Bound to Me (9 page)

Authors: Jocelynn Drake

BOOK: Bound to Me

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“So are you going to tell me what happened?” Trixie prodded after a moment of silence had stretched between us.

I shrugged as I turned to face her. “Nothing important.” I finally raised my eyes to look at her again, feeling as if I had better control over myself following the initial shock of her outfit.

“Nothing important but it involved a gun,” she said, crossing her arms over her bosom. “Come on, Gage. Spill it or I’ll get Bronx to sit on you when he comes in and we’ll crush it out of you.”

“Russell Dalton caught me on my way into the parlor this afternoon. Seems he’s a little pissed regarding the results of his tattoo.”

“Dalton? I don’t remember him.”

“Came in a couple weeks ago wanting a good luck charm. He had only fifty bucks on him.”

“Oh, that idiot!” she gasped. She dropped her hands back to her lap and shook her head at me. “I still can’t believe that you took that one.”

I sighed, once again forced to question either my sanity or my decision-making process when it came to clients. “I was feeling generous.”

“So, I’m guessing the tattoo hasn’t worked like he wanted.”

“I put a shamrock on the heel of his left foot. Do you honestly think anything good would come of that?”

“Not really. But then, I wouldn’t expect things to go all that bad for him either.”

“Yeah, well, neither did I but they did. Lost job, car stolen, and wife wants a divorce.”

Trixie let out a low whistle as she leaned back against the set of cabinets above the counter that wrapped around the far wall. “That’s odd.”

“Not really. I put a leprechaun hair in the ink.”

“It go bad?”

“That or it was bad to begin with,” I said with another sigh. This wasn’t how I expected my day to go. “I’ve already called for some fresh, but it’ll be a few days. Just be careful and cut the mixture with something else to counteract it, if you happen to use the hair between now and then. Pass the word along to Bronx if you see him before me.”

“Got it, boss,” she said, hopping down from her perch on the countertop.

“Shall we get started?” I asked, trying to ignore the jiggle of her breasts as she landed lightly on her toes.

“Do you want front room or back room?” she inquired, looking over her shoulder at me as she walked toward the front glass counter and bent down so that I could catch the perfect roundness of her rear in the tight jeans. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was doing it on purpose. But she was just switching on the music like we did every day.

“Back room,” I bit out, turning to look for the pair of clipboards that held the list of supplies that we kept on hand. The front room held the random necessary items such as paper towels, latex gloves, petroleum jelly, needles, and ink. The processing of the items in the front room took less than thirty minutes and an order form was quickly filled out.

The back room possessed all the unique ingredients that we used in our potions. Each container needed to be checked, opened, and assessed as to whether the contents were still good or if we needed more. The back room check could take up to three hours to process and the order form was even trickier because not everything could be purchased at the local ingredients shop. Some had to be acquired through a series of back alley transactions and black market connections.

“If you need any help, just give a shout,” she offered as I turned toward the back room again.

“I’ve got it.”

“Gage . . .”

I stopped and turned half around to see where she was standing with one hand on the glass top of the counter in the lobby. “Thanks for not getting shot.”

“No problem. I hear the job market is killer right now.” I winked at her, a wide, devilish grin crossing my mouth.

“Asshole,” she mumbled under her breath as she turned back toward the stereo she was fiddling with. I didn’t miss the smile that graced her lovely face. Before I could escape into the back room, Beethoven was blasted through the four speakers that were spread around the main tattoo room. I suppressed a laugh when I heard Trixie cursing Bronx’s taste in music. By the time I had shut the door, she had hooked up her own MP3 player to the speakers and Dropkick Murphys was filling the air. Trixie had a thing for both punk bands and bagpipes.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The bestselling author of the
Dark Days
series and a former financial analyst, JOCELYNN DRAKE lives in Kentucky.

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ALSO BY JOCELYNN DRAKE

The D
ARK
D
AYS
Novels

Nightwalker

Dayhunter

Dawnbreaker

Pray for Dawn

Wait for Dusk

Burn the Night

And Coming Soon

Angel’s Ink

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Excerpt from
Angel’s Ink
copyright © 2012 by Jocelynn Drake

BOUND TO ME
. Copyright © 2012 by Jocelynn Drake. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition APRIL 2012 ISBN: 9780062118219

Print Edition ISBN: 9780062118226

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