with in storage. I was down to the duffel bag over my shoulder. If Slater didn’t want to talk to me—and if Jenna followed suit, as she usually did when it came to taking sides between us—I’d be bunking in a hotel tonight and for the foreseeable future, at least until I found a job.
I wanted something mindless while I figured out what my life was going to look like now. Something I could punch in for and check out from at the end of the day without worrying I’d be taking the job home with me.
Or that the job might take me out.
Shit, I didn’t want to live in fucking New York. Anywhere else would be better than a place that was cold and dark half the year. I’d been in enough dark places already.
Annoyed with myself, I rapped on the wood. Hard. Fast. Like ripping a bandage off a wound. The quicker I set this in motion, the quicker I could retreat and regroup.
If Slater could hear my thoughts right now, he’d shake his head.
Jesus, Lime, why you gotta come up with a strategy for everything? People aren’t battleships. No one’s going to tie your hands and feet and throw you in the ocean to make sure you can swim.
Except it felt exactly like that. This was my chance to prove who I was to my family. The only family I had left—other than my grandmother, whom I barely knew—after my parents had died in a wreck years ago. It had been the three of us until I became a SEAL, and then I found a whole new set of brothers.
And lost my own flesh and blood.
When the first knock yielded no results, I rapped again. No response. Maybe Slater wasn’t even home.
The door swung inward, and, at first, all I saw was a pale, slim arm shielding a face. Female, naturally. A tuft of reddish-gold hair haloed her head, and the ragged hems of a pair of torn jeans revealed bare feet with candy-pink toes. My dick stirred. Damn, had it really been that long since I’d had a woman?
Yeah, way too long.
“Can you come back later? I’m not really up to seeing visitors.” Still yawning, she dropped her arm and blinked heavily lined, sleepy blue eyes.
Holy fuck. No. This could not be happening.
“Abby?” I whispered. Of all the places I might’ve run into Abby Sinclair again, my brother’s apartment should not have been one of them.
Sure I was having an out-of-body experience, I stepped back and looked up and down the hall. Right floor. Right building. This was supposed to be Slater’s apartment. He lived in a not-so-great section of Brooklyn, but this was New York, and the place probably cost primo bucks, anyway.
When my gaze landed on her again, I noticed two things at approximately the same time—she was frowning as if she didn’t recognize me, and she was naked from the waist up.
Okay, not naked. She had what appeared to be a bandanna wrapped around her breasts. The tie-dyed fabric barely held them in, so the ample flesh popped over the top, highlighting the musical-note tattoos that decorated her cleavage. Hell, she had the full C Major scale printed between her collarbone and her tits.
“Liam?” she whispered back after a moment. “Am I dreaming?”
“No. It’s me.” I regretted the hardness of my voice, but there was no alleviating it. After the way we’d parted, finding her again was both the best thing that had ever happened and the frigging worst. Even worse than my injury. “What are you doing here, Abs?”
For an instant, something that seemed like pleasure and…relief filtered into her expression. An answering pang in my chest made me want to pull her into my arms, bury my face in her hair, and just thank God I’d made it back to her, somehow.
But that wasn’t how things were. She was no longer mine, and I had no right to hold her until our heartbeats synchronized to the same rhythm, the way they always had in the past.
I’d broken up with her, for her own good. It damn well hadn’t been for mine. I’d spent the months after our split losing myself in training and the special ops missions that took one hundred percent of my focus. How many nights had I spent in my cramped bunk, my body still wet from the quick shower that never managed to get all the sand off my skin, lost in memories? Only unconsciousness gave me any respite.
Now I was looking at her again, and her face was already closing off and closing down on me, that momentary light in her blue eyes turning to ash.
“Don’t call me that name.” Abruptly, she turned away and shuffled into the half-empty apartment, reaching up to undo the clip in her hair. Waves of brown, blond, and red fluttered past her shoulders, cut in uneven layers that gave her a wild, uninhibited look. More tattoos decorated her back. A G-clef curved up her side, the bottom of the symbol disappearing below the waist of her low-rise jeans, which were so low I could see the top of her crack when she bent over to water the plants.
She was watering plants in my brother’s apartment instead of talking to me, who had been her boyfriend for a year and a half. What was wrong with this picture?
She turned back, and reality slammed into me every bit as swiftly as her beauty. It had been two years and some change since we’d seen each other. I wasn’t the man she remembered, and from the looks of things, she sure wasn’t the same woman.
“So, what am I supposed to call you then?” I dropped my duffel bag and pushed my hands into the pockets of my cargos, well aware I’d walked inside and left the front door wide open behind me.
I was afraid if I turned my back on her she’d vanish. I’d seen plenty of mirages in the desert in my time, and none of them had been as welcome as the sight of her curvy body and snapping blue eyes.
She was life, when I’d been mired in death for so fucking long.
“Don’t call me anything.” She set aside her watering can and braced a hand at the base of her spine. Her pose indicated exhaustion, but I couldn’t help focusing on her vanilla perfume and the faint smell of grapes. Wine, maybe. Was she drunk? The old Abby scarcely touched the stuff.
“Just pretend you didn’t see me here,” she added.
“Yeah, and how am I supposed to do that?”
“Easy. Walk right back out the door.” Her razor-sharp smile cut me deep. “That’s your specialty, isn’t it?”
“Is that why you decided to hang around with my brother?” The question erupted from my lips before I could hold it back. I’d tried so hard to play it cool. I didn’t want to come in and start shit. We’d been apart for years, and logically, I knew she wasn’t mine anymore.
But in my head and heart, she was. Abby being at Slater’s this early in the morning—and wandering around as if she belonged—dug shrapnel deeper under my skin than the fragments already buried there.
“Whether or not I’m hanging around with Slater isn’t your concern. You let me go.” She lifted a shoulder. “He invited me to stay.”
“Oh, I just bet he did.” I stared at her, trying like hell to fight the pull on the past. I didn’t want to be there in the first place, and that was when I’d thought I would have to contend with only Slater.
This made that prior concern seem almost minor.
Slater wasn’t around, and she was—and God, her badass fragility nearly knocked me out. She’d always had that fragile air, bringing out my already dominant need to protect. But the badass was all new.
“You have no right to cop an attitude with me. You made your bed.”
I had no argument for that. Nothing coherent anyhow. I was rapidly descending to the point where I wanted to put my fist through a wall, and that wouldn’t do either of us or this fucked-up situation any good.
To give myself a moment, I glanced around Slater’s apartment. The hardwood floors were in rough shape, scuffed from probably hundreds of feet. Wide windows let in tons of light, showing the cobwebs and dust motes in the corners that weren’t filled with surfboards and assorted other crap. A long, sunken
couch and a pair of equally rundown club chairs faced a huge flat-screen TV. Beneath it, I saw a stack of MMA DVDs.
What the hell?
It wasn’t the fact that he still had some DVDs that surprised me, but the content of them. My little brother never adopted new tech easily.
I crossed the room to make sure my sketchy vision hadn’t let me down once again. One of my eyes was still decent, but the other created a distortion that had left me uncertain enough to willingly give up my driver’s license.
Like so much frigging else.
But, nope, I wasn’t wrong. As I sorted through the stack, the tension in my shoulders grew. Slater had always been a damn hippie, preferring his surfing and his lazy days on the beach with Barnabas, his golden Lab, to anything resembling actual work. He’d been happy to take a low-paying job at the Surf Shack in Coronado where we’d grown up, spending his money on beer and peanuts and new boards.
Until our parents had died coming back from a romantic weekend at our family’s beach house in Malibu, leaving the three of us as orphans. Then Slater had become the dad of the family, bossing Jenna around right and left. I’d already been in SEAL training at the naval base, and I couldn’t just walk away to take care of my family—despite what Slater believed.
Besides, the money I’d earned had helped out big time. Our parents had been comfortable financially due to my dad’s real estate company, but there had been debts to pay, and it had taken a good amount of cash just to maintain our lifestyle. I’d worked my ass off to make sure my siblings could stay in our family home. Then, without a word, Slater had picked up stakes and moved him and Jenna back East, supposedly to bond with a grandmother we’d barely known.
Now he was stockpiling MMA tapes. What the hell would my longhaired, soft-skinned younger brother know or care about such a brutal sport?
“What are these?” I grabbed a handful of fight discs and waved them as I turned. Some of the discs weren’t of televised UFC bouts and had handwritten labels with dates and times of matches. Though I had buddies who were into the fights, I didn’t recognize these names. Fox Knox. Giovanni Costas. And a chick no less, Mia Anderson. An address label for The Cage, a gym located in Brooklyn, had been slapped on one of the cases. “Who are these fighters?”
