Spiked Lemonade: A Bad Boy Sailor and a Good Girl Romantic Comedy Standalone (31 page)

“How does that relate to what we’re doing?”

“It’s like testing out the goods before committing. A test drive,” I continue. Digging my hole.

“So if I sucked in bed, you wouldn’t have asked me to go out with you?”

“I’m glad we see eye to eye on this,” I say with a quick wink. At the same moment, I hear the front door bells chime, and I think we’re both in agreement that we waited thirty seconds too long to get dressed.

Our lax situation turns into a wrestling match of finding what clothes go where and on who. We almost make it on time before a man reaches the front counter, looking around for service.

“Uh, oh,” he says. “Um. I’ll give you a—Sa—Sasha?”

It’s the breathtaking moments in life that stick with me forever. In this case, it’s the moment I meet—

“Dad!” Sasha shrieks.

Her dad.

“Ya know, a typical father might be disappointed to see his daughter half naked on the ground of an auto-body shop with some grizzly looking man, but…”

Where the hell is this going.

“Dad, stop,” she says.

“No, sweetie, I can’t tell you how relieved I am to see you not following in your mother’s perfect little footsteps. Your future will be better for it, trust me.” He breathes a sigh of relief during the pause in his words. “Look, son, I don’t want to make things awkward here. I was called by the insurance company, letting me know about Sasha’s car, and I wanted to take a look at it. I’m going to do you both a favor and come back another time, and probably call first. Sound good?”

I finish pulling my shirt on and debate about reaching out to shake the man’s hand. The hand that was just all over his daughter. Better not. That’s weird.

“Yes, sir. That’s a good idea.” It takes a lot to make me uncomfortable. This is a lot.

Sasha’s dad leaves quicker than he came in and Sasha’s the shade of an eggplant, holding her shirt firmly against her bare chest.

When the door closes, she bursts out in a fit of giggles, hysterical laughter that forces tears from her eyes. “That was the funniest thing I’ve ever experienced,” she cries.

“And you’ve just experienced me so I don’t know if that’s an insult or a compliment,” I joke.

She stands up and pulls her shirt over her head, still laughing a bit. “That was perfect.”

“I might have a different choice of words for what just happened, but we’ll go with it,” I tell her.

“My dad’s a jackass. He’s cheating on my mother, and I hate to say I understand why, but I do. Not that it makes him any less of a jackass but it’s been a revelation for me.”

“I don’t understand,” I tell her. “I mean…yeah, I get the jackass part. He called me grizzly. Am I grizzly? I am a little, huh?”

“Maybe a little,” she grins. “But I hope that doesn’t change your mind about still wanting to take me out,” she says, curling up beneath my arm.

“Doll-face, I want to take you out every night for as long as you’ll let me.”

TWO HOT AND STEAMY WEEKS LATER

SASHA

JAGS RUNS HIS
fingers softly through my hair. “Sasha,” he whispers.

The sound of his deep honeyed voice forces my eyes to lazily open. “Mmm?” I groan through a slight stretch.

“I’m going to go pick up some breakfast for us. Stay here and relax, okay, beautiful?”

“Okay,” I whisper through a smile.

He leans over me and places his lips softly over mine. “God, I won’t ever get enough of you,” he says with a sleepy grin. “How did I get so damn lucky to wake up next to you?”

“It must be your wooing dirty words and the naked woman dancing on your bicep,” I joke, still sounding groggy. He thinks it’s funny when I tease him about his tattoos, and most of them have actually grown on me a little, or I don’t mind them as much, I guess. Maybe it’s just that I’m so head over heels for him that I don’t notice them anymore.

“Must be it,” he says, placing another kiss on my nose. “Do you want a coffee too?”

“Yes, please. Hazelnut…”

“With milk and sugar, I know.” He does know. He listens. He tends to me. He cares about me like no one has ever cared about me before, yet at the same time, he challenges me. I think it’s what I need. Pushing off the bed, he winks as he pulls his pants up to his waist. “I’ll be quick.”

I let my head sink back into the pillow as the bedroom door closes, allowing myself to fall back into a hazy sleep with a smile still stretched over my lips. I’ve got the butterflies for this guy, that’s for sure. I get it now—what it’s all about. What it’s supposed to feel like. It all makes sense.

A minute or two after I hear the front door secure, it reopens. “Jags?” Cali and Tango aren’t around this weekend so he must have forgotten something. I look over to the nightstand to see if he left his wallet and/or phone behind, but both are gone. “Jags, is that you?”

The bedroom door opens, and my question is answered. I sit up quickly, as my heart pounds heavily against my ribcage. “What are you doing here?” I ask, sounding like a mouse looking up into the mouth of a predator.

“I’m here. Isn’t that all that matters?” he asks.

The tape over my lips is making it hard to breathe. My wrists are bleeding from the friction of the cuffs, and I’m not sure how much longer I can sit like this before I pass out, but it’s already been hours. Maybe more.

“You know what the funniest part of this is, Sash?”

He knows I can’t answer him, but he keeps asking me questions. Even if I could answer, I wouldn’t.

I listened to Jags. I listened to Cali and Tango. I stayed away from my house. I’m in the process of selling my house just to really put the nails in that coffin. I’ve quit my job, I got a new job, and then another job so I wouldn’t be anywhere without a big brother looking over my shoulder, and yet with all of those precautions, it obviously didn’t matter. Landon was smarter than all of us this whole time, and he was just waiting for his chance. Tango was sure he’d have this “situation” handled two weeks ago, but it wasn’t as simple as he thought.

I wonder if anyone knows I’m gone. I wonder how long it will take them to realize what happened. I wonder if they’ll ever be able to find me. I know Jags won’t give up until he finds me, but that doesn’t mean he’ll make it on time.

“You know, I did love you,” he says. “I wanted to marry you.”

If I could talk, I might offer him a reminder that he was basically holding me hostage to get closer to Cali’s dad, who is a very wanted man. Landon is money obsessed, and he would go to the ends of the earth for a quick dollar. That includes putting the girl he pretended to love in front of himself if bullets were to come flying. That’s not love. He didn’t love me. I was nothing more than an inch closer to a gold mine. This is why Cali had been on the run. People have constantly used her to get closer to her dad, who basically lives in hiding now. Watching her life made me appreciate mine, even with its abundance of perfection that I never quite wanted.

“I’m not going to kill you, sweetheart. I just want to make an honest woman of you.”
Where is he taking me?
I do my best to sit up and look out the window, trying to catch the words on a sign as we speed by. We must be going at least thirty miles per hour over the speed limit, and I can only hope we get pulled over. This isn’t Landon’s car, which means things will go downhill quickly. Hopefully. I can only pray at this point.

It’s minutes before we fly by a sign and the only thing I can see are the words: Del Rizo. Oh shit! That’s on the border of Mexico! But we haven’t gone through customs yet, which thankfully means we haven’t crossed the border.

I close my eyes, trying not to think about how much I need to use a bathroom and how the fear I’m feeling is turning my stomach into a mess of knots. With the darkness behind my eyelids, I can only see the look on Jags’s face this morning when he leaned over to kiss me softly before whispering about being back quickly with breakfast and coffee.
How did I go from that to this?

Cali, Tango, and Tyler went away for the weekend to celebrate Tango’s clean bill of health after receiving all of his test results back, so it was the first time since we’ve been together that everyone was so happy. Everything was so perfect. It was like all parts of everyone’s messy lives were somehow falling into place and into harmony. Tango believed Landon was “handled” but sadly, he was wrong.

To make this worse, it was the first time Jags and I have had a chance to be completely alone since we started being
us
a couple of weeks ago. With both Jags and I looking for new places to live, we’ve been at the mercy of Cali and Tango. We appreciate their hospitality; nonetheless, it’s been hard sneaking around to avoid their jittering eyebrows and knowing looks every time we walk in a room. I’m not sure Jags has cared as much as I have, but I was looking forward to this weekend of privacy.

I don’t know how Landon got into Cali and Tango’s house, but this man is capable of more than any of us have given him credit for.

Despite my effort to stay awake, the motion of the car lulled me to sleep for a bit, but I’m startled awake when the car jerks to the side of the road. I try to snap myself out of a haze when the door beside me whips open, but reality hits quickly when I’m pulled from my seat. Landon drags me by some trees and roughly tears my pants down to my ankles, his fingernails scraping against my legs along the way. “Go,” he demands.

I want to tell him I’m not going to the bathroom in front of him, but I have to go so badly I don’t care. I squat, careful not to fall backward with my hands still clasped together behind me, and I do my best to ignore his staring eyes.

“All those times you made such a big deal about closing the bathroom door when you needed private time,” he mocks me. “See, it’s not so bad having everything out in the open, right?”

How could this man I had once been so attracted to be such a jerk? Such a horrible person. I have no form of defense. I have no way to protect myself from him. I’m at the mercy of his strength, and I pray for a hint of his weakness to show through, but I’m doubtful he has any mercy for me at all now.

As I stand back up, waiting for him to pull my pants back up over my hips, he tears the duct tape from my mouth and smashes his lips against mine. The taste of rotten breath mixed with a mint gum nauseates my already upset and starved stomach. I used to kiss this man for pleasure, and now he feels like a burning poison against my mouth. As he pulls away and my eyes dare to peel open, he utters, “I missed my girl, Sasha. We were a team. We are a team. We were always in this thing together, so what made you switch teams?”

“Switch teams?” I question with confusion. I was never on his team. I didn’t know what he was up to, so how could I be? I thought he was simply a chef at a restaurant. Come to find out, he’s doing dirty jobs to earn money on the side.

“You know what I mean,” he grunts while pulling me back to the car by the links between the cuffs. The pain from the metal rubbing against my bone is nearly unbearable, and I want to kick him and do to him what he’s done to me, but I’m worried I don’t have the strength to fight him. He’s much taller and might have at least a hundred pounds on me. Still, this might be my only chance.

As much as it hurts, I ignore the pain and yank my wrists, something he wasn’t expecting. He doesn’t release his grip, but he turns around to see what I’m doing.
It’s now or never
. “What are you doing?” he asks, confused as to why I’d fight him at all.

“What am I doing?” I ask. “Really, Landon?”

He places his hands around my shoulders in an endearing way, unknowingly making what I have to do so much easier. “Is this because I put duct tape over your pretty lips?”

I try not to narrow my eyes and look at him the way I want to look at him right now, but how does someone hide their true self like this for years and suddenly come out of the closet as a psycho nut-case. Is he that good at games or am I that naive? I’d hate to think the latter.

Cali has told me many stories of her tricks and games with pushing an ex off a cliff,
maybe more literally than I’d like to believe, but if I’ve learned anything from her, it’s to make a man feel weak and then crush him. She told me it works every time. If I was to ever believe her and take her words of wisdom as a lifesaving technique, the time would be now.