Tempting Tristan Page 21

  Emotions he didn’t want to deal with burned in his gut, causing his chest to constrict. He turned to go inside, hoping to outrun thoughts of his own fucked-up family, whom he’d tried—and failed—to save. His cell phone rang with his brother’s ringtone, “A Beautiful Lie” by 30 Seconds to Mars.

  “Fuck,” he muttered, debating letting the call go to voicemail, but six months of silence from his brother was a long time. Rain pelleted his back as he pressed his palm to the door to steady himself. The ringing stopped, and he blew out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d trapped inside. The phone rang again, and he froze.

  He’d just freed himself from the dredges of hell that he’d been thrown into in an effort to save his brother. He didn’t need to get wrapped up in whatever mess the drug-addicted fool had gotten himself into. The call went to voicemail, and Truman eyed the metal box containing his painting supplies. Breathing like he’d been in a fight, he wished he could paint the frustration out of his head. When the phone rang for the third time in as many minutes, the third time since he was released from prison six months ago, he reluctantly answered.

  “Quincy.” He hated the way his brother’s name came out sounding like the enemy. Quincy had been just a kid when Truman went to prison. Heavy breathing filled the airwaves. The hairs on Truman’s forearms and neck stood on end. He knew fear when he heard it. He could practically taste it as he ground his teeth together.

  “I need you,” his brother’s tortured voice implored.

  Need me? Truman had hunted down his brother after he was released from prison, and when he’d finally found him, Quincy was so high on crack he was nearly incoherent—but it didn’t take much for fuck off to come through loud and clear. What Quincy needed was rehab, but Truman knew from his tone that wasn’t the point of the call.

  Before he could respond, his brother croaked out, “It’s Mom. She’s really bad.”

  Fuck. He hadn’t had a mother since she turned her back on him more than six years ago, and he wasn’t about to throw away the stability he’d finally found for the woman who’d sent him to prison and never looked back.

  He scrubbed a hand down his rain-soaked face. “Take her to the hospital.”

  “No cops. No hospitals. Please, man.”

  A painful, high-pitched wail sounded through the phone.

  “What have you done?” Truman growled, the pit of his stomach plummeting as memories of another dark night years earlier came rushing in. He paced the deck as thunder rumbled overhead like a warning. “Where are you?”

  Quincy rattled off the address of a seedy area about thirty minutes outside of Peaceful Harbor, and then the line went dead.

  Truman’s thumb hovered over the cell phone screen. Three little numbers—9-1-1—would extricate him from whatever mess Quincy and their mother had gotten into. Images of his mother spewing lies that would send him away and of Quincy, a frightened boy of thirteen, looking devastated and childlike despite his near six-foot stature, assailed him.

  Push the buttons.

  Push the fucking buttons.

  He remembered Quincy’s wide blue eyes screaming silent apologies as Truman’s sentence was revealed. It was those pleading eyes he saw now, fucked up or not, that had him trudging through the rain to his truck and driving over the bridge, leaving Peaceful Harbor and his safe, stable world behind.

  THE STENCH OF urine and human waste filled the dark alley—not only waste as in feces, but waste as in drug dealers, whores, and other deviants. Mud and graffiti streaked cracked and mangled concrete. Somewhere above, shouts rang out. Truman had tunnel vision as he moved swiftly between the tall buildings in the downpour. A dog barked in the distance, followed by the unmistakable yelp of a wounded animal. Truman rolled his broad shoulders forward, his hands fisted by his sides as memories hammered him, but it was the incessant torturous wailing coming from behind the concrete walls that had him breathing harder, readying for a fight. It sounded like someone—or something—was suffering inside the building, and despite his loathing for the woman who had brought him into the world, he wouldn’t wish that on her—or wish the wrath he’d bring down on whoever was doing it on anyone else.

  The rusty green metal door brought the sounds of prison bars locking to the forefront of his mind, stopping him cold. He drew in a few deep breaths, pushing them out fast and hard as memories assailed him. The wailing intensified, and he forced himself to plow through the door. The rancid, pungent scents of garbage and drugs filled the smoky room, competing with the terrified cries. In the space of a few heart-pounding seconds, Truman took in the scene. He barely recognized the nearly toothless, rail-thin woman lying lifeless on the concrete floor, staring blankly up at the ceiling. Angry track marks like viper bites covered pin-thin arms. In the corner, a toddler sat on a dirty, torn mattress, wearing filthy clothes and sobbing. Her dark hair was tangled and matted, her skin covered in grit and dirt. Her cheeks were bright red, eyes swollen from crying. Beside her a baby lay on its back, its frail arms extended toward the ceiling, shaking as it cried so hard it went silent between wails. His eyes landed on Quincy, huddled beside the woman on the floor. Tears streaked his unshaven, sunken cheeks. Those big blue eyes Truman remembered were haunted and scared, their once vibrant color now deadened, bloodshot with the sheen of a soul-stealing high. His tattooed arms revealed the demons that had swooped in after Truman was incarcerated for the crime his brother had committed, preying on the one person he had wanted to protect. He hadn’t been able to protect anyone from behind bars.

  “She’s…” Quincy’s voice was nearly indiscernible. “Dead,” he choked out.

  Truman’s heart slammed against his ribs. His mind reeled back to another stormy night, when he’d walked into his mother’s house and found his brother with a bloody knife in his hands—and a dead man sprawled across their mother’s half-naked body. He swallowed the bile rising in his throat, pain and anger warring for dominance. He crouched and checked for a pulse, first on her wrist, then on her neck. The pit of his stomach lurched. His mind reeled as he looked past his brother to the children on the mattress.

  “Those your kids?” he ground out.

  Quincy shook his head. “Mom’s.”

  Truman stumbled backward, feeling cut open, flayed, and left to bleed. His siblings? Living like this?

  “What the hell, Quincy?” He crossed the room and picked up the baby, holding its trembling body as it screamed. With his heart in his throat, he crouched beside the toddler and reached for her, too. She wrapped shaky arms around his neck and clung with all her tiny might. They were both featherlight. He hadn’t held a baby since Quincy was born, when Truman was nine.

  “I’ve been out for six months,” he seethed. “You didn’t think to tell me that Mom had more kids? That she was fucking up their lives, too? I could have helped.”

  Quincy scoffed. “You told me…” He coughed, wheezing like he was on his last lung. “To fuck off.”

  Truman glared at his brother, sure he was breathing fire. “I pulled you out of a fucking crack house the week I got out of prison and tried to get you help. I destroyed my life trying to protect you, you idiot. You told me to fuck off and then went underground. You never mentioned that I have a sister and—” He looked at the baby, having no idea if it was a boy or a girl. A thin spray of reddish hair covered its tiny head.

  “Brother. Kennedy and Lincoln. Kennedy’s, I don’t know, two, three maybe? And Lincoln’s…Lincoln’s the boy.”

  Their fucking mother and her presidential names. She once told him that it was important to have an unforgettable name, since they’d have forgettable lives. Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies.

  Rising to his feet, teeth gritted, his rain-drenched clothes now covered in urine from their saturated diapers, Truman didn’t even try to mask his repulsion. “These are babies, you asshole. You couldn’t clean up your act to take care of them?”

  Quincy turned sullenly back to their mother, shoving Truman’s disgust for his brother�
��s pathetic life deeper. The baby’s shrieks quieted as the toddler patted him. Kennedy blinked big, wet, brown eyes up at Truman, and in that instant, he knew what he had to do.

  “Where’s their stuff?” Truman looked around the filthy room. He spotted a few diapers peeking out from beneath a ratty blanket and picked them up.

  “They were born on the streets. They don’t even have birth certificates.”

  “Are you shitting me?” How the fuck did they survive? Truman grabbed the tattered blanket that smelled like death and wrapped it around the babies, heading for the door.

  Quincy unfolded his thin body and rose to his feet, meeting his six-three brother eye to eye. “You can’t leave me here with her.”

  “You made your choice long ago, little brother,” Truman said in a lethal tone. “I begged you to get clean.” He shifted his gaze to the woman on the floor, unable to think of her as his mother. “She fucked up my life, and she clearly fucked up yours, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let her fuck up theirs. The Gritt nightmare stops here and now.”

  He pulled the blanket over the children’s heads to shield them from the rain and opened the door. Cold, wet air crashed over his arms.

  “What am I supposed to do?” Quincy pleaded.

  Truman took one last look around the room, guilt and anger consuming him. On some level, he’d always known it would come to this, though he’d hoped he was wrong. “Your mother’s lying dead on the floor. You let your sister and brother live in squalor, and you’re wondering what you should do? Get. Clean.”

  Quincy turned away.

  “And have her cremated.” He juggled the babies and dug out his wallet, throwing a wad of cash on the floor, then took a step out the door. Hesitating, he turned back again, pissed with himself for not being strong enough to simply walk away and never look back. “When you’re ready to get clean, you know where to find me. Until then, I don’t want you anywhere near these kids.”

  —End of Sneak Peek—

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  BAD BOYS AFTER DARK: DYLAN

  Everything’s naughtier after dark…

  He’s a savior, a knight in shining armor, and his mighty talented sword has no trouble bringing damsels in distress to their knees. She’s a gorgeous cutthroat sports agent who looks like sex on legs, fucks like she’s passion personified, and wouldn’t let a man help her if she was hanging onto a ledge and he was her only hope. One night and too much tequila might change their lives forever. The question is, will either one survive?

  WITH HER PHONE pressed to her ear, Tiffany Winters ducked out of the rain and into the Kiss, an eclectic Manhattan bar, to return calls and take care of a mountain of text messages that had piled up during her dinner meeting. She listened to her client’s wife explain why she didn’t want her husband traveling too often to endorse a hotel chain Tiffany was planning on pitching him to next week. Her client had already nixed any mention of his family in the advertisements, and reducing his travel would make it an even harder sell.

  “I hear your concern, Allison,” she said as she sat on a barstool. “If you and Matt decide this isn’t the right thing for your family, we’ll turn our efforts in another direction.” As a sports agent, dealing with significant others was part of the job, a part Tiffany enjoyed and other agents rued. Sure, some wives assumed their husband’s success granted them the power to be overly demanding. Ass kissing was part of the game. Sometimes she wished she could give the meeker wives lessons in how to be tough. Teach them to have balls as big as their husbands’ and come right out and say what they meant instead of beating around the bush with bullshit hypotheticals. She reminded herself often that not every woman grew up in a testosterone-laden house with two competitive older brothers and a father who won the Heisman in college and went on to play pro sports—a house where mincing words didn’t cut the mustard.

  “You missed the wedding.”

  The deep male voice drew Tiffany’s attention from her phone call to the fine specimen of a man standing behind the bar. He looked like he’d just stepped off a Hot Guys in Suits Pinterest page. His tie hung loosely around the collar of his white dress shirt, which was open three buttons deep, revealing a smattering of dark chest hair, a rarity nowadays, when so many men manscaped every inch of their bodies. Tiffany preferred a man to look like a man, which included hair in all the right places. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, exposing heavily corded forearms, and his jacket hung casually from two fingers over his left shoulder. Her fingers itched to send the last few buttons—and that jacket—flying to the floor. The guy’s chiseled jaw and dark eyes were movie-star classic, and his dark hair was thick enough to hang on to. She’d had a long, hard day, and he looked like he could provide a long, hard, pleasure-filled night.

  Perfect.

  Holding his gaze, she spoke into the phone as he laid his jacket across the bar, giving her the impression he wasn’t the bartender, but rather a guest who’d happened to wander back there. “Allison, I’ll see what else I can come up with and get back to you. Right. Okay, hon. Thank you.” After ending the call, she responded to the stud behind the bar. “Wedding? Who gets married at a bar?”

  “My brother, for one.” He nodded across the room to a group of men and women who were holding their glasses up in a toast.

  She zeroed in on one she recognized as her tall, dark colleague. “Mick Bad is married?” The high-powered attorney was a workaholic like her, and he’d been unattached two months earlier, when they’d worked together on a deal for one of her clients. She’d never understand couples who claimed to fall in love practically overnight. Love was a crutch for weak people who needed someone else to lean on. Except Mick Bad had never needed anyone to lean on. She wondered if his new bride was pregnant.

  “The one and only.” Hot guy’s eyes took a long, luxurious stroll down her body, lingered on her breasts, then roamed north, hovering around her mouth, before finally meeting her gaze. He flashed a wolfish grin full of sinful promises.

  “Dylan Bad at your service.”

  Pushing thoughts of her newly married colleague’s expedient nuptials aside, she focused on his very available brother. A definite player, which was fine with her. She had no time—or interest—in anything but a quick hookup, and the six-two or -three stud had already shot to the top of tonight’s fantasy list.

  “What’s your pleasure?” he asked with more than a hint of innuendo.

  You. Naked, with your head buried between my legs, to start.

  “Surprise me.” She watched him turn to prepare her drink and checked out the way his dark slacks hugged his perfect ass. It had been a long time since she’d found a man this attractive. But Mick Bad’s brother? That spelled trouble.

  A minute later he slid two drinks across the bar. A cocky smile spread across his handsome face. “One Leg Spreader and one All Night Long.” He dragged out each seduction-laden word.

  “A little overly confident, aren’t you?” She had no qualms about taking what she wanted—in a boardroom or a bedroom, and Dylan’s confidence was a definite turn-on.

  He leaned across the bar, and the temperature around them spiked. “I was going to add a Blow Job, but I wasn’t sure how much you could handle.”

  She held his challenging gaze. “I think the question is, can you keep up?”

  “Dylan!” a guy called from across the room.

  Dylan held up a finger in the guy’s direction, his eyes never leaving Tiffany’s. He leaned in so close she could smell alcohol on his breath—and God help her, she wanted to suck the taste off his tongue.

  “Mark my words, gorgeous, you’ll be leaving here with me tonight.”

  Heat streaked down her spine. “Cocky. I like that. Tell Mick I said congratulations.” She dropped her eyes as if she weren’t hanging on the very thought of devouring him, but couldn’t resist stealing another peek at the tempting beefcake as he walked away. Okay, maybe several long glimpses, of which he caught two or three and returned
with an I-can’t-wait-to-fuck-you grin that had her insides igniting.

  She answered another call and a few text messages, and a short while later, Dylan’s voice spilled like warm cognac over her shoulder.

  “You know what they say about wedding hookups?”

  She lifted her gaze as he sat on the stool beside her. “What do they say?”

  “They say they can’t happen if you don’t put your phone away.” Dylan boldly placed his hand on her thigh. Long, strong fingers pressed into her flesh, sending rivers of desire to the apex of her thighs.

  She wondered how big other parts of his anatomy were, and couldn’t help stealing a quick glance. Oh yeah, he was packing major heat. A whiff of his spicy, masculine scent brought all her best parts pulsing to life. His scent alone probably brought more women to their knees than the Pope, but coupled with the sinful promises in his dark eyes, the guy was lethal.

  “I don’t put my phone down for just anyone,” she answered, still holding his gaze. His hungry eyes dropped to her mouth, lingering there long enough to make her salivate. “Are you as good in the bedroom as you are behind the bar?”