Still a Bad Boy: A New Adult Romantic Suspense (5 page)

For a second, he looked like he was going to say he didn’t give a damn and I felt a lump in my throat.  Instead, his expression softened almost imperceptibly.

“I’ll get a car for you.  We’ll leave out the back entrance.”

As he was about to put his suit jacket on he glanced at me, holding the sides of my shirt across my chest, before draping it over my shoulders.  On me, it was almost like a short trench-coat and I pulled it protectively around me.

Jace spoke to somebody on his phone as I stood there awkwardly.  I looked at the wall I’d been pinned against so recently and saw a dent in the sheetrock that hadn’t been there when we first walked into the room.

I turned back to Jace, who seemed to be doing his best to not even look at me as he gave instructions to somebody, a driver perhaps.  What did this all mean? Had I just been used? Had I just given my virginity to somebody who didn’t care about me at all?

Jace’s eyes wandered to me, and then looked away.  Maybe I was wearing my heart on my sleeve, maybe he saw those questions written on my face, because he redoubled his efforts to not look in my direction.

The lump returned to my throat and I looked down at my feet.  I wanted to curl up and…

Jace was right in front of me and, before I could look up, I felt his arm wrap around me and pull me close.  My cheek rested against his chest and I looked up at him with hope.

He was unreadable, but he was holding me.  Being there in his arms felt like being in a suit of armor, or a tank.

Jace

My muscles felt pumped as if I’d just finished lifting weights, and I was almost shaking with anticipation.  After that shit with Santino the previous night, this dumb fuck picked the wrong day to break the rules and get caught.

He had to know that he’d shit the bed on this one.  A punk-level guy like him doesn’t get a meeting with me out of the blue.  Meetings like the kind he seemed to think he was having didn’t happen in this ‘office’ miles away from my high-rise, either.  This office was soundproof and easy to clean.

Yet, he was still trying to play it cool, praying at the back of his mind for a miracle.  Praying that I didn’t know it was him and his friends that rolled the liquor store in China Town.

So here he was talking about all these ideas he had to improve my fucking business, missing every opportunity I was giving him to get off the bullshit train.  Holy fuck was it making me angry.

Lorenzo stood in the corner behind him, hands clasped nonchalantly at crotch-level and shaking his head as he listened to Tony here dig a hole for himself.  I hadn’t decided if the hole was six feet deep yet.

“So I can cut the heroin with icing sugar and increase profits, huh?” I asked.

“Yeah! Yeah, man, that’s the shit I’m sayin’!”

“Wow! You’re a fucking genius.  Hey Tony, one businessman to another, I had a few ideas myself, could I maybe run them by you?”

“By me? Yeah! Yes sir, Mr.  Barlow, I’ll… yeah anything you want!”

“Great!” I stood to my feet and began pacing in front of him.  “See, when you’re in business you might have a lot of business partners.  Some of them are big, and some of them are small, but if you fuck one of the small ones over, word gets around to the big ones, you know?”

“Yeah, makes sense, sir,” he said, beginning to stand up.

“Sit the
fuck
down.” I pointed at him and waited for him to slowly sink back into the hard wooden chair that was no doubt getting more uncomfortable by the second.

“Sir, I-”

“Shut the fuck up, I’m talking here.  Of course it makes sense, but you haven’t let me get to my question.  That’s rude, Tony, that pisses me the fuck off.”

“I’m-”

Smack!

I gave him an open-palmed slap across the face.  I didn’t want to risk knocking him out.  Not yet.  His head rocked to the side anyway, and when he looked back, that calm-ish veneer was gone.  It didn’t take the genius I had labelled him as to realize where this might be going.

“There you go again.  Just nod if you want to agree with me.  Nod, motherfucker.”

He did.

“So one of my little business partners owns a liquor store in China Town.  My accountants tell me he pays early every month.  Every month, isn’t that fantastic? He pays for protection to keep
his
business going.  You see how this works? Businesses interacting… synergy?”

I reached out and grabbed a fistful of Tony’s hair with one hand and his jawline with the other, shaking his head back and forth to make him nod furiously.  His face was a mask of terror when I let go, pale-skinned with a sheen of sweat.

“When somebody who works for me fucks over a business partner like that, it throws a wrench in the works of my whole business.  It fucks with my cash flow.  It’s like
stealing
from me.  In certain cultures, when somebody steals something from their employer, it’s customary to cut their hand off.  Did you know that?”

Tony opened his mouth, but then shut it again and shook his head, all remaining color draining from his face.  He was probably saying he didn’t know and begging me not to do that in equal measures.  I wouldn’t have been surprised if a wet patch showed up on the front of his pants.

I was almost ready to boil over.  The thought of tenderizing his face under my fists was all too seductive.  I simply wanted to let him marinade in his own stupidity a little longer.

“Anyway, my idea was to do that, but also make any shit for brains punk who steals from me
eat
his own hand too.  How the fuck about that?”

With a hard kick, I broke the two flimsy wooden legs on one side of the chair and Tony tumbled to the ground at my feet.  As he tried to get up, I kicked him right in the stomach and he crumpled back to the ground with a groaning whoosh of air.

“You stupid motherfucker!” I stomped on his ribs and broke at least one of them.

“Please!” he wheezed.

“Too late for that!”

I bent down and rolled him over, straddling his stomach so I could ruin his face with punches and elbows.  After a few strikes, the impacts started sounding pretty wet.

“Please!” This was a lot more gurgly-sounding.  More slurred.

“Who else did the job with you?” I asked.

“Jimmy, Brad… Pete!” he spluttered.

“They work for me?” I shook him by the collar of his shirt.

“N-no, sir! Please!”

The one eye that wasn’t swelling shut widened in terror as he saw me pick up one of the broken chair legs, which had splintered to a sharp point, and hold it above my head like I was going to drive a stake into a vampire.

“Please! Let me make it right!” he screamed.

I held him still with my free hand, the broken chair leg shaking with tension above us both.  It was time to decide whether he lived or died.

“Are you
ever
going to fucking break the rules or try to lie to me again?” I asked, as if anybody would say yes under the circumstances.

“No!”

“Right.  Jimmy, Brad and…”

“Pete,” Lorenzo finished for me.

“… all
do
work for me now, understand?”

Tony nodded.

“You’re all going to go back to the liquor store and be on call twenty-four fucking seven for Mr.  Xiaou, helping him clean up the mess you made.  You’re going to take back all the money you stole, money for the alcohol you stole, money to refund him for his monthly payment to me.  Understand?”

Tony grasped the straw with both hands.  “Yes! Yes, sir, Mr.  Barlow!”

“Anything Mr.  Xiaou wants done, you do.  If he wants to use your asshole as an ashtray, you’re upside-down next to his armchair while he smokes his pipe, you fucking get me? I’m going to have him fill out a motherfucking customer satisfaction survey, and if I hear you referred to him as anything but ‘sir’ then I swear the search parties will never find your body.”

I stood up and threw the chair leg away, looking with satisfaction at the blood on my knuckles.  Tony took one look at me and knew I meant it, and I’d have fun doing it.

“Get your ass out of here.  You get the money and you start work in China Town by three o’clock this afternoon.  Go!”

Mr.  Businessman didn’t need to be asked again, he didn’t even pause to pick up a stray tooth.  He got the hell out of dodge.

Lorenzo closed the door behind him and then pulled out the giant trash bags and a roll of duct tape from the inside pockets of his jacket to put them back in his briefcase.

“Well that was a nice little trip down memory lane,” he said.

“Sure was.”

I felt a thousand times better, letting all that rage and energy flow through me.  I always did.  I learned that when I was still a kid.  To beat a guy so hard they never lay a hand on you again, there was nothing that came close to it, until I learned about fucking, which was just as good.  Now they were both my drugs of choice.

“What I don’t get is why you’re here for this, but you weren’t there for Santino last night,” said Lorenzo.

“I thought you could handle it,” I said pointedly, wiping my hands on a towel from a drawer in the desk.

Lorenzo paused and a dirty look flashed across his face.  “Shit was already fucked by the time I got there,
boss
.  I bet if you and I had arrived earlier then we wouldn’t be having this talk now.”

Calming down from dealing with Tony, I held my hands up.  “OK.  Fair point.  You’re right.  What do you think the blowback is going to be from this? Santino was alive yesterday, he’s alive today.  Are we any worse off?”

That defiant expression dropped away, and Lorenzo’s temper-needle edged away from the red-zone too.  “Three guys down and Santino wouldn’t have shown up if the Picollis weren’t up to something.  That was a chance to nip it in the bud, so yeah, seems we’re worse off.  Hope that reporter pussy was worth it.”

Truth be told, despite Santino turning up and getting away, thoughts about Kendall had invaded my mind all night and all day so far.  The way her pussy felt when it was wrapped around my cock was better than I could have imagined.

Even now, I could hear those sexy little sounds she made when she was trying to take all the hard fucking I could give her.  I bet she wasn’t even aware she was making them most of the time.

I’d never cum so hard, so
much
, with any girl before.  If all the times I’d fucked before, and there were a
lot
, were on par with fighting… fucking Kendall was about a mile above all of it.

Of all the girls I’d had my way with, I’d never wanted to fuck one twice.  What was the point? They’d never forget the time I fucked them, they’d think of me when some poor asshole married them.  No woman had so much that I couldn’t take it all in one session.

Kendall was different somehow, though.  I still remembered her name for some reason.  Why? It had felt incredible to take her virginity, sure, but it felt good to see her look at me the way she did when I stopped those fuckwits from giving her shit in the restaurant.  It felt good to see her face light up when I simply slipped my arm around her.

I shook my head to try and get these alien thoughts out.  What the hell was I thinking? I decided I probably just needed to fuck the life out of her one more time to get her out of my system.

Kendall

Sitting comfortably in any chair was an impossibility.  Sitting in
this
chair took it to a whole other level of awkward squirming.

My pussy was
stinging
from its rough introduction to adult life the previous night.  I was trying to bear as much of my weight on the armrests as I could, and what I really wanted was one of those cushion rings the people with piles had to use.  That would have been heaven, I bet.

Every time I tried to get more comfortable and somebody looked at me out of the corner of their eye I was swamped with the terrible thought that, somehow, everybody knew that Jace Barlow had taken me hard and bareback the previous night.  They knew that I’d been a virgin yesterday and I wasn’t today. 
They knew
.

“So, overall, it couldn’t have gone better,” said Lucile.  “The Mayor was only too happy to talk at length about how his ‘Police in your Neighborhood’ initiative has reduced crime by sixty percent in the last few years, lots of great soundbites.”

“Did you ask about the rumors that the Picolli Crime Family hasn’t been disbanded, it’s just got better at hiding its tracks lately under that new boss… what was the name?” asked Mr.  Kinsley from the front of the room near the interactive whiteboard.

Please let them talk about this for the rest of the meeting
, I pleaded silently as I looked down with a wince at my woefully inadequate interview notes.  How was I supposed to spin an entire article out of the fact that he liked baseball? I couldn’t write a couple thousand words about how having sex with him for your first time would leave your most intimate places feeling sore for at least a day.  Maybe more.

I gulped.

“Sure.  He laughed it off, said it was just wishful thinking from people who have seen too many gangster movies and have romanticized the past.  He said the hardworking people in law enforcement gained the upper hand in the nineties, and the majority of the Mafia family members and associates, the Picollis included, packed their bags and headed for greener pastures a decade ago.  There’s no evidence whatsoever of any new boss in the family named Velenodi Picolli.  End quote,” said Lucile.

“Well, the crime figures seem to back that up.  Go over it with a fine-toothed comb though, because he’s right in a way.  The Mafia angle would sell more copies.  Anything else?”

“I interviewed Will Norris too, you remember that beat cop from last year? The one who got into some trouble trying to break up a domestic disturbance and the inner-city youths stepped in and saved his life?”

Mr.  Kinsley, his hands on the back of his chair as he stood behind it, nodded.

“He had a few new things to say about the night, and he told me a great story about when he got out of hospital and he was able to visit those people.  Really inspirational stuff,” said Lucile.

“When will the article be ready for review?” asked Mr.  Kinsley.

“Tomorrow morning.  I’m just waiting on the research department to fact check it and give me some official statistics to match up with some key points.”

“OK, great.  Well, I know why so many of you turned up for this meeting today, so I think we should just get right to it and see what we’ve got to work with on the Barlow story.  Kendall? The floor is yours.”

This was worse than those dreams where you think you’re at school and suddenly realize you forgot to wear clothes that day.  I forced myself to sit still despite the discomfort, and flicked through my notes as if I was deciding from multiple excellent points to start at.

“Well… um, Jace Barlow is a...  uh… very driven man.  He’s used his winnings to invest in a number of businesses in various industries.  Uh…” I stammered my way through common knowledge for almost a full minute.

“Yeah, but where did he
come
from?” said Mr.  Kinsley.  “Who
is
he? How did
he
know what businesses to invest in when so many people back the wrong horses? What’s he doing
next
? What do you have that we can’t get from the Wikipedia page?”

“Um… he… likes baseball…”

Mr.  Kinsley let go of his chair and circled the table towards me.  “Let me see that.”

He grabbed my notes and flicked through them.  It didn’t take long, and when he looked up at me I thought he would probably have the same expression if all I had on those pages were dirty stories about his mother.

“I’m sorry… I… he just kept…”

“What’s ‘art, arrow, OK’?”

“He… I’m really sorry… he thinks art is… OK.”

There must have been twenty people in that room, but for a few seconds you could have heard a pin drop on to a feather pillow.  I was so embarrassed, and Mr.  Kinsley looked like he was wavering between anger and resignation.

“Art… is OK?” He paused for a moment and then threw up his hands, scattering my notes in the process.  “You heard it here first, folks.  The first interview Jace Barlow ever gives, it lands in our lap, and art is A-freakin’-OK.  Holy crap, Kendall! What happened to the questions we fed you?”

Mr.  Kinsley had returned to his spot at the front of the room and was gesturing wildly with his hands as he really got going.  Some people in the room seemed to share his anger at the missed opportunity, others were holding back laughter as he tore me a new one.

“He just kept dodging the questions,” I said.

“What happened to the girl that showed up at the doorstep here determined to show me what she could do? Is
this
it?”

“I-”

“I thought you said he was flirting with you? What happened to that? Lucile.  What happened when Renny Ramone flirted with you?”

“I got him to admit that he’d been taking performance enhancing drugs for years, and that all the important matches in the Champ League had been fixed for almost a decade.  People went to jail,” said Lucile smugly.  “But I can’t imagine Jace Barlow was flirting with…
her
.  I mean… come on, right? Let’s be serious.  She’s not exactly his type.”

I’d managed to keep my head held up for this long, but I couldn’t show my face anymore.  I looked sadly at my hands in my lap as I concentrated more on trying to fight back tears than the words flying around me.

“Oh, sweetie,” said Lucile.  “Don’t feel bad, it’s just different here in the big city.  Not everyone can cut it.  The boys where you’re from just flirt differently.  Probably.”

I wanted to shout from the rooftops that Jace Barlow had fucked me halfway through a wall last night, but knew that would sound even stupider in real life than it did in my head.  He did
more
than flirt with me.

He even… liked me, I thought.  He saw something in me worth standing up for, worth defending.  He saw something sexy.  When I was with him, I had let myself believe it too.

I realized that last night was the first time I’d felt really good about myself for a long time.  All my life, when somebody noticed me at all, I usually saw indifference or disappointment.  Last night, I looked up at Jace and saw that I was the center of the universe for a moment.  What a feeling.

That fleeting illusion had come at a price though.  The way Mr.  Kinsley was talking, I might be looking for a new job or moving home to my parents once he had the paperwork in order.

The thought of doing either made my heart sink, the latter far more than the former.  If I went home, it would be humble pie for dinner for the rest of my life.  I was given a golden opportunity and all I had to show for it now was a sore pussy, and even that would fade with time.

The sound of scraping chairs startled me out of my day-mare and I saw that the meeting had apparently come to a close.  Without making eye contact with anybody, I crawled around retrieving my notes for reasons I couldn’t have explained, useless as they were.

As I grabbed one piece, I saw the note “group home from 6 years old” and had a flashback to the momentary crack in his expression when I had asked him about that over dinner.  My breath caught in my throat as I felt a ray of hope shining through the clouds.

This
was the first thread of a story. 
This
was where he came from.  All I had to do was get another meeting with him and I would at least know where to start.  I’d already, technically, had two meetings with him, so I was already ahead of anybody else in the journalism world, so I had a better chance than anybody.  How hard could it be?

Three hours of telephone hell informed me about how difficult it really was.  It started with the tall blonde receptionist stonewalling me and finished with me trying every number I could find for any companies remotely linked with Jace Barlow.  I vowed that even if he was the hottest guy I’d ever met, if I got another meeting with him, I’d get my story out of him just to see the look on Lucile’s face and so I wouldn’t
have
to see the looks on my parents’ faces.

Suddenly, as I listened to terrible hold music in one ear, the background noise of the office changed completely.  Rolling like a wave from the direction of the front desk, animated conversations on telephones changed to hushed whispers with whoever was close enough.

The wave swept past me, but I didn’t look up, I didn’t have time for anything except tracking down the most heavily tattooed businessman in the city.  My finger was hovering over the button, ready to hang up and dial the next number when my search abruptly ended.

I smelled him before I saw him.  Cologne, money, the faint essence of
him
under it all.  I hung up the phone as I spun around in my office chair, and there he was, leaning casually on the wall of my cubical as if he owned the place.  Oh.  My.  Gosh, he smelled
good
.

Mere minutes ago I’d been vowing to keep it all business if I was ever face to face with him again, but something about Jace Barlow seemed to break my mind.

All at once, it felt like there were invisible ropes tied around each knee, pulling my legs apart.  Sore or not, there were parts of my body that absolutely cried out for him.

That wasn’t the only battle waging inside of me though.  I wanted to run and hide.  That was a more familiar sensation.

Standing right
here
in front of me as I failed to come up with even a “hello” let alone a comprehensive interview was the first guy I’d had sex with.  The previous night.  He’d
seen
me, he’d
felt
me.  I felt exposed all over again, except this time it was in front of the entire office.

I blushed and folded my arms across my chest, trying to make myself small enough to disappear completely.  That primal, sexual, part of me that had been so utterly satisfied by Jace last night called me crazy from whatever dark room of my brain it called home.

Jace was taking his time giving me a full body scan and it felt like he had x-ray vision.  Maybe it was because out of everybody in the entire world, he was the only one who really knew what I looked like under these clothes.

“Hi Jace… er… Mr.  Barl-”

“You can call me Jace, Kendall, it’s fine, remember,” he said, calm as the eye of a hurricane.

“Right.  Right.  Uh… hi, Jace.”

“Hi.  Sorry to drop in unannounced, but I was in the area and-”

“Mr.  Barlow!”

Mr.  Kinsley was striding across the office wearing his suit jacket for the first time I’d noticed in weeks, buttoning and smoothing as he went.  He looked like he might have fallen off his chair when whoever it was had rushed in to tell him the most sought-after interviewee in the city had walked through the doors.

A bodyguard, standing silently behind Jace watched Mr.  Kinsley’s approach like a hawk, looking ready to spring into action at the slightest misstep.  My boss put on his most disarming smile.

“Sir, it’s an honor to meet you!” said Mr.  Kinsley, whose enthusiastic expression only faltered for a moment when Jace didn’t accept the outstretched hand.  “On behalf of
The Weekly Enquirer
, I just wanted to apologize for sending such an inexperienced staff member yesterday.  I understand that Kendall here didn’t really perform to the standard we expect from all our journalists, and I hope that her conduct hasn’t left a sour taste in your mouth.  If you’d be willing, I can have the boardroom cleared out and one of our more senior employees can…”

Jace held up his hand to cut off Mr.  Kinsley, lip curled in mild disgust.  “Man, who the fuck cares what you have to say about anything? Seriously.” He turned to me.  “Who is this guy?”

“Um… Jace, this is my boss.  Mr.  Kinsley.  Mr.  Kinsley, Jace Barlow.”

Mr.  Kinsley held out his hand again.

“Really,” said Jace, dubiously, still ignoring the handshake.  “Well, I was just coming in here to apologize for having to leave the interview early due to some unexpected business coming up.  I was hoping to reschedule so we could finish.”

“Of course,” said Mr.  Kinsley.  “I can have Lucile Norris reschedule to suit any time you’d-”

“I’m not talking to anybody but Kendall.”

Mr.  Kinsley faltered for a second.  “Are you sure? I mean-”