Burn: A South Beach Bodyguards Book (19 page)

I’m taking this dog back to the Gables if you don’t come get it.

That annoyed me. Glancing over I saw Isabel was on the phone. She was just nodding though, not saying anything. Did I nod when I was talking on the phone? No one could see you nodding. Why would any of us do that? Mickey was in the middle of texting me so I decided to cut him off by just calling him. That would annoy the shit out of him, which was childishly satisfying.

“Are you kidding me?” Mickey said, not bothering with a greeting. “Now you call me?”

“What? I told you I’m busy. What do you need?”

“I’m stuck with this dog, Ryan. I have shit to do. You need to come and pick it up.”

“First thing in the morning,” I told him. “It will be fine.” I saw Isabel out of the corner of my eye and she was chewing her fingernail, phone still at her ear, her nipples pert and visible beneath the thin white cotton. God, that was so tempting. She was tempting.

Mickey gave me a perfect out. If I said I’d get the dog I could leave and not come back until right before she woke up. She’d never know that I hadn’t been sleeping next to her half the night. I wouldn’t hurt her feelings and I wouldn’t have to suffer through the weirdness of spooning. I’d heard rumors about spooning. I never wanted to spoon. Ever. I’d had girls try it post-sex and I usually just flipped them onto their back and distracted them. Fuck spooning.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told Mickey. Then in case Isabel was listening I added, “I’ll handle it as soon as possible.”

“You sound like you’re up to something,” Mickey said. “Let me talk to Isabel.”

“She’s talking to Kim.” That was my assumption anyway. She’d said she wanted to talk to her mother.

“No, she’s not. Kim is lying in bed right next to me.”

Too much information. “Oh. Well, she’s on the phone talking to someone. I’m not going to interrupt her.”

I was staring at her though. I couldn’t seem to help myself. She looked so cute and sleepy and well-loved. I wondered what she was thinking. Feeling. I wondered how soon I could sink inside her again. Holy hell, she’d been tight. I shifted on the chair, my dick getting hard. She looked over and caught me checking her out. She picked at her shirt, but it didn’t prevent it from clinging to her breasts.

She had been speaking but she trailed off, clearly flustered.

I should look away, give her privacy. But I couldn’t seem to make myself do it. I was going to have to leave her here. Walk out, stay the night at my apartment. I didn’t want to hurt her. But I couldn’t be what she wanted me to be. I shouldn’t put the burden of my lust for her onto her. Yet I couldn’t seem to turn it off either. You couldn’t build a bonfire then douse it with a teaspoon of water. I wasn’t finished getting what I wanted from Isabel and that must be written all over my face.

She actually looked scared of me. The big hulking ugly man looking at her like he wanted to eat her couldn’t be comforting.

I reached over and cupped the back of her head with my hand. She quickly shifted her own hand over her phone and I kissed her, a demanding aggressive domination of her mouth. I broke away and stared into her eyes. “I have to go. Work. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

That was a lie, but she’d be asleep by then.

Her eyes widened but she didn’t say anything. She just nodded, then went back to talking to whoever it was. “Yeah, I’m here,” she said. “No. Don’t worry about it.”

It felt like a dismissal. Which was stupid. I was the one fucking leaving. But it still bothered me. Damn it, everything was bothering me. Since the minute I’d walked into my apartment and found Isabel naked and soaping herself up, I’d been bothered. Hot and fucking bothered.

I went into the hotel room and got dressed, feeling pissed off and not even sure why. I jammed my gun into my back pocket. I wasn’t going to get Isabel’s dog, which I would do if I were a nice guy. Nor was I going to work like I’d told her. I was going home to sleep alone on my sketchy sheets. Maybe I should tell her that. Maybe she needed to know that I was no hero, that she should never have put me in the role of strong, silent, and sensitive. I wasn’t sensitive at all. I was a prick, the product of two assholes. Asshole Junior, that was me. Because for all my vows to respect women and only get with women who knew the score, when it came down to it, I was as selfish as the next guy.

I hadn’t wanted anyone else to take Isabel. So I took her.

Justification wasn’t going to change that little fact.

Without a glance back, afraid I would tell her everything or worse, tell her nothing, just make her mine again, I got the fucking hell out of the hushed room at the Fountainbleau. On the way down in the elevator I decided to text Alejandro.

What are you doing?

I’m heading out in SOBE. Hit da club with me?

Normally that would hold almost zero appeal. Now? It seemed like the perfect way to avoid everything I was feeling. I wouldn’t have to think if I was in a club with pounding bass and pulsing lights.

I’ll meet you there. What club?

The elevator doors dinged and I stepped out. I probably should have showered. Nothing like going out with a dirty dick. But I had needed to get out fast before I did something even stupider than what I’d already done.

Handing the ticket to the valet attendant I stepped outside to wait, crossing my arms over my chest. The air smelled good, clear, crisp. As crisp as the air can get in Miami. It felt refreshing on my hot skin. Maybe I should have worked out first before going out. Sweat my tension out then hit the scene. But I would have to go upstairs to get my workout clothes and I wasn’t doing that.

So with adrenaline pumping through my veins I got into my car the attendant brought and hit the gas, pulling out onto A1A at fifty miles an hour. It felt like all of Isabel’s expectations and my unworthiness were chasing me.

E
veryone always underestimated me. No one thought I could handle anything and that because I was shy, sometimes painfully so, I was also slow to pick up on things. That I couldn’t comprehend deviousness or lies or manipulation. But I could and I did and I sat there on the balcony wondering why in the hell Ryan thought I was stupid enough to believe that he was going to work. Mickey had assigned Ryan to bodyguard me. He wasn’t going to tell him to leave me alone in a hotel and go off and do some other random project at eleven at night.

“Brandy, I need to go,” I told my best friend. She was talking on and on about some guy she’d met at her job at the café and I wanted to care and be a good friend but I couldn’t focus. “I’m sorry, but I don’t feel good.”

Her voice turned solicitous. “Oh, I’m sorry, are you okay?”

I had tried to call my mother but she hadn’t answered her phone. I had called Brandy because I had needed to avoid Ryan for a few minutes, collect my thoughts. I hadn’t expected him to bolt and now I had a pit in my gut. He wasn’t coming back. I just knew it.

“I’m fine. I just haven’t felt right since I fell and I kind of have a headache.” I felt like a jerk lying to her, but I couldn’t tell her the truth either. There was something just totally mortifying about admitting even to my best friend that the guy I had hand-picked as the one to lose my virginity too had bolted ten minutes after he pulled out. It was just not something I wanted to say out loud right now. I’d tell her in a day or two, after the sting of humiliation had worn off.

“Okay. Take some aspirin. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

I said goodbye and ended the call. I stared blankly out at the ocean. It was so peaceful here, way up high, above the crush of cars and people. It felt like I could reach out and touch the waves. Like I could splash my fingers in it the way you would as a child in the sink.

I didn’t really have a headache. Nope. I had regular old heartache and I had no one to blame but myself. Ryan had tried to warn me that he wasn’t going to be around for the long haul. That he wanted to have sex with me because he was attracted to me, but that he wasn’t any better than any other guy. I hadn’t believed him. Now I wasn’t so sure. It didn’t take a diagnosis from Freud to see he had some abandonment issues. But what never made sense to me was why people who resented their parents exhibited the same behaviors as them.

I would like to delude myself into thinking that he bounced because he knew if he stuck around he would fall in love with me and for whatever weird man reason he had decided he could not do that. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe commitment just wasn’t his thing. Maybe I just wasn’t his thing. I could hear my mother’s warning ringing in my ears and it pissed me off to realize that she was right. Even when I had told myself it didn’t matter, that one night would be enough, I hadn’t been honest with myself. I was going to want more from him.

If he had spent the whole night with me, cuddling, and cute and loving, I would have wanted breakfast. If we’d gone for breakfast, then I would have wanted him to call or text me later in the day. I would have wanted more. I would always want more until he was mine. My boyfriend. That was my shit, my mistake. Not his. He’d been clear as a damn bell about it.

What would Julia do? She would not sit on the balcony alone like a moron feeling sorry for herself. She would get up and leave. Or say to hell with it and go to bed. But more likely she would leave.

Ryan had left his beer on the table and I drained the few inches of liquid left. I could look at staying in two different lights. One, that it was my being defiant and nonchalant. Like I could just enjoy the hotel and the view and to hell with Ryan. But I knew myself well enough to know that wasn’t what it would feel like. It would just be lonely. I would lie in that bed and I would repeatedly sniff the sheets to see if I could find any remnants of his scent and how pathetic would that be? I would end up crying, guaranteed. I would eat every chocolate item in the minibar and I would get drunk on the little wine bottles. In the morning I’d be hungover, sick to my stomach, puffy-faced, and out eighty dollars in minibar expenses.

Better to just avoid all of that. I stood up and went back into the hotel room, stripping off the T-shirt as I walked to the bathroom. I needed a shower. I needed to not be as aware of how amazing sex with Ryan had been. Ten minutes later I was dressed in the clean clothes from my overnight bag and I removed the beer bottle from the balcony table and tossed it, shutting the slider. Glancing around, I realized that Ryan had left his duffel bag. It gave me pause. Maybe he was planning to come back.

Then I thought about his face when he had seen me on the verge of tears and I decided that he had just forgotten about the bag in his rush to get away as fast as possible. I would just take it with me. He could get it later. Or I could leave it downstairs at the front desk. That was even better. Less complicated, because then Ryan wouldn’t even have to see me.

Knowing full well it was nearly midnight I took a deep breath and made my way down and to the desk clerk. “I need to leave a bag for Mr. Harris,” I said. “Room 1325.” I plunked it on the countertop.

After I showed my driver’s license and we sorted that out, I tried not to give a shit what he might be thinking about me. It was none of his business and surely he’d seen odder things than a woman leaving the hotel at midnight. I tried to picture what Frank Sinatra would say, and I figured he would tell me to do what you gotta do. And he would call me doll, which would be amazing. Thinking about the old days of the glamour of the Fountainbleau and Miami Beach before condos was a fun distraction from my current emotions. It would have been amazing time to be alive. If you were a movie star or a gangster anyway.

I would not have made the best gangster’s girlfriend. Too easily spooked.

Honestly, I would not make the best bodyguard’s girlfriend either. I worried about Ryan. Imagine how I would feel if we were together. I would worry constantly. But it would be worth it. Clearly. The greater truth was the story of my life. The role of mobster wife suited my mother, not me. She fit into Mickey’s world of wheeling and dealing and guns and money. Me? I pretended none of it existed. I went to school, then I went home to the house that Miami Security had afforded. That was really my sole connection to the danger of keeping celebrities and rich people safe on the Beach.

After the bellman got me a cab I gave him the address of my mom’s house in Coral Gables where we were living. I needed to go home, even if it was Ryan’s old bedroom. I couldn’t stomach the thought of my mother’s prying eyes or Brandy’s endless questions. I didn’t want to be alone in the hotel, but I much preferred being alone at home over in the same room where I had felt Ryan’s tender and powerful touch.