Текст книги "Under Locke"

Автор книги: Mariana Zapata

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“Obviously you need a babysitter if you’re walkin’ around shitty ass Austin alone this late, babe.”  He shook his head, yanking me not so gently around Blake’s white Nissan Frontier and toward my old Ford. “So fuckin' stupid,” he hissed under his breath.

Jerk. Total jerk.

"I'm not stupid and I'm not a friggin' idiot," I snapped, wiggling my arm again but he didn’t let go.

He also didn't say anything. The only noise that came out of his body was a sharp inhale that was impossible to miss.

"Can you please let go of my arm now?" Why the hell was I saying please? I tried jerking out of his grasp, feeling like an idiot for asking permission to get control back of my body. I should have just… demanded it, damn it.

"No."

His simple, curt answer grated on me.

“Not till you’re in the car,” Dex explained.

I pulled at his hold. “Let. Go. Of. My. Arm.” I lowered my voice into a whisper. “Or else.”

He didn’t need to know that the or else depended on me slapping his tiny nuts with the back of my hand.

Dex didn’t respond and he didn’t say anything either as he pulled us to a stop in front of my Focus. I was fishing through my purse the minute my arm was free.

“Thanks for walking me over,” I murmured to him, still indignant. Still pissed. Still keeping my eyes a million miles away from Dex The Dick’s face.

You need the job.

You need the job.

You need the job.

But that didn't mean I completely shut up. My dumb mouth kept going. "I'm not stupid enough to not pay attention to my surroundings, by the way."

Well, that could have been a lot worse.

Normally, I would have been shocked by how angry I felt all of a sudden. It was as if the two days of working with this asshole and the last ten years of my life had suddenly joined together in a tsunami of pissed-offness that threatened to drown everything in the world. Normal Iris would have and should have just continued to ignore Dex Locke. Pretend like his words hadn't bothered me but that Iris was a victim of the tsunami, apparently.

He didn’t say anything for a long minute, an ink covered hand pulled at the sleeve of his crew neck shirt. His tight gray crewneck shirt. Guh. It seemed so friggin' unfair. It should be a standard that attractive men be just as nice on the inside as they were on the outside. But they weren’t and it sucked big time.

“Ritz?” he asked in a softer tone than I’d ever imagined hearing from him. The dry, bored tone seemed to be a staple in his vocal cord usage.

I groaned. “My name’s—“

“Ritz.”

“No,” I told him—well, his neck.

“Look at me,” he said but it sounded more like an order.

I didn’t want to, and I knew he knew it too.

“Babe, look at me,” he repeated the command, still in that lax, casual voice.

Slowly, like a snail making a long trek, I rolled my eyes over to his face, taking in the flawless bone structure staring back at me from over demon flesh incarnate.

When my eyes landed on his bluest of blues, he frowned. That handsome, angled face shifted in uncomfortable displeasure. Should it have been a surprise that a look that resembled guilt seemed so foreign to him? No. “Chill out, yeah?”

I forced that same look he'd copyrighted onto my face. Flat, plain, and emotionless. “Sure.”

He blinked. “You’re lyin’.”

I tried to take a step back. “Goodnight.”

Dex's hand whipped forward to grab the hem of my shirt, stopping me. “Ritz.” His tone was insistent.

“That’s not my name.”

He chose to ignore that. “Will you look at me?” he growled, exasperation dripping from his words. That soft voice disappearing in an instant.

I looked at him but felt a million miles away.

Dex cut the distance between us, towering over me. His brilliant eyes searched over my face, resting on my mouth for a brief moment before looping back up to my eyes. "Son already bitched me out."

I tugged on my arm. "Goodnight."

“Babe," he said, tugging on my button-down. "I got a bad temper and that was a crap day for me. I say shitty things when I'm pissed."

Sure, because it was that friggin’ easy. He had a shitty day so he could call me names behind my back. Right. Made total sense. Not.

Dick.

I just stared back at him.

“Just let it go, 'kay? It drives me fuckin' crazy you won't look me in the eye,” he breathed. "I don't do this awkward shit, babe."

“If I look at you from now on will you leave me alone?” I asked him in a whisper.

Something shuttered across his eyes. “You’re not gonna let this go?”

My chest flared with white hot anger. Getting fired would be better than quitting if I was standing up for myself, wouldn’t it? Sonny was my brother, he’d understand in a heartbeat if I explained. Then afterward, some kneecaps would be busted.

There was always the job at the damn strip club. Lord.

Schooling my features, I leaned forward to close the short distance between us to a microscopic one despite the near foot in height difference.

“It’s not everyday someone I don’t know calls me a fucking idiot, then insults my clothes and my time management.” I looked him right in the eye, not caring that he winced. “I’d say I’m sorry that I had to ask you for help, and that I can’t pretend you didn’t hurt my feelings, but I won't. If you would've showed me what to do slower or not rolled your eyes each time I wrote something down in my notebook, I wouldn't have had to. I'm not stupid or an idiot or a moron or whatever else you've called me.” In all honesty, I hadn’t intended to tell him he’d hurt my feelings but once the words were out in the universe it was a done deal. Whatever. I couldn’t take them back so I had to stand by them. “And now, I’m just pissed off, and I want to go home.”

And Dex, Dex just looked at me with those irises the same shade as a crayon. “You don’t know what it’s like to have a shit day, princess?”

Princess?

Princess?

This dickwad had no clue.

I sucked in another breath, steeling myself. I wasn’t going to be a pushover again. No. Friggin’. Way. I was done. If I could get fired, it’d be better than leaving on my own. So I laid it out on him as politely as I could. “When I have bad days, princess,” I whispered, opting at the last minute to leave out the Duke Dickface teasing my tongue, “I cry. I read. I clean. I eat crappy things. I swim or do the yard. I don’t make people feel like crap, your royal highness.”

Chapter Six

“Are you sure this won’t get you into trouble?”

Sonny’s upper body had disappeared beneath the car minutes ago with tools and a pan. I plopped down on top of a tire that was sitting off to the side of the bay at the body shop he worked at, watching him because I had no idea how to help. “It’s fine, Ris. Trust me.”

Well, shit.

The shop was closed on Saturdays; there was a very clear sign by the gate that we’d come through. Personally, I’d rather not get arrested for trespassing but Sonny didn’t look worried even a hundredth of a fraction. Plus, I’d spotted three bikes and two cars parked alongside the big adjacent building to the bays, so I figured we either weren’t alone or somebody was using the space as a parking lot.

Only I wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or not.

“You trust me, don’t you?” he asked in a teasing voice when I didn’t respond.

"No." I extended my leg out to nudge his knee with my toes. “Yes.”

Because I did. A lot. Sonny had never let me down when he knew I needed him.

Regardless, I still didn’t want to risk him losing his job all because I couldn’t change my own oil. “You're positive?”

A dirty blue rag went airborne and smacked me in the face. “Quit asking.”

"Sheesh," I muttered but made a face and picked the rag up with my index finger and thumb before tossing it back at him.

He worked quietly for a few minutes, the sound of metal on metal and drip, drip, drip filling the silence before he spoke again. “Wasn’t your mom’s anniversary last month?” he asked in a muffled voice.

I froze, sucked into the fact he remembered the date.

But just as quickly as my appreciation for him flared, a distant but familiar feeling that was both pressing and heavy swam around in my stomach. It was awkward and irregular shaped, but after a second it went away like it always did in the past. I licked my lips and focused on answering him. “Yeah. It was.” Eight years had passed since my mom had died and it’d felt like something that happened two lifetimes ago instead. Which was a good thing, I thought. Will and yia-yia would agree, too.

It’d taken me years to get over my dad leaving. Years of crying and suffering and feeling like the hole his absence left in my life would never go away. At ten, it's unfathomable that the father you love and adore would just... leave. By the time he showed up again when my Mom got sick, I'd gone from being upset to downright pissed.

When I'd needed him before, he'd fallen off the face of the planet. Not even Sonny had seen or heard from him.

I'd even blamed him for a while for what happened to Mom. Maybe if she wouldn't have loved him as much as she did, and then been left alone with two kids, juggling two jobs, she might have been fine.

But she hadn't been. She died and left us with my crazy ass yia-yia that made the most amazing baklava... for breakfast.

Dad was alive but he'd become a long lost dream. A long lost dream that withered into smoke and ash right after Mom was buried.

Will was there though. And without Will, who needed me to keep going, I wouldn’t have gotten through those floating, disaster months that ruined any chance of me making grades that were good enough to get scholarships. Scholarships that I should have been shoo-ed into if I’d played up The Arm Situation, but not even that could make up for my crap, quarter-hearted grades.

“The older you get, the more you start to look just like her,” Sonny noted, pulling me out of my thoughts.

Yia-yia and Will had both said the same thing. “Yeah, it's kind of creepy.” Mom and I had the same black hair. We had the same normal nose, the same small mouth and slightly fuller bottom lip. Our build was the same too from what I could remember. Mom had been long and lean, and while I wasn’t as long as she was, at five-seven I wasn’t exactly short either.

I was my mother’s daughter. The looks, the impulsiveness, the temper, almost everything. My brother, like Sonny, was a mirror image of our dad, where I was our mom’s doppelganger.

Sonny slid out from beneath my car, wiping his hands on the rag I’d thrown back at him. He reached over and patted the top of my running shoe, his eyes warm. “It’s a good thing. I take more after my mom, too.” He closed his eyes and let out a long breath. “Thank fucking God.”

That was a blatant lie. He looked just like our dad but I wasn't about to ruin the mood by stating what seemed so obvious to me.

“You do have those girlish features,” I told him with a grin, wanting to pull away from the talk of my mom.

Sonny snickered and sat up. “Stupid.“ With a shake of his head, something behind me caught his attention making his eyes narrow. And because I’m nosey, I turned around to see what he was looking at.

Dex.

Walking onto the lot, his short black hair went in ten different directions. Wrinkled jeans and an equally wrinkled blue t-shirt finished off his obviously bedhead ensemble. But what caught my attention, and what might have also caught Sonny’s, was the blonde woman he was walking beside. A blonde woman in a very wrinkled dress that screamed she wasn't opposed to public fondling. And it wasn't the same woman I'd seen him with two weeks ago.

Dex stopped just a few feet shy of a Hyundai parked in front of the office. It was a magnetic pull that kept me watching him drop a quick kiss on her mouth before slapping her ass as she crossed the distance toward her car and got in.

Pig.

“That motherfucker,” Sonny murmured, shaking his head in a disbelieving fashion.

My eyes went from my brother to my boss, who stood with his back to his lady friend, completely disinterested. Sonny didn’t look mad, but he looked annoyed and that alarmed me. “Please tell me that wasn't your girlfriend."

His light brown eyes met mine, wide with amusement. “Hell no. I don’t even think Becky knows how to spell the word girlfriend, Ris.” Sonny looked past me again. “But that motherfucker’s always talking shit about how he wouldn’t fu—do her because she's been with half the club.”

“Oh.” He didn't strike me as the picky type, but then again, I guess he really wasn't if he couldn't hold his own word.

I looked back over my shoulder to see that the Hyundai was gone and surprise! Dex was walking over in the direction of the open bay we were in. Obviously. It was the only one open. I ignored the weird feeling in my chest I got from seeing him taking those lengthy strides toward us. “Well, you know I don’t know how to kick anyone’s ass but I’d try my best if she was being a cheatin’ ho-bag.”

Sonny threw his head back and snorted. “It’s the thought that counts.”

I grinned at him, extending my legs out in front of me again to kick his shoe.

He chuckled again but this time kept his gaze on Dex’s approaching figure. “Well if it isn’t my favorite hypocrite,” Sonny greeted my boss.

“Fuck off,” Dex snapped from feet away.

"Becky?" Sonny shook his head. "Outta all the pu—" he eyed me, "—women at the bar, you took fucking Becky upstairs?"

I was surprised my boss didn't give him the middle finger, instead he settled for a look that could only be described as withering and absolutely not amused. "I can't remember shit from last night," Dex explained in a voice that somehow managed to be both gruff and scratchy.

An attractive man that drank so much he slept with people he didn't like, and then couldn't remember? Absolutely excellent. My opinion of him was just getting better.

Was it unfair to judge him when the majority of single men did the same thing? Yes. Did I care about being fair? No.

Sonny looked down at me, raising his eyebrows in disbelief. “Sure.”

“I’m fuckin’ serious, man. Buck had me try his home brew to celebrate, and I don’t remember a single goddamn thing after my third one.” Two boot clad feet landed right next to me, and I angled my face upward to take in the long length of Dex’s legs and torso, only to find him looking down at me in return. His expression was tight. “Hi.”

I breathed out a “Morning” back that was buried beneath Sonny’s reply.

"You know better than to drink anything Buck makes. His shit puts moonshine to shame." There was some type of hesitation in my brother's voice that I didn't understand, like something was bothering him. “I forgot to tell you congrats,” Sonny said, completely oblivious to the stare down his friend and I were having. "Me and Ris stayed home last night otherwise I would've met up with you for a drink. Congrats, man."

Dex’s bright blue eyes slid away from my face and out toward my legs, lingering on them so long it made me self-conscious of how small my shorts were.

“Thanks,” he replied, detaching his gaze from my direction and back toward Son. “Feels good.”

“Well, you deserve it, fucker,” Sonny noted.

When had he started speaking so much? I hadn't heard him string together so many words in three days total.

And what were they talking about?

Dex shrugged, glancing back down. His mouth was set in a fine line, something in his expression telling me that there was something he wanted to say but nothing came out. Just like nothing had come out of his mouth the night before after I'd told him he hurt my feelings in the parking lot.

Which was right before I called him a princess.

A-w-k-w-a-r-d.

Finally, he looked over at Sonny instead. “I’ll let you get back to what you two were doin’. See you at the shop later,” he spoke to me, glancing down at my legs one last time before nodding a goodbye at Sonny and making his way back to the building he’d come out from.

The moment he was out of earshot I asked, “What was he celebrating?” I didn’t care, I swear, but I was nosey.

“He just paid off the loan Luther gave him to set up Pins.”

I focused on big, bad Dex paying off the money he’d been loaned to set up his tattoo shop. “Huh.” I’d spent my entire adult life trying to balance just having a lease, medical bills, cell phone, and random things to pay for; I couldn’t imagine the responsibility of having a business to worry about on top of that when I could barely afford my minute sized expenses.

"Is it always that awkward between you two?" my brother asked.

Crap, was it that obvious? "Always." I made a face. “I probably made it worse when I  called him a princess last night.”

He busted out a laugh that had me giggling at the absurdity of what I’d done.

“Goddamn, kid.”

“He made me mad and it just...came out.” I didn’t bother telling him Dex had called me a princess first. The phone conversation I’d overheard two days ago was still fresh in my mind. No need to fuel that fire, right?

Sonny nodded, dropping to his butt in front of my car before sliding back underneath it. “You sure you don't want me to have a talk with him?"

The sneaky turd. I didn't even need to think about it. "You already had a talk with him."

Sonny snickered but didn't apologize or make any excuses for the conversation he'd had following the fit he'd thrown in his bedroom.

"I do want to look for another job though if you know anyone else, " I offered him up. "Preferably one with someone who reminds you of unicorns and rainbows."

I heard him laugh from beneath the car. "Kid, I don't think anybody in the club would remind me of unicorns and rainbows," he replied, still laughing.

"Glitter and tutus?"

He snorted. "Hell no." Thinking better of it, he added, "Maybe Trip."

~ * ~ *

I was bored out of my friggin’ mind.

Thirty minutes in, and I was ready to get the heck home.

Sonny had finally told me about the "party"—it really just seemed like an excuse to go to the bar—and on top of that, I’d found out that the guys from the shop were going to be there, I’d been relieved. While hanging out in places where I didn’t know anyone usually freaked me out a bit, I’d mentally prepared myself for the fact that I was practically starting my life over. New city, new job, new home, new friends.

New, new, new, new, new.

I’d decided a few days ago that all this new stuff needed a solid commitment from me if I wanted to make it work long term. My hermit days of working to scrape by needed a positive boost. Plus, Sonny wouldn't let me get away with the same stuff that Lanie had. Like staying in, eating Ramen noodles, and watching PBS on Friday nights because we couldn’t afford cable.

So I’d thrown a tough smile on my face and driven to the bar after work. Pins wasn’t set to close until one but business was slow, and I’d already clocked in over eight hours, Slim had told me to go ahead and go. Was I going to argue with him about staying? No way.

Things all day had been awkward. Dex The Dick had been in a surprisingly good mood with everyone. He wasn’t grumpy or aloof like usual, and I wasn’t sure whether to thank the fact that he paid off his loan or the fact that he’d gotten laid—gag—last night, for it.

The thing that got to me though was that not once had I heard any of the guys complain about his previous shit-titude. Back at my old job, if my boss was having a bad day and was on an ass-ripping mission from hell, we’d all talk about him the moment we had the chance. Or at least I’d roll my eyes.

But did anyone say anything about Dex?

Nope.

I had no one to roll my eyes with. No one who understood my resentment for the jerk who had made me feel like I had no business breathing the same air as him just because he was supposedly having a bad day. I could only come up with the conclusion that while Slim, Blue, and Blake were friendly, they hadn’t completely let me into the ranks yet.

Having someone else call him a dick wasn’t too much to ask for, was it?

When Slim gave me the chance to get out of there so I could avoid being in Dex The Dick’s general vicinity, I took it. I changed as quickly as I could—because you don’t go to a bar owned by bikers wearing business casual.

Now that I was more familiarized with the area, I realized the bar was just two blocks down from Pins and the body shop Sonny worked at. It seemed like the entire city mile was Widowmakers' territory. There were a handful loitering around outside with my brother in their midst.

Old, still smelling strongly of cigarettes, pee, and beer, Mayhem had new upgrades like flat screen televisions mounted on the wall and new pool tables lined up far from the entrance that clashed with the old bar. The lights were dim, the place was as loud and crowded as it'd been two weeks before. And for some strange reason, I didn't feel completely awkward there like I usually did when I'd gone to bars with Lanie.

This in itself said something because in the first five minutes I was inside, someone had broken off a bottle against the edge of the counter and held it up to someone else's throat before two Club members split them up.

Sonny and I walked around the floor. I smiled and waved at some of the people he'd introduced me to the last time. People who knew the complicated web of our lives thanks to an irresponsible former Widow.

And apparently, because I was getting so chummy with strangers who were a little interested to meet a former member's daughter, Sonny thought it'd be fine to leave me.

The horny bastard said he’d be right back, and thirty minutes later, he wasn’t. I’d seen him spying some brunette across the bar before pulling a Las Vegas magic show act on me and disappearing.

What was a girl who didn’t really know anyone supposed to do? Sit her ass at the bar, watch, and wait.

And watch and wait was what I did. About a quarter of the people boozing and being really friggin' loud were dressed like Luther and Trip: jeans, a t-shirt, and a black leather vest with multitudes of patches. And so many tattoos I didn't know where to begin looking. I could still remember the WMC insignia my dad had worn proudly until he'd gotten it covered up one day randomly. I was never sure what had officially cut his affiliations with the Club after nearly a decade of living away from Austin but honestly, I didn’t give a crap.

Not a single one.

The other half of the people milling around Mayhem doing shots, yelling, laughing, and smoking something I had a feeling wasn’t legal in the corner, were still pretty rough looking.

Glancing around, I’d never seen so many tattoos, leather, and facial hair in my life—and that was just the men.

The women were all around mid-to-late twenties and older. Their skin and hair colors ranged across the color spectrum. Clothes were obviously optional after I’d seen a couple women flash their boobs just for the hell of it.

It totally made sense to me right then why my mom had hightailed it back to Florida when she found out she was pregnant with me. In the ten minutes that followed the first broken-bottle-to-the-throat incident, someone got socked in the face. What did I do? I sat there and watched.

Maybe I should have felt awkward and out of place. I was used to being alone and I didn't mind it. But even though the men were loud, burly, and kind of intimidating and overbearing, I liked listening to their laughs and voices.

I found myself alone, nursing a glass of orange juice Sonny had ordered for me, and people-watching. It was like my senior prom all over again minus the fancy dress, orange juice, and smoking.

The guys from the shop hadn’t shown up yet, and at that point, I was desperate enough to attach myself at the hip to any of them. Well, with the exception of Dex.

“Iris.”

I whipped around to spot Trip making his way toward the part of the bar I was at, dressed in a nearly identical outfit as the one from the day before. He was also either on his way to Shit-Facedville based on the glazed look in his eyes, or already there.