Freefall (11 page)

I unzipped my sweatshirt and slipped it off my shoulders. As I reached up to hang it on the hook, Nix’s stool slid across the floor, and before I could lower my hands, his arms snaked around my waist, and he pulled my back against his hard chest. My head dropped back against his shoulder, and he leaned his mouth down to my neck and kissed it. His arms tightened around me, and it felt as if he had no intention of ever letting me go.

He spun me around roughly and pressed me up against the wall. He pressed his two hands high against the wall on either side of me and leaned his forehead down against mine. His breathing was sharp and uneven. “If I kiss you, I won’t be able to stop, Scotlyn. I won’t be able to stop myself.”

I pushed my face up toward his letting him know that it didn’t matter because I didn’t want him to stop. He dropped his hands and grabbed my waist. His fingers dug into my flesh as he lowered his mouth next to mine. He hesitated for a second, and a tiny sound floated between my lips. I’d heard the same sound before when he’d touched me. Tension radiated from his body like a rubber band stretched to the limit and then his hands slid up from my waist to my arms. He grabbed them hard and brought my face up to meet his. His kiss was like an explosion of need, and he devoured my lips with his mouth and tongue. It didn’t feel like a kiss he’d been contemplating the past few days since we’d met. It felt like a kiss he’d been thinking about for years.

The door to the shop opened, but it was a distant sound, muffled by our breathing and the sound of our heartbeats. His fingers dug into my flesh and his kiss deepened. My knees weakened beneath his grasp. My pulse raced. The aroma of coffee wafted around the half-closed door. Lincoln’s self-assured footsteps pounded the tile floor of the shop causing Nix to deepen the urgency of his kiss and hold me tighter. Then with a gasp he pulled his mouth from mine just as Lincoln reached the room. Nix reached over to a counter and grabbed a paper bag, which he plowed his fist into.

Lincoln’s mouth dropped open and he looked at us. “What the hell is going on? Are you done already?”

Nix lifted the bag. “Panic attack,” he said hoarsely. “Happens a lot after the first time. Then they know it’ll hurt.” He lowered his gaze to mine. The heat of it hadn’t cooled yet. He lifted the bag toward my mouth. “Need more or are you ready?”

Truthfully, I hadn’t gained my composure yet, but it had nothing to do with panic. I nodded weakly and made my way to the table to sit down. Lincoln placed Nix’s coffee on his tray. I couldn’t tell if Lincoln believed the whole scenario or not. He was hard to read, but he was also slow at reading other people.

Then he walked out. Nix and I looked at each other. I lifted my hand to touch his face but a chair slid across the floor and into the room. Lincoln sat down hard on it.

Nix looked back at him. “Look, man, I told you I can’t work with someone hovering around me.”

Lincoln stared at Nix over the brim of the cup as he took a long sip. “I’m not hovering. I’m sitting. Of course, we could always go to a different tattoo shop. They’re on every corner out here in L.A.” Lincoln lifted a cold gaze to me. It was hard to know what was going on in his head. It seemed to me that if he’d had any clue at all that Nix had kissed me, he would have already dragged me out of the shop. This was just a control move to show Nix that he was keeping an eye on him . . . and me.

Fortunately, Lincoln’s phone calls always took precedence over anything else, even me. Twenty minutes after he’d plunked himself down in the chair, he got up and left the room to engage in one of his heated calls.

Nix had been as silent as me through the session, but he finally lowered the tattoo gun with a sigh. “Why the hell do you stay with him?”

I was slightly taken aback by his question. I leaned away from the table and scratched some words across the paper. “There just are that many job openings for a scarred, mute girl without skills. And living on a park bench sucks.”

“Come live with me,” he blurted, and my shoulders shook with a silent laugh. His long lashes dropped. He was hurt.

I cursed my lack of speech and quickly wrote. “I wouldn’t do that because I really like you. I don’t want to be dependent on you.” I glanced toward the door.

Lincoln took a brief break from his conversation to yell to the back. “Why don’t I hear that fucking tattoo gun?”

Nix’s fingers tightened around the gun, and I leaned back down. “I’m almost done.” There was still disappointment in his tone.

Lincoln sounded pissed at whoever was on the other end. Nothing seemed to be going right for him these days.

Nix wiped the extra ink from the tattoo and took the opportunity to lean down and kiss my bare hip. “I just thought of something. I need someone to sit with my grandmother during the day. I was looking online for someone, but what she really wants is for someone to write out her memoirs.” He smiled. “She says memoirs have to be written in long hand. I can’t think of anyone who can write faster than you. She lives over in Century City.”

I looked down at him to be sure he was serious.

“What do you think?” he asked. “Twenty bucks an hour seemed to be the average rate. It would really help me out of a problem.” The gleam faded from his eyes. “My sister wants to put her in a home.”

“I’ll think about it. My biggest problem would be Lincoln.” I scratched out the words once he’d read them. The idea of it thrilled me, but I had no idea how to push the notion past Lincoln. I would try and catch him in a good mood, which seemed harder and harder to do these days.

Unsettling phone call finished, Lincoln came back in and sat down hard on the chair. It scooted several inches across the tile floor.

“All done here,” Nix said, the strain in his tone had returned. He stood blocking me from Lincoln’s view with his broad shoulders. He gently covered the new area with a large piece of gauze making sure to run his rough fingertips along the edge of the tape so that it brushed my skin. His gaze held mine the entire time, and my lips tingled with the leftover sensation of his kisses.

“Can we finish tomorrow night?” Lincoln asked brusquely.

Nix’s gaze was still transfixed to mine, and though his back was facing Lincoln, it was obvious that he couldn’t give a damn if Lincoln saw him looking at me, stroking me with his eyes, touching me with his fingertips.

Nix pulled his gaze away and turned to Lincoln. “Tomorrow will be fine.” He started cleaning the tools on his tray telling us silently that we could show ourselves out. I hopped down from the table, and Nix’s forearm tightened as I touched it on the way out.

C
HAPTER 13

Nix

I glanced over my list of appointments for the day. The shop was still empty and quiet. A cold shower hadn’t done much to relieve the blur in my head. I’d gone home after last night’s tattoo session and pulled out the giant bottle of cheap whiskey. Dray drank to help take off the edge of pain that was making him miserable, and I drank to take the edge off too. And my edge was making me pretty friggin’ miserable too. Dray was still sleeping his off when I left the Zany Lucy.

I’d wanted badly to text Scotlyn, and nearly did twice in my drunken haze, but I had no idea if she could read a text without the asshole grabbing her phone from her to see who she was talking to. And he seemed to be near her every minute of the day. If he knew we were texting each other, I was sure he would take her to a different tattoo artist. And I would never see her again. I wasn’t willing to risk it. The worst thing about all of it was the jerk didn’t seem to know what he had. A girl like Scotlyn didn’t just happen every day.

Cassie walked into the shop carrying a pink bakery box. She looked up at me apologetically. “He called me. I had to bring him. He’s not really ready to stay alone.”

Dray walked in behind her, moving slow and hunched over like an old man, with a stack of my Playboy magazines under his arm. He shuffled past me to the back room. “Just think of me as Freefall’s new mascot.”

I turned and watched him scoot across the floor like a snail pulling a wagon of bricks. “You mean like a stray cat?”

“Yeah, but I think of myself more like a dog.” He disappeared into the office.

Cassie put the box down. “He wanted donuts.”

“Don’t touch the crème-filled ones,” Dray called from the back and then moaned from the pain of talking loudly with broken ribs.

I grabbed out a glazed.

“How come you’re so early?” Cassie asked. “And how come you look like shit?”

“We finished off a bottle of whiskey that tasted like piss.” Dray’s feet scuffed over the tile floor. He’d taken off his shoes.

Cassie stared up at me from behind her big lenses.

“He’s right. It did take like piss.”

“I don’t care what it tasted like,” she said. “I get why he was drinking, but why were you?” Cassie always knew when something was eating at me, and there was no way she didn’t sense my unhappiness today. “What’s got you in such a snit?”

Dray stood close enough that I could see the powdered sugar from his donut on his chin stubble. “Yeah, Nix, what has you in such a snit?” I wanted to wipe the sugar off with the bottom of my shoe. Dray looked over at Cassie. “Snit? Really?”

“You have a problem with my vocabulary?”

“Only when you say things like snit.” Dray might have looked as if he’d been run over by a tractor, but he was definitely in a better mood. I wondered or maybe I was just hoping it had to do with Cassie.

“Oh, I guess I should have said ‘what has you in such a fucking snit’ then it would have made more sense to you. Here eat another donut.” She handed him a second one. “It’s better when you don’t talk.”

I headed to the back to finish sterilizing my tools.

“You didn’t answer me, Nix,” Cassie called to me.

“Not now, Cass. I don’t really want to talk about it.”

***

After a morning of odd tattoo requests, including a giant cockroach on a girl’s neck and Bugs Bunny on a tough looking dude’s calf, I was glad for the afternoon lull. Dray had read himself to sleep or, more accurately, had looked at pictures until his eyes drifted shut. Cassie added a few more items to her earring displays and then pulled out her romance novel.

I checked my phone a thousand times hoping for a text from Scotlyn, but she was about the only person on the planet who hadn’t texted me. I just didn’t feel like responding to anybody.

I carried out a list of ink colors I needed and handed them to Cassie. “Here’s the order list.”

She glanced up from her book. “Just put it by the computer, and I’ll get to it after my break.”

Dray shuffled out of the office with his hair standing straight up and rubbing his eyes like a little kid who’d just got up in the morning. “What’s for lunch? A patient can’t heal his body on donuts alone.” He stopped at the counter next to Cassie and leaned against it for support. “Why are you reading a book about pirates?”

I laughed, and Cassie rolled her eyes.

“What?” Dray asked completely unaware why his question was so comical.

“Dude,” I said, “anyone can see that that is a—” I looked at Cassie for support.

“A Regency era duke,” she finished for me.

“I thought girls had a thing for pirates,” Dray said as he licked his finger and reached into the donut box to pick up the extra sugar.

“They do,” Cassie said. “They’re definitely up there on the list of alpha males along with rakish lords, knights, cowboys, and navy seals. Although, I’m pretty sure the real pirates were leather-skinned, old salty guys who were missing limbs and who never bathed. Still, they work well in a romance novel.”

“What about billionaires?” I asked. “I thought they were the new hotties.”

Cassie shut her book and sighed, which meant she was going to go into one of her well thought out rants. “Don’t get me started on billionaires.” Which, of course, meant she was about to get started. “First of all, there aren’t all that many of them in existence, and when I think of billionaires, I think of guys like Bill Gates. Now don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t kick the man out of my bed, and I would certainly not say no to having his children, but he is definitely not romance novel material. Even if he had whips and blindfolds.”

That statement caused Dray to suck in some powder sugar, and he tried desperately to suppress the cough. He held his stomach and shut his eyes, holding his breath until his face turned red. Cassie hurried to the back for a cup of water. When the cough passed, Dray took a breath. His eyes watered as he drank it. “So you like whips and blindfolds?” Even after the trauma of coughing with broken ribs, Cassie’s comment had stuck in his head.

Cassie looked up at me and shook her head. “He nearly coughs up a lung, and that’s what he’s still thinking about.”

“What?” Dray asked. “I’m just curious. And what about fighters? We’re alpha males.”

Cassie sighed loudly and faced him. “You are definitely an alpha. I just wish you’d think more with you head than your . . . than your
alpha
.”

The door opened and Clutch walked inside.

“You’re pouting too?” Dray said. “You look like a kid who didn’t get any bananas in his cereal this morning.” Dray turned back to me. “Seriously, the two of you should go on Oprah or something.”

“I don’t think office mascots are supposed to talk,” I said.

Clutch headed straight to the pink box, and his frown deepened when he saw that it was empty.

“So what happened?” I asked. “No offers on the car?”

He leaned his elbows on the counter, and the glass creaked with the weight of it. “I’m driving it up to some guy who lives in Hollywood Hills. He’s going to check it out, but he’s probably as cheap as the rest of them.”

“Maybe you need to drop the price,” I said. “The economy is still pretty bad.”

“The economy is never bad for rich people,” Clutch snarled.

“O.K, what’s wrong? You never talk badly about the rich.”

“Nothing is wrong. I’m hungry. What are you guys doing for lunch?”

“I could order pizza,” Cassie said.

Dray lifted his hand up. “Works for me.”