Chapter 13 Sean
SEAN
Normally, driving the Mustang makes me forget everything else. For me, the low rumble of the engine, soaking through the steering wheel and into my body, is better than any massage, no matter how many oiled-up women you throw in.
But that afternoon, as we cruised through the streets, all I could think about was who was sitting next to me.
Even when I wasn’t looking at her, I was more aware of her than I’d ever been of any woman.
I could hear every soft breath she drew, smell the warm, spicy scent of her skin, hear the scrape of her denim against the leather as she shifted position.
...I’d been in bed with women and thought about them less.
And when I did glance across at her, pretending I needed to check the door mirror.
..it was hard as hell to look away again.
This girl had done a number on me. Some sort of goddess-of-nature witchcraft, maybe.
It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter how much I wanted to grab hold of her, drag her onto the back seat and ram those jeans down her legs, push between her thighs and bury myself inside her.
It was bad enough that she had to get involved in my world to save her sister.
I wasn’t going to mess her up even more by letting her get involved with me.
Arriving was almost a relief, because it distracted me from thinking about her. I heard her intake of breath as she got her first look at our new home.
I’d taken her to the neighborhood where I’d scared off the Serbians. Malone’s turf, and I knew him well enough that I could make that work. He’d insist that we sold through him, but that was cool—we had to sell to someone.
In the daylight, it looked even worse than at night.
Single story houses built so cheaply that they started leaking and rotting the second they went up.
Chain link fencing, sometimes with barbed wire.
No one gave a shit about mowing their lawns here, so every yard was overgrown.
Sometimes there’d be a plant in a pot, but it was always yellow and sickly or just plain dead, left behind by some previous resident when they’d seen sense and gotten the hell out.
“God….” said Louise from the seat next to me.
Our apartment block was bad, but I don’t think she’d realized how much worse things could get.
We drove past gang members sprawled in lawn chairs, watching us pass with one hand on their guns.
We passed pit bulls and Dobermans who ran at the car, snapping and snarling at us before their chains brought them up short.
Many of the houses were boarded up. Of the ones that weren’t, maybe half were occupied by the kind of people you really didn’t want to mess with.
The other half were like fortresses, with bars on the windows and reinforced doors, their occupants living in fear of the first half.
“We really have to grow here?” Louise whispered.
“People won’t ask questions,” I told her.
“The cops aren’t welcome, here.” I pulled over and pointed to a rental sign.
“How about that one?” Like all the others, the house had been white once.
Now it was every shade from gray to green, bleached by the sun, and stained by mold.
The houses on either side were derelict.
Louise looked up and down the street. “Why that one? That’s like the worst one on the street.”
“We’re growing in it, not living in it. We want the worst one. The realtor’ll be desperate to rent it and they won’t care who to.” I punched the realtor’s number into my phone, then passed it across to Louise. “You call,” I said. “They’ll trust a woman.”
The call gave me another chance to drink her in.
It wasn’t just that gorgeous face with its delicate cheekbones and that full lower lip.
It wasn’t just the body with its perfect curves.
It was her whole manner: the softness of her voice, the way she looked so serious when she listened to the realtor’s reply, the way she nodded and bit her lip as she thought.
She was classy, a world away from the women who flung themselves at me in bars.
She didn’t belong in this place any more than a Ferrari or some exquisitely carved violin.
Louise gave me back the phone. “We can look round it tomorrow morning,” she said. Then she shook her head. “But how the hell are we going to pay the rent? I mean, it’s cheap compared to my apartment but I’m flat broke. The hospital bills are eating everything up.” She looked up at me with big eyes.
I’d been worried about this. It wasn’t that I didn’t know a solution; it was that I didn’t like it.
“You need a loan,” I said. “Enough for the rent for six months. That way it’s taken care of and you don’t have to budget for it every month. And it’ll be cheaper if you pay six months up front.”
She shook her head again. “I’ve been calling loan companies since this started. If I take every loan I can get and max out my cards, I can just barely pay the hospital bills Kayley’s insurance won’t cover. I’m going to be up to my neck in debt. There’s no more credit left.”
My guts tightened. “Not that sort of loan.”