Rowdy

скачать книгу бесплатно


He rubbed his hands over his shaved head and I wondered how often Saint did the same thing to him. Those flames he had tattooed along each side of his scalp were bright and fun. If he was my guy I would have my hands all over them every chance I got. His purple eyes flashed at me with a mixture of good-natured humor and aggravation.

“What do you need me to do in order for you to get that store upstairs up and running? I thought I had an idea, but every time I think I’m moving forward something happens and I get pulled in the opposite direction.”

“I need you guys to give me some images, some kind of logo, so I can contact a screen printer and get the designs put on T-shirts and other apparel.” It had to be cute stuff and trendy stuff that fit with the vibe the guys had going on. “I think you should all base your design ideas off of tattoos each of you already has. The fangirls would go bonkers for it. You have that dragon, Rule has that snake on his arm.” I nodded when his eyes got squinty in thought. “Cora has all those flowers, and Rowdy has that anchor on his neck that is impossible to miss. All different, all distinct, and I think it would make a statement. That way we aren’t just branding the tattoo shops—we’re branding the people behind them.” I reached out and squeezed his impressive bicep. “I also think you should do a special limited-edition design for Phil. Something old-school, something badass that pays tribute to him and his hand in leaving this behind for you guys.”

I saw his Adam’s apple slide up and down and his eyes blinked fast for a second until he cleared his throat and dipped his head down in a nod.

“You are exactly the person we needed to make this happen. My dad really did know his shit.”

I grinned. “He was a very smart and tricky man.”

“He wanted you here for more than the shop, didn’t he?”

I lifted a bare shoulder and let it fall. “Sometimes it takes someone from the outside to notice what is missing. Phil was really good at that.”

Nash grunted his agreement and lifted a hand to wave his client over as he entered the shop.

“He was.” He took a step around me and then paused and looked down at me. “The store was all Rowdy’s idea. The concept, the idea to branch out, was all him. I think I’ll give him a call and tell him he can be your point person on getting up and going. Rule and I have too much other stuff to deal with right now.”

It was there in those fabulous eyes, the same kind of compassion and need for the people around him to be happy that glowed out of his father’s eyes. He was Phil’s son—no doubt about it. I laughed and turned back to the desk so I could help Cora manage the still-growing crowd of potential clients.

“Whatever you say, boss.”

*

It wasn’t until hours and hours later that I finally got to my brownie. It had been a packed day for appointments, and there were two late walk-ins that a couple of the new artists agreed to stick around and do, so it was almost nine at night by the time I got around to doing the cash-out for the day and locking everything up. Even on a busy day here it didn’t come close to the chaos I was used to at the shop in the casino. That place had almost fifteen artists on staff and was open until two in the morning. The shops in Denver were successful and busy but they felt way less like a spectacle than my previous job had. I was surprised how much I liked the closer-knit, more mellow feel of my new gig and I appreciated that they were really cranking out amazing works of art versus cookie-cutter, flash tattoos that tourists picked off a wall.

I was the type of person that got bored and hated routine. I think that was one of the reasons I was always on the move so much. I never wanted to be predictable. I never wanted to know what was in store for me from one day to the next. I’m sure it had to do with growing up in a house where routine was everything, where not one second passed that wasn’t accounted for and planned down to the minute detail. My dad lived and died by rules and regulations, so it made sense that as soon as I was able I decided to never have a plan. I was always content to just land wherever the wind took me—only now that had changed. I felt grounded here. Felt like I could wake up to the mountains, fresh air, and crazy weather for an endless number of days and never get tired of it.

I also knew without question that I could stare into Rowdy St. James’s cerulean eyes for an eternity and never see anything prettier—even when he was looking at me like I was something toxic and dangerous.

I was munching on the brownie and called Poppy again, this time leaving a message where I chewed her out and threatened to get on the next plane out of Denver if she didn’t call me back tomorrow. I was putting the cash from the day’s deposit in the safe that was in Cora’s office and making sure all the doors were locked upstairs when I caught sight of myself in one of the crazy fun-house mirrors the contractor had put up here to tie the boardwalk theme of the shop together.

It was the mirror that stretched me out and made me look like a giraffe. It also reflected that I had thick black smudges of eyeliner under each eye and that my normally sleek and styled hair was a frizzy mess from the rain. I couldn’t believe I had worked the entire last part of the day looking so rumpled and messy. I shook my head at the silly reflection and went to turn the lights off when I heard footsteps on the floor below me.

The only people with keys to either shop were the guys and Cora, so I just assumed it was one of them and waited to see if the footsteps were going to hit the stairs. They did, and when I heard the distinctive click that could only belong to a pair of well-worn cowboy boots, I felt my heart start to pick up speed.

Rowdy’s slicked-up hair cleared the top landing and his bright gaze landed on me. He didn’t smile or grin. He didn’t quip one of his fast responses at me; he just stared at me steadily as he closed the space between us until he was standing in front of me. He towered over me and I had to tilt my head back to look up at him. Flirty-fun Rowdy seemed reserved for any female that wasn’t me and I didn’t know if I liked that or if it annoyed me just yet.

“Hey.”

His eyes flared hot at the center and I saw the corners of his mouth tense in a frown as he continued to just stare at me without speaking.

It took a solid five minutes before he decided to open his mouth. “Nash called me and told me to swing by and see if you were still here. He wants me to talk to you about the store.”

I lifted an eyebrow at him and took a step back. When I did so he took a minute to breathe the space in and run his thumb along the edge of one of his ruthlessly trimmed sideburns. His eyes also swept over me and landed back on my face with his frown still in place.

“Why are you such a mess?”

I snorted and flipped my tangled hair over my shoulder. “I got caught in the rain on my lunch break and almost ran some poor woman over in my haste to get back to work. I can’t believe no one told me I looked like a drowned rat all day.” I rolled my eyes and went to move another step or two back from him but he caught my wrist in his hand and tugged me closer.

My lungs stopped working and my heart fell out of my chest and landed at his feet when he took his free hand and ran his thumb along the delicate curve below one of my eyes where all my eyeliner had retreated to.

“This actually looks familiar. I remember the first time you snuck makeup from one of your girlfriends at school and couldn’t get it off.” He repeated the process on the other eye and I had to suck in a breath out of desperation because his face was starting to get blurry from lack of oxygen to my brain. “You didn’t know the stuff was waterproof and spent an hour trying to scrub it off with the hose in the backyard because you knew your dad would lose his shit if he caught you with it on. You just ended up looking like a soggy raccoon.”

I remembered the incident just as clearly as he seemed to, only I was having a hard time thinking straight because his thumb was now dancing across the high arch of my cheekbone and skipped even lower to glance across the ruby I wore right above my lip.

“You ran home and asked Maria what to do. She sent you back with olive oil and saved the day.” I gave him a lopsided grin. “It wasn’t too long after that that I started wearing as much makeup as I could just to get under his skin. Some habits stuck with me, I guess.”

I saw his chest shudder as he took a deep breath and something dark moved across his sky-blue eyes. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something else then changed his mind and snapped it closed. He dropped my wrist like it was on fire and took a step back from me. I didn’t bother to try and hide the disappointment that his retreat caused.

“So talk to me about the store.”

I sighed a little, but if he wanted to talk business I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. At least he was carrying on a conversation with me.

I ran over the basic ideas I had given Nash earlier. I told him that I really thought their clients would love the opportunity to represent not only the shop but their favorite artists and I was happy that he seemed to agree. He told me his idea about offering prints and graphic pieces of art to sell as well as apparel and I had to admit I was impressed with his entrepreneurial mind. He had always been a lot more than a pretty face and a jock. I was happy to see he hadn’t lost that as he had grown into adulthood.

We tossed ideas back and forth for twenty minutes or so and I told him he was in charge of wrangling Rule and Nash because he knew them better than I did in order to get them to give me designs I could use. He readily agreed and then we fell into an awkward silence as it was obviously time to go. He told me he would have something for me by the end of the following week and I nodded in agreement. We turned in different directions, him toward the stairs and me back toward the light switch on the wall, when he suddenly said my name in a very strangled tone.

“Salem . . .”

I looked at him over my shoulder and lifted a brow at the intent look on his handsome face.

“Yeah?”

His boots clattered on the wooden floor as he stalked toward me. His mouth was in a tight line and his eyes were bleeding blue fire at me.

“What is that?”

He walked right up to me. He didn’t stop until his chest was almost pressed into my back. For someone who had actively avoided me for weeks and weeks and didn’t seem thrilled to have to share the same space as me, he sure didn’t have any kind of problem at all putting his hands on me.

He collected my heavy fall of two-tone hair in his hands and pulled it all up and off the bare expanse of my shoulders and neck.

From one shoulder to the other I had a field of Texas bluebonnets and in between all the flowers were tiny little sparrows. It was a big tattoo, bright and pretty, that took up a lot of real estate on my skin and in my heart. The flowers and birds were so lifelike it looked like a photograph not a painting made of flesh and ink. It was the first tattoo I had ever had done and it had withstood the test of time pretty well over the years. Normally it was hidden by my hair or whatever I was wearing for the day, but with this shirt, the entire thing was on display and it was no wonder he was looking at the ink like it was going to jump off my skin and wrap him in memories.

“I got it done as soon as I left Loveless.” My voice was a little shaky even though I meant to sound defiant. The flowers were the exact same color as the heartbreak in his blue eyes that day I left.

“I drew that for you.” He sounded mad. He sounded hurt. I couldn’t blame him for either.

“I know you did, Rowdy. I might have had to leave Texas, but it was never my intention to make you think I was leaving you and Poppy as well.”

His finger traced along the field of flowers and he said more to himself than to me, “You never thought it was weird I liked to draw. Everyone else always told me to focus on football. Everyone said I was going to go pro, so I shouldn’t waste my time with studying or messing around with art. You always told me to do what I wanted. You were the only one that ever said it was okay that I was really good at more than one thing. I drew this picture for you for your birthday when you turned sixteen.”

I was going to jump out of my skin and then I was going to jump him if he didn’t stop stroking me like that. I let out a shuddering breath.

“It was beautiful. The gesture and the picture. You always were extremely talented and I thought your art should be on display. I never forgot you, Rowdy. I always took you with me wherever I ended up.”

He said my name again, only this time he sounded confused and lost. I gasped a little as his hands suddenly gripped my shoulders and he spun me around. Before my mind could catch up to what was going on, he was backing me up toward that fun-house mirror. When my bare shoulders hit the chilly glass I gasped, which worked out perfectly for him because he suddenly dropped his head and clamped his mouth over mine.

My brain might not have known what to do with his sudden switch in demeanor toward me but my body had no trouble responding. My back arched. My arms reached up to twine around his neck. My nipples got hard and my mouth did its very best to seal itself to his forever. My tongue twisted around his and I whimpered as his hands slipped around my waist to pull me up higher on the toes of my heels in order to match his impressive height. Thank God I typically wore ridiculous shoes, or getting all the good stuff lined up would have been impossible.

It wasn’t a sweet kiss. It wasn’t a delicate kiss. I could taste the past and his resentment in it. I could feel that he was chasing down ghosts as his teeth nipped a little harder than they should have along the plush curve of my bottom lip. None of that mattered, though, because this was Rowdy and to me he felt like everything that had ever been good or made me happy in this whole entire world.

His hands were a little too hard, his breathing a little too fast, and when I leaned even more fully into him I could feel that his heartbeat was erratic and unsteady. I was trying to climb up him, trying to get inside of him, and just when I got my hands up to the back of his head so I could pull him even more fully to me, my phone decided to ring from where it was stashed in the back pocket of my shorts.

Carl Perkins was singing “Honey Don’t,” and while I would have been glad to ignore it and continue kissing the boy I had always wanted to kiss in another way than good-bye, I couldn’t because it was finally my sister calling me back.

I dropped back to my feet and let my arms drop from around Rowdy’s neck. I dug the phone out and hit the touch screen to answer the call.

“Poppy?”

As soon as my sister’s name fell off of my lips Rowdy’s entire behavior changed. Dark shutters fell across his pretty eyes and he stepped deliberately away from me. Without another word he turned on his boot heel and headed for the stairs. He didn’t say good-bye, didn’t look back. There was no acknowledgment that we had been involved in a very serious lip lock just seconds before. He just vanished, leaving me all keyed up and with more questions than I had had before. Damn him and damn the past that seemed to be standing in the way of where I wanted to be.

CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_69d50e40-85e8-5423-a8dd-42773b7fdd13)

Rowdy (#ulink_69d50e40-85e8-5423-a8dd-42773b7fdd13)

It was so hard to keep the memories at bay once the door they had all been closed behind was flung open. One after another they chased me across all of my waking hours and danced behind my eyelids at night.

I remembered the first time Poppy ran across the yard between our houses and asked me if I wanted to play. I was so used to being overlooked, so used to being forgotten and alone, that I almost ran in the other direction. She was so cute—all knobby knees and long pigtails. She smiled at me and told me we could be friends forever and I remembered even at ten years old thinking I never wanted to be without her smile and her kindness.

I remembered Salem being patient and funny as two kids trailed after her like she was the queen of the world. She never tired of the questions, of the attention, of fixing up my hurt feelings when I had a bad day at school—which there were a lot of—and she never looked at me like she found me lacking even when everyone else in my little world was trying to guide me in a direction I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. She was always my biggest cheerleader and it never mattered if it was because I scored a touchdown or drew her a picture.

Along with all those memories came the other ones, the ones that made it hard to breathe and made my head throb and my heart hurt.

I remembered Poppy and her big, sad eyes telling me she would never love me the way I loved her, that we would always be from two different worlds, and therefore it would never work out. I literally put my young and soft heart in her hands and she had chucked it back at me like it was nothing. I had had a crush on her—was so sure that I’d loved her—for what felt like forever. I just knew she was my one. She was steady. She was unfailingly kind and generous. She was lovely inside and out, but to her I wasn’t enough. I didn’t have the right background, the right upbringing, and in all honesty the right skin color for her to ever be able to bring me home and tell her dad she was spending the rest of her life with me. I would have given her the world—only she didn’t want it—or me.

I also remembered standing in the driveway watching Salem and her dad scream at each other while she threw all her things into the back of a rusted-out Bonneville and her telling him point-blank she was never going to step foot in his house or in Loveless again. She was my best friend. She was the one that always made everything better, and even at fifteen I remembered thinking I would never make it the rest of the way through high school without her. How was I supposed to pick which college I was going to go to? I was going to tell my foster parents, Poppy, everyone, that I didn’t want to play football, I wanted to paint and draw. I wanted an art scholarship not an athletic one and Salem was the only one that would support me in that. I needed her to give me the strength to fight for it, but in the blink of an eye she was gone.

She saw me where I was lurking and got back out of that car so that she could give me a kiss—a real kiss—on the lips and I remembered she tasted salty and sweet because she was crying as she told me good-bye. It was my first kiss and the memory of it was tied to watching yet another person I cared about leaving me on my own. She tried to tell me she would write, call, send a carrier pigeon, but I just walked away from her because I couldn’t listen to it and I knew she was lying. Once she was gone, I wouldn’t matter anymore, which had proven to be true.

Now all those memories were tangling and colliding with the new ones I had of the way grown-up Salem felt pressed against me. The memory of the way my dick twitched when I saw her standing at the top of the stairs that first day she got hired to work at the shop. There was the irritating remembrance of the way she burned as hot as the sun when I touched her and that she still tasted salty and sweet, but now I was old enough to want to know if she tasted that way everywhere on her body, not just on her pouty lips. I couldn’t stop seeing the way her dark eyes gleamed like polished onyx, or stop thinking about the way her full mouth felt better than anything I could ever remember feeling, and the fact she tasted like chocolate and history in the best and worst way was haunting me every minute of every day. I knew that if her phone hadn’t gone off I was a split second away from trying to get my hands in the waistband of those short-shorts she had been wearing, and even closer to tugging the shoulder of her sexy top the rest of the way off. I wanted to touch all that caramel-colored skin and put my mouth on the pointy tips of her breasts that I could feel poking into my chest.

It was all crashing and colliding so loud and hard that I felt like I couldn’t see or hear anything else. I actively avoided going to the new shop and even harassed Rule into taking my shift that week so I didn’t have to see her. I couldn’t get on top of it and as a result I was drowning in the past and running away from the future. I was exhausted.

Even though I told her I would get her some drawings by the end of the week, I totally blew it off and now it was Thursday night and I was well on my way to getting absolutely shit-faced with my friend Zeb at the Bar. I also fully intended to take Dixie home because the quickest way to get over the idea of someone was to get into the idea of someone else. And even if Dixie wasn’t game to play surrogate lover, then maybe I would take the blonde that was eye-fucking me from the end of the bar home with me and her hot, brunette friend was totally welcome to join us. I smiled at her for good measure and saw her flush and turn to whisper to her friend.

I caught Asa’s eye; he was watching the show with a smirk and shrugged. I turned back to Zeb, who didn’t look half as impressed as the southern bartender did.

“What?” My tone was a little surly and a whole lot sloppy. I was chugging Jäger shots like they were water and I think they had finally caught up to me.

Zeb Fuller was a good dude. He had been a client first and then morphed into a friend after we spent several hours covering up the nasty jailhouse tattoos he had gotten over the couple of years he had spent locked up. The guy was an amazing craftsman. I was pretty sure he could build a house with nothing more than some Elmer’s Glue and some toothpicks, but life hadn’t always been a picnic for him and such being the case, I had wanted to help him out. I was the one that suggested Nash and Rule look into hiring Zeb as the contractor on the new shop, and much to my relief it had worked like a dream for everyone involved.

With all my friends being married, or having babies, or settling down with sexy nurses, I was on my own way more than I was used to be, so I had taken to calling Zeb when I needed a drinking buddy for the night.

Zeb lifted his Jack and Coke and just looked at me over the rim of it and told me “nothing” in a tone that clearly meant something.

I squinted my eyes a little and tossed back the newly filled shot Asa had placed in front of me with a lifted brow.

“What’s with the look, then?”

Zeb was a massive guy. I think he was even bigger than Rome, which was almost unheard of as far as I was concerned. He was as covered in ink as I was, and with his shaggy dark hair and scruffy face he was one intimidating bastard. I think I was lucky we were friends or else I might have regretted being a dick to him.

“I don’t know what’s more pathetic, the fact you are wasting your game on some random bar chick . . .” He grunted at me when I scowled at him. “Or the fact that you’re a grown-ass man trying to drink your girl problems away.”

I was twenty-five but felt like I had lived a hundred lifetimes from the moment the cops had showed up at the apartment door in the middle of the night to tell me my mom was dead. They had explained that she had taken a bullet when some punk kid tried to carjack her when she hadn’t moved fast enough to suit him. They put me in the system that night and I had never escaped. I had been a grown-ass man since that moment on, and Zeb was right, I should be man enough to face Salem and the way she had me tied up in knots.

“What do you know about it?” I sounded petulant and irritable.

Zeb rolled his dark green eyes and his normally unsmiling mouth twitched at me in unsympathetic humor.

“I know she’s about this tall.” He held his hand out to about shoulder height. “She has a figure that makes it hard to think and eyes and hair that were made to get lost in when the lights go out.”

I felt a muscle tic in my jaw as I leaned on the bar and asked Asa as he walked by, “You telling stories?”

He laughed at me and I wanted to lunge over the bar and choke him.

“Hey, she’s a fox and radiates hot sex and good times like it’s effortless. I was just sharing my appreciation of a pretty girl. It’s not my issue that you can’t seem to see her looking at you like you’re her favorite drink and we’re in a drought.”

Oh, I could see it all right. I just didn’t have the first clue as to what to do with it. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. After that kiss I had a pretty fucking clear idea where everything I was feeling toward Salem was headed, right into my bed, but I wasn’t sure I could handle that. Just her saying Poppy’s name had been enough to tame the raging hard-on kissing her had awoken and had done more to get my head out of my pants than any shock of cold water ever could.

Could I ever really have loved Poppy the way I thought I had if just the sight of Salem, the idea of putting my mouth on her, did more to wind me up than Poppy ever had? I don’t think there was really any way I would’ve been able to kiss Salem if all those feelings I had for Poppy in the past were really as important as I had always made them out to be.

I mumbled something that made no sense and picked up my beer.

“It’s not just some random chick that I’m trying to navigate around. I know this girl and she knows me.”

Zeb chomped on a piece of ice from his drink and I thought he looked like he could be out in the woods somewhere living off the land. He was the epitome of what a Coloradoan should look like. I thought we should maybe put him on the state flag to represent us all proudly. Yep, I was drunk.

“That’s your problem, Rowdy. You never want a chick to know you. You just want to hit it and quit it so you don’t have to put any effort into it.”

I growled a little and motioned for another shot. “I put effort into it once. More effort than any young man should, and it blew up in my face. I learned that lesson the hard way. No more effort . . . just a good time for me and a great time for her. Everybody wins.”

Zeb made a noise and nodded when Asa asked him if he wanted another round.

“One girl burned you a long time ago, so that means all girls are made of the same flammable material? Gotta say, I always thought you were smarter than that.”

I was getting annoyed. We were supposed to be brothers-in-arms—bros before hos—and all that noise. I didn’t ask him to hang out so he could shove logic and brutal clarity at me.

“You don’t understand.”

He rolled his eyes at me.

“No? I was engaged when I got arrested. I loved the holy shit out of that girl. She told me she would wait, that I was her one true love and even bars and time wouldn’t be able to keep us apart. It took a little less than two months for her to stop visiting, a little over six and she was engaged to a ski pro. She has two kids now and drives a minivan. You think that means all women are like that? That there isn’t one out there that would really wait if she loved me?”

We just stared at each other until he shook his head.

“I don’t. I think there are good women out there that will stand by their man no matter what. I think there is a woman out there that won’t give a shit I did time and she will love me anyway and be willing to see what I have to offer now. Sure, until I find her I have no qualms about doing easy—easy has its place and can be a good time. But when it gets hard, when the girl is worth it, I’m not scared to do the work.” He laughed. “I like doing the work, especially when it’s hands-on.”