Still a Bad Boy: A New Adult Romantic Suspense (11 page)

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.

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?