Текст книги "Still a Bad Boy"
Автор книги: Ada Scott
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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 12 страниц)
Chapter 19
Kendall
This was the best time of my life. Nothing else was even worth comparing.
Every time Jace had a spare moment during the working day, I was at his office. As far as Mr. Kinsley or anybody else knew, I was there to get more information for my article, but in reality I was getting fucked in every way imaginable.
Bent over his desk, on the floor, against the wall, on the couch. I was even hiding under his desk sucking his dick when somebody came in and talked to him for a few minutes. Jace ended up cumming in my mouth while he was on a phone call.
He held his hand over the mouthpiece, I assume, and told me to swallow every drop like a good little girl. You bet I did.
I licked my lips just thinking about it. This was what life was supposed to be like. This was the fantasy that the movies, the commercials, the schools, the everything, sold to you.
The contrast from that colorless existence was like night and day. Every time I saw Jace, I saw his expression shift. He went from cold and calculating, to warm and hungry… for me.
It was a crazy feeling. It wasn’t just that he had my back and would stand up for me if I needed it, it was like my happiness mattered to him. My presence made him happier. For the first time in my life I felt like, no matter what the rest of the world might think of me, I mattered to somebody.
It certainly didn’t hurt that that somebody was sexy enough to make my panties break the sound barrier as they dropped. Literally temporarily losing the power of vision because of the intensity of the orgasms? That didn’t hurt either. It always came back.
I laughed at that thought, and then held my hand over my mouth, looking around the office to see if anybody had overheard and thought I was being a weirdo. Nobody seemed to be paying any attention, so I shook my head to clear it and went back to trying to outline my article on Jace Barlow, the man behind the millions.
With all the time I’d spent with Jace, I had so much material that had never even been hinted at in anything written about him before. Easily the most fascinating stuff was his early life. Even with his memories faded and incomplete due to the passage of time, it was an extraordinary start for an extraordinary man.
Before that car crash it was all so normal. Mom, Dad and little Jace could have been any family in the country, but then everything changed.
He was in the car when it crashed. He remembered his dad was driving, his mom was in the front passenger seat and he was in the back. He remembered the way they looked back at him and that his mom had a big swollen belly.
He can’t remember for sure, but he had this vague idea that he was going to have a baby brother or sister that day. Instead… pain, loud noises, blackness and more loud noises. Then the group home, and instead of growing to four, his family shrunk to one.
When I asked him about the group home, it was always a bit of a stumbling block. He’d start sentences, only to cut himself off and go off on a random tangent. Inevitably, he’d end up with a far-away look in his eyes and his fists bunched up as if ready to beat the hell out of something.
There was so much anger in him, it flared up sometimes like when that couple made that big scene at Luc Monette’s. Jace could be downright terrifying, there was no denying it. Nobody who seemed to have known him for any length of time dared to push his buttons.
I knew that was the kind of thing Mr. Kinsley would have wanted me to dig deeper on, but when Jace was with me and I saw that other side of him, I couldn’t bring myself to aim for an article that made him out to be the bad guy. That side of him was like me, although it had known pain more intimately than I had. To write that article would be like hurting myself.
That’s why I wanted to concentrate on what made him the man he was. That was the story I wanted to tell. That was what Mr. Kinsley had asked about in the first place anyway. Where does he come from?
I already had a feeling that this article I was writing would give the paper, and me, national attention. Mr. Kinsley seemed to have that feeling too, which was why I thought he was tolerating how little information I extracted out of each meeting with Jace.
It was also why, at long last, Mr. Kinsley had agreed to pay me something. It wasn’t a salary per se, but a couple thousand dollars for ‘expenses’ went a long way. At least now I wouldn’t have to sell the earrings Jace had bought me just to make rent.
My case for payment was strengthened by the fact that I thought I had just about everything I needed to write out the first full draft of my article. The last time I met with Jace, I asked if we could visit the group home where he grew up, and he had reluctantly agreed. Mr. Kinsley thought that was a great idea, that it would give me the chance to add a lot of tone to the piece.
Looking at the clock on my computer screen, I saw that Jace would be waiting for me downstairs in a car in exactly fifteen minutes. Unlike everybody else in the world, he was always on time, so there was no point in even texting to confirm.
I needed to get as much of this outlining done in the next few minutes as I could. After today, I’d have the last piece of my puzzle, and I’d be able to build the whole thing a lot quicker if I knew my structure. Somebody cleared their throat behind me.
I turned to see Lucile standing there with a wad of papers in her hand. “Hey, I need you to photocopy these and get Dan in research to sign both copies, then bring them to my desk. I need them in twenty minutes,” she said, dropping the documents on my desk without waiting for an answer.
My heart sank. Ever since I’d started here, Lucile had taken it upon herself to delegate to me various things she couldn’t be bothered doing, things that weren’t part of my job description as far as I understood it. I was the bottom of the food chain, sure, but I wasn’t supposed to be her PA.
She’d been even worse than usual since the shootout at that biker bar that was being attributed to the Picolli Crime Family, because it contradicted more or less everything her article about the police had said. Everything is looking good in the city, and the Picollis are long gone… except for that bloodbath they orchestrated. She’d been through the wringer on that one.
“Wait,” I called out and she stopped and turned to look at me. “I can’t do this right now, I’ve got-”
“Are you kidding me? You’re here to follow instructions. Get on it, you fucking wannabe.”
That old familiar fear gripped me when Lucile raised her voice, like freezing fingers around my lungs. People were starting to look up from their desks, and I wanted to hide under mine. Who was I to say no to a senior reporter? When did a confrontation between myself and a beautiful woman like her ever end up with me on top?
Then I thought about Jace and what he thought about me. I remembered what he’d said to Lucile and stood as tall as I could. I still would have got a face full of her breasts if she walked into me, but that didn’t matter.
“If you want to go tell Mr. Kinsley why photocopies of your fuck up are more important than the exclusive article on Jace Barlow, then be my guest. Otherwise, I believe a wise man once said, get the fuck out of my face.”
I pointed back in the direction of her desk and glared at her. Lucile changed color between bright red and pale at least as fast as a chameleon for a few seconds, but then stormed off.
As soon as her back was turned, I collapsed into my chair and took deep breaths while I waited for my heart to stop threatening me with a cardiac arrest. My hands were still shaking by the time I was able to start messing around with my outline again, but deep down there was this river of exhilaration running through me. Maybe that would be the last time Lucile ever spoke down to me, who knew?
Chapter 20
Jace
Kendall had been taken aback to come out of the building where The Weekly Enquirer offices were located to see three identical cars parked there. Her face lit up the way it always did, when she bent down to look inside the open door of the middle one and saw me.
“Is this like a giant ‘find the ball under the cup’ game?” she asked, before climbing in and kissing me.
“No. You know how the President gets like fifty death threats every day and the Secret Service goes “yeah, yeah, whatever”? But then they get one they take seriously, so they put the president in the nearest tank?”
“You had a death threat?” She looked incredulous.
“Lots. Not as much as the President. We had one we had to take seriously though, so I had Lorenzo beef up security until we… uh… the police bring the guy in for questioning. Don’t worry, we’re safe.”
“OK,” she said.
Simple as that. She trusted me so much that I felt something I hadn’t felt before. Guilt about lying. My whole life had been full of lies, I’d have lost my life a long time ago if it hadn’t been.
I’d lose Kendall too if I told her everything. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach as I mulled that over. Kendall seemed like she was on top of the world today, even chattering away happily about how she could work this into her article, but my mood had no reason to improve by the time we arrived at Wellfort Group Home.
Why in the ever-loving fuck I agreed to come back to this place I’d never know. It had only been abandoned for about seven years by this stage, but it already looked like a relic from a past civilization.
The lead car, with three of my security detail in it, headed around the other side to monitor the other entrance. The men from the following car stayed within sight, but mostly looked outwards. They were all carrying guns, of course, as were the men in the decoy convoys that would leave from the underground parking lots of wherever I stopped for more than fifteen minutes. Lorenzo and I had reinstated the procedures from the early days after I seized the Picollis’ assets and heads.
Kendall and I walked across the cracked concrete and stood almost in the shadow of the stained brick building that didn’t have a single window intact. I should have had the place demolished and built a giant public toilet facility here.
Kendall took out her notebook and pen. I was giving her the information she needed for an article, but I’d still be damned if I wanted my actual voice recorded on a Dictaphone talking about anything at all.
“So it’s been eleven years since you lived here. How do you feel being back?” she asked.
I looked around the area the staff had called the basketball court, but what we’d called the-place-where-you-get-the-shit-kicked-out-of-you. The ghost voices of chanting kids echoed in my mind.
Fight! Fight! Fight!
“Pissed off.”
“Why?”
“This place. This fuckin’ place. Kids shouldn’t be here. It wasn’t a home. It was a cage for animals. You put kids in, you get animals out.”
“What do you mean? It didn’t turn you into an animal.” she asked.
“It did. You see that ladder over there?”
I pointed at the rusty iron rungs that were bolted to the side of the building. A fire escape at one point, that ladder was already a relic in my day because there wasn’t a single fucking window anywhere near it that didn’t have permanent bars on it. Kendall nodded.
“See how one of the bottom rungs is missing? I ripped that off and changed the way this kid’s face looked with it. He never came back to Wellfort.”
Kendall stopped scribbling and looked up, horrified and confused. “Why?”
“Because he was fucking huge. I was in fights every week, Lord of the Flies had nothing on this place. The guy started hearing rumors that some people thought I could beat him. Well, he was almost eighteen by that point. He’d ruled the roost for so long, used to kick my ass all the time when I was younger, and he didn’t like people talking like that. People start talking like that, you have to watch your back a whole lot more.”
“What did the staff do to stop all the fighting?”
“Stop it? You kidding me? They took bets, this was their fucking entertainment,” I spat.
“You can’t be serious!”
“Look at me. I’m serious. I got a scar here where a kid hit me with a brick. I had a scar here on my neck, it’s faded now, from rope burn when another motherfucker tried to strangle me.”
I shook my head in disgust, remembering the staff who used to hold back, waiting until somebody was about to get killed before they “noticed” the fight and “took appropriate action” as per state guidelines.
“Couldn’t you just… not fight? Stay out of their game?” she asked.
“No.”
“Everybody fought?”
“No. I tell you what though, the kids that didn’t fight had nothin’. If you’re here, you already don’t have much, but those poor fucks had nothing,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“This place taught me that at least. If you don’t fight, then somebody is going to come and take away whatever it is that you care about. Those kids didn’t have a shirt on their back most of the time. Yeah. It taught me that alright. Nobody is ever going to take what’s mine without a fight, without payback.”
“Is that why this place got shut down in the end?”
“I have no idea, never looked into it.”
Kendall wrote something in her notebook, and when she looked up at me again her eyes were glassy. She spoke with a choked voice.
“What was it like? You know, one day you’re at home with Mom and Dad, you’ve got your own room, your toy box in the corner, maybe a bunch of books your parents take turns reading to you at night, you’re safe. You were just a little boy and… the next day you’re here. Did you ever think about that? About them? W-wonder h-how this happened?” Kendall’s lip was quivering.
I looked across the-place-where-you-get-the-shit-kicked-out-of-you to the-place-where-kids-shove-sand-in-your-mouth. In my day, there had been a swing set there. Now there was just a rusty death-trap frame. That was where that guy sat me down and told me what really happened that day.
Hey kid, they’re feedin’ you bullshit here… That car accident wasn’t an accident, it was a mob hit… You don’t remember some guys blastin’ your folks after the crash? You musta knocked your head good… Well, fuck it, I just wanted you to know the truth… the Picolli family did this to ya…
Trench coat, hat and sunglasses like in a shitty spy movie, he dropped that bomb on me and left. I never saw him again, but that was the day my life regained purpose. I would turn myself into a weapon that could take down the Picolli family. Nothing else mattered.
“Not much,” I said.
Chapter 21
Jace
Going to Wellfort was more nerve-wracking than going to the Ex Machina headquarters with a twenty percent chance of them gunning me down on sight. I stood behind my bar and filled a shot glass with scotch, knocking it back and pouring myself another.
“You want one?” I asked.
Kendall, sitting at my table, was pulled from some inner thought. She looked up from the notebook in front of her and shook her head. She hadn’t written anything for several minutes.
“No, thank you,” she said.
“Suit yourself.”
I downed the second shot and then brought the bottle to the table, sitting down across from her. Like me, she’d been a lot quieter on the way back from Wellfort than on the way in.
Leaning back in my chair, I closed my eyes and felt the warmth of the scotch thawing the iceberg in my stomach. It was a bad idea to go there today, there was too much other shit going on.
Not just that shitstorm at the biker bar, either. Word was that some of my guys were turning up dead here and there. Not many, just higher than the average level for people in their demographic, the active criminal demographic.
Things were ramping up, and I had an entire fucking country to search so I could find where the Picollis’ new base of operations was. So far we had one lead. My contacts in the police said that one of my cadaver mugshots was almost certainly a known thug from Chicago.
That’s where I had to focus my… I got the feeling I was being watched. When I opened my eyes, the mystery was solved. Kendall was looking at me with such obvious pity that I felt a flare of anger.
I was Jace Motherfucking Barlow. I owned this city. Pity me? I felt my skin prickling as my blood rushed. Kendall stood and walked around the table until she was standing beside my chair. She hitched her skirt up a bit before she lifted a leg over and straddled my lap.
Good girl… that’s just what I need. Fuck my problems away…
I reached between her legs, cupping that sweet pussy of hers through her panties, and felt my middle finger nestled in along the length of her slit. My God, I wanted to touch her every second of every day.
“Wait…” she said.
Kendall held my wrists and pulled my hand away from her, placing both of my palms around her upper thighs just below the hem of her high-riding skirt. If any other girl had ever told me to wait, I’d have thrown her out of the room and had the next one sent in. I clenched my jaw and looked up at her.
Once she was reasonably confident that my hands weren’t going to wander when she let go, she reached up and cradled my head, with her palms along my jawline, her fingers near my ears and her thumbs gently stroking my cheeks. Her touch was so tender, so soft, that it was almost as if she was handling me like a Ming Vase, something precious and breakable.
I looked at her with the most incredulous expression I could muster, and she just looked straight back at me. Straight through me, almost, into my soul.
“Jace? Listen to me, because I… I don’t think anybody ever told you this. I am so sorry for what happened to you-”
“It doesn’t m-”
“No. Listen. I am sorry for what you went through, Jace. Look at me. You were just a little boy. You didn’t deserve to have your home and family ripped away. It wasn’t your fault. You shouldn’t have been thrown into that hellhole. Somebody should have been there to tell you that everything was going to be OK.”
Kendall’s face was streaming with tears by now, but she didn’t let go of my head to wipe them away. With a jolt of shock I realized that she was, in fact, using her thumbs to wipe tears off my face.
What in the fucking hell was this? I thought I knew what power was… but this girl had me mesmerized, enthralled. She was the powerful one, and she had more to say.
“I wish I could, I don’t know, travel back in time so I could tell you. I’d tell you that all this… all this shit, isn’t forever. I’d tell you that there’s nobody in the whole world like you and everything is going to be OK and I’ll be waiting for you.” Kendall pulled my head against her chest and I shut my eyes, shut out the world.
This penthouse was supposed to be my bomb shelter, my safe place, and my home. Being in Kendall’s arms felt more like those things than the expensive surroundings ever had.
How was that possible? I had billions of dollars that the IRS had no fucking clue about, more weapons than my two and a half armies could wield, and I could probably throw Kendall thirty feet one-handed. But I needed her as much as I needed oxygen.
After some unknown quantity of time, Kendall pulled my head away. I opened my eyes to see a wet spot on her shirt, where it stuck to her perfect body, before I looked up to her face again. She held my gaze for what seemed like forever before she spoke again.
“Jace… I love you.”
Panic and fear froze me like the first time somebody held a gun to my head when I was sixteen. My heart was probably hitting three hundred beats per minute and in my mind I reached for any weapon I could find. The usual one. Anger.
Put this bitch in her place, Jace. You tell her love doesn’t fucking exist and she better get used to the idea that she’s just a tight-pussied little cum dumpster and you can get a thousand more just like her before the end of the day.
I was just about to stand up, send Kendall tumbling to the ground and tell her exactly that when another part of my brain spoke up with a ‘hold on, what about this?’ and an image flashed through my mind of what Kendall would look like if I said that.
That spark in her eyes would be snuffed out. That glow. Gone. She wouldn’t look at me like a hero anymore.
Oh for fuck sake. Well say something, you stupid cunt.
“Kendall… I...”
Don’t just sit there like a fucking moron. Fuck it, tell her the truth if you have to.
My stampeding heart made my voice waver with every beat. “I love you too.”
I hadn’t said those words in over two decades. But if I was telling Kendall the truth… how could I tell her the whole truth?
