I drove home with a lot on my mind.
First and foremost, my sister and why I didn’t disown her like my father and Meredith. She wasn’t even my full sister. She was my half sister. I’d never found her in my living room giving an unconscious man a blowjob but she’d done worse to me, way worse, so, seriously, I should just give it up and let it go.
In a cruel twist of fate, my father married my mother, who was a wild child then he got married to an angel and they’d created a hell child.
Mom had left when I was three but she came back occasionally and when she did we had fun. I didn’t remember much but I remembered she was a blast. She wasn’t about rules or discipline; she was about sticky food that made a lot of mess, fun places and good times.
That was until one visit, while she had me for the weekend, she met a guy she liked and she liked him a lot. She took him back to her hotel, gave me a bunch of candy and sent me outside to sit and wait for her to call me back in.
The manager of the motel saw me sitting out on a bench, swinging my legs, eating candy, daydreaming and doing it for ages, so he called the police. By the time they came I’d wandered off because I was bored and the police found me. I told the policeman my phone number that Dad made me memorize and they called. Then Dad came to get me, he had a rip roarin’ with Mom at the hotel while her one-day-stand kept shouting at them to keep it down, he was trying to sleep and I never saw Mom again. Ever.
I missed her for awhile but I didn’t know her very well and anyway, at that time Meredith was already in our lives.
Meredith was awesome. She was the coolest stepmom ever. She was sweet and funny and she loved my Dad, like, loads. She also kept homemade cookies in the cookie jar all the time and for a kid, a girl who was being raised by a man who was all man, that meant she was practically perfect
She and Dad got married and I was the flower girl but not like normal flower girls. She walked down the aisle with one hand through the crook of her father’s arm, one hand clutching mine. She made her special day our special day. She was making a public statement that she was walking down the aisle not only to take a man in marriage but to build a family. I was six and I never forgot how special she made me feel, never, not to this day.
But that was Meredith. It wasn’t the first time she’d done it and it wouldn’t be the last.
Then she and Dad had Ginger who was my Mom times, about, five million.
This was the cruel twist of fate. For Dad, Meredith and me.
The second thing I was thinking about was all things Tack. What he said, the way he looked and how he made me feel.
I was already regularly sleeping with a man whose name I didn’t know. A man I met at a restaurant just under a year and a half ago, took him to my home, slept with him, had the best sex in the history of womanhood and, fortunately or unfortunately depending on when I looked at it, he kept coming back for more, proving again and again that first time wasn’t a fluke but, instead, a sneak preview of better things to come.
I didn’t even give him a key. How he got in was as much a mystery as his name. But he did. He didn’t come every night, sometimes it was once a week, sometimes twice, sometimes he’d skip a week, once he’d been gone for three which freaked me out and then it freaked me out that it freaked me out.
But he always came back. Always.
With Mystery Man in my life I didn’t need the trouble that Tack had written on him. Okay, so he thought I was cute and another bonus was that I knew his name and he knew mine (which, Mystery Man, by the way, did not know). But my sister owed him over two million dollars and he was scary.
He also said I could get onto “others” radar and get into “situations”. I didn’t want to be on anyone’s radar and I made enough situations for myself, being half my mother’s daughter. I didn’t need Ginger dragging me into her situations.
And lastly, I was thinking about my Mystery Man. The days after he visited I always did. I always wondered what was with me, I didn’t tell him to go. Now I was wondering, when I had what could possibly be the world’s greatest lover visiting me in the dead of night, how I’d move onto someone else. I’d had three dates and no lovers since I met The Great MM. None of them came close to what little I had with MM and therefore none of them got to the second date or second base (yes, the Great MM was that good of a kisser).
He was totally screwing up my life.
No. No, that wasn’t true. I was screwing up my life.
This was what I was thinking after I parked my car in my drive, walked up to my house studying my boots, slid the key into the lock and opened my door.
However, even if I’d been paying attention, I wouldn’t have been prepared for what happened next.
Once I cleared it, the door slammed, hard and loud. Then a hand in my chest slammed me into the door, again hard and loud. Then a man was in my space, his body deep in mine, pressing me into the door and I looked up into a pair of somewhat familiar black eyes.
I’d only seen those eyes once in light. He didn’t turn on the lights when he visited me at night.
God, I forgot how beautiful he was. Even in my daydreams he wasn’t that beautiful.
“What are you doing here?” I whispered.
“Are you fuckin’ insane?” he barked in my face.
I blinked at his surprising tone and angry question. Then I asked, “What?”
“Struttin’ into Ride like you did. Jesus, are you insane?”
I blinked again. Firstly, because I was confused. How did he know I went to Ride? Secondly, I was more confused. What was he doing there during the day? Thirdly, I was even more confused because his unbelievably handsome face showed clearly he was extremely pissed off.
“Um…”
“Answer me, babe,” he demanded.
Yikes. He was scarier than Tack, Dog and the entire biker gang all rolled into one.
“Gwen, I said answer me.” His deep voice was beginning to rumble.
But I blinked again.
“You know my name?”
He stared down at me.
Then he stepped back and ran his hand over his short-cropped black hair at the same time he shook his head but not even for a second did he unpin me from his ferocious scowl.
“Jesus, babe, you’re a piece of work.”
“What?” I whispered.
He planted his hands on his hips and leaned back into my face. “Yeah, Gwen, I know your name. Gwendolyn Piper Kidd. Thirty-three years old. Self-employed, freelance editor. You pay your taxes on time, your mortgage on time and your bills on time. Married once for two years to a man who couldn’t keep his dick in his pants and who has since married three other women and is currently engaged in his fourth divorce. Your father is Baxter Kidd, ex-Army, current construction foreman, married to Meredith Kidd, executive secretary to a hotshot divorce attorney who, incidentally, pulled your shit outta that mess you got into with that asshole. You hang with Camille Antoine who works dispatch for Denver PD and Tracy Richmond who works everywhere, mostly retail. You string along Troy Loughlin, who’d kill to get in your pants but you have no clue and he has no balls. Your sister is the definition of loser. You spend too much on clothes. When you go out, you show too much skin. And the only man you’ve fucked for a year and a half is me.”
For the second time that day, my jaw was slack.
Then I closed my mouth only for it to fall open again.
Then I closed it only to open it to speak. “How do you know so much about me?”
“Sweet Pea, I know who I fuck,” he shot back and I felt my body move like he’d struck me and that’s exactly what his words felt like, a blow. He didn’t see it, or more accurately, he disregarded it and went on. “Now tell me, what the fuck were you thinkin’ walkin’ into Ride like that?”
“I needed to talk to Dog,” I explained because I couldn’t get out any of the other ten thousand and fifty things I wanted to say.
“You needed to talk to Dog,” he repeated.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Babe, you were coasting under radar, now you’re lit up like a fuckin’ beacon.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means you’re fucked,” he answered.
Belatedly, I was getting angry.
“Okay,” I moved an inch from the door, straightening my shoulders, “now what does that mean?”
“I think you get that your sister is a piece of trash,” he informed me.
It was safe to say Ginger was a piece of trash. It was also safe to say my Dad, Meredith or I could call her that. Even Tack and Dog, who she owed over two million dollars, could get away with calling her that.
The person who could not was the man standing in front of me, a man I knew intimately but this was the first time I’d seen his face by the light of day. And one I was discovering was a big, fat jerk!
“Do not call Ginger a piece of trash,” I warned.
His eyebrows flew up and it sucked because he was so goddamned handsome, all that brown skin, those black eyes, that strong jaw, that thick, short, black hair, his beautifully chiseled features and equally beautifully chiseled physique – all of it hinting at Hispanic or maybe Italian and all of it freaking, unbelievably amazing. But the worst for me, right then, was that he could be even more drop dead beautiful with his eyebrows raised in disbelief like he thought I was an idiot.
“You’re sayin’ you don’t know your sister’s trash?” he asked.
“No, I’m saying you can’t call her trash. I can call her trash but you can’t.”
He scowled at me some more and then muttered, “Fuck me.”
“I think we’re done here,” I announced and started to move to open the door but then suddenly found myself pinned against it again by his big, hard, sculpted, exceptionally warm body with both his hands at either side of my neck, thumbs at my jaw forcing me to look up at him.
“Oh no, Sweet Pea, we’re not done,” he whispered in a scary voice and I fought my mouth dropping open again because he was back to freaking me out more than half dozen members of a biker gang and I succeeded in this endeavor mainly because his thumbs were there.
“Step back,” I demanded and was pretty pleased my voice didn’t tremble.
He ignored me and didn’t move. Instead, he said, “Your sister has bought herself a load of shit, then she bought herself more, not done, she bought herself more. She’s pissed off some serious people. The best end to this scenario is she turns up dead. I know there’s no love lost between you two and I know it still sucks for you to hear that but that doesn’t make it any less true.”
“Step back,” I repeated.
He continued to ignore me. “The best thing you could have done when Darla showed on your doorstep was close the door, close your mind to that shit and go back to work. You didn’t. You strutted your ass into Ride, got Tack’s attention and, trust me, babe, you do not want Tack’s attention. And doin’ that, you made yourself visible to a lot of people you do not want to know you exist. That’s done. Now, your sister’s problems do not exist for you. Your sister does not exist for you. Now, you keep your head down, be smart and keep yourself out of trouble. Which means you stick to what you know, who you know and where you know. You do not move out of regularly scheduled programming. You get me?”
“How do you know Darla was here?”
His brows shot together and the way they did made him now look scary and scarily impatient.
“Clue in, Sweet Pea, I keep tabs.”
“You keep tabs?”
“You’re mine so I keep tabs.”
I felt my own eyebrows shoot together. “I’m yours?”
“Babe, I’m fuckin’ you aren’t I?”
This was without question. I didn’t see his face but that didn’t mean he didn’t talk. He was seriously bossy in bed and I’d know that deep voice anywhere.
“Okay,” I started, “perhaps at this juncture we should discuss our relationship.”
“Clue in again, Gwen, the reason our relationship is the way it is, is so I don’t ever have to waste my fuckin’ time doin’ stupid-ass shit like discussing it.”
Oh boy. Now I was getting really angry.
“I think you should step back and then I think you should go,” I told him.
“And I think you should confirm you get me then I’ll go.”
“Fine, I get you, now… go,” I snapped back.
He didn’t move and his black eyes didn’t unlock from mine.
Therefore, I called, “Hello? I get you. Now go.”
Suddenly, his eyes warmed and his thumbs moved from under my jaws to slide over the edges of them.
Then he noted softly, “You’re pissed.”
Was he for real?
“Uh… yeah,” I verified.
“Don’t be pissed,” he ordered.
No, seriously, he couldn’t be for real.
“You can’t tell me not to be pissed.”
“Babe, you think I don’t have better things to do than be here?” he asked.
Oh my God.
Did people’s heads actually explode? Because at that moment I was pretty certain mine was about to.
“Then maybe you should be on your way,” I invited, my voice sharp.
“The point is, I’m here.”
“Well, I hate to break this to you, but you’ve made other visits I’ve enjoyed a whole lot more.”
That was when he grinned and when he did, that was when my heart stopped beating.
Never, not once, not even that first night, did I see him smile and if he was beautiful normally, his face smiling knocked my freaking socks off.
Lordy be, the man had two dimples.
Two.
“Do you not get why I’m pissed?” he asked gently through his smile.
“No, I don’t and there’s never a good excuse for being a jerk so, again, please, if you’re so busy, allow me to stop wasting your time and just go.”
“You fucked up today, Gwen,” he told me.
“I think you’ve made that clear, baby,” I shot back.
For some reason the warmth in his eyes deepened at the same time he whispered his warning. “Don’t call me baby when you’re pissed, Sweet Pea.”
“Don’t call me Sweet Pea at all, baby,” I retorted.
“You call me baby when I’m fucking you,” he stated and I didn’t know if this was a demand or a recall but it was probably both.
“Well, don’t hold your breath for that to happen again.”
The warmth in his eyes got deeper, hotter and his thumbs stroked my jaws again. I tried to pull my face away but his hands tightened and I stopped.
“You shouldn’t make a threat you can’t carry out,” he advised, still talking gently.
“How many times do I have to tell you to go?” I asked.
He ignored me and declared, “I end things.”
Seriously, he was not for real.
“It’s good to experience change in life, refreshing, keeps your senses sharp,” I informed him.
“Don’t push that shit, Gwendolyn,” he warned. “You won’t like the consequences.”
“What’s your name?” I asked on a dare.
He called my dare and raised me. “You call me baby.”
“What’s your name?” I repeated.
“Sometimes honey,” he continued.
“What… is… your name?” I demanded.
“But I prefer baby.”
I rolled my eyes to the ceiling and snapped, “God!” at the same time I stomped my foot, realized my hands were at his waist and I pushed back.
He didn’t budge.
My eyes rolled back to him and I instantly noted my mistake when I found one of his hands had disappeared and his mouth was at my neck, his lips at the skin behind my ear and then I felt his tongue there.
Without my permission, my body did a top to toe tremble.
His face came out of my neck, it got in mine, his hand returned to my jaw and he whispered, “Yeah.”
Then he pulled me away from the door and like a freak of nature, one second he was there, the next he was gone.
I stared at the closed door then moved to the window and checked and I was right. He was gone.
Then I turned my back to the door and stared into my messy living room.
And I was thinking I was pretty sure he felt the tremble.
