Chapter 12
She was stalking me. That much was clear. Her angle, however, remained muddled, and that kept me on edge better than a death wobble on a highway.
Her presence niggled at me everywhere I went. It started as a tingle at the base of my nape, then a rush of frenzy, and each time she stepped into view, a zing of sparking embers heated a path from my shoulder blades to my groin.
It began that first night. She sauntered by me at the restaurant as I carved a warning into Councilor Anderson’s knee under the table after his unsanctioned collaboration with the Italians, Russians, and Colombians. Then she proceeded to taunt me.
The following day, at one of my family’s bars, I drank alone at a corner table, waiting for my brothers to arrive.
I wound my knife around my thumb, attention glossing over the regulars and boozers as they cheered on one of the last Red Sox games of the season when the first sense of her hit.
She blended into the crowd, weaving in and out, nothing more than a blur of ash-brown hair among many, her delicate fruity perfume lost to spilt beer and greasy chicken wings.
But I knew, and it stirred a hunger in me for a glimpse of her.
A swamped server set a tumbler of Irish whiskey neat before me. A little yellow umbrella hung off the side of the glass.
“From an admirer,” he said, then rushed back to the bar.
Another drink, another game. I twisted the glass in front of my face. The bar’s ambient light refracted off the glass edges and the golden color of the liquor. I plucked out the umbrella and sucked the bead of whiskey off the toothpick. If she poisoned it, too bad for me.
My phone vibrated, and I eyed the newest message flashing along the screen with a toss back of my original beer.
Unknown
Prefer this one?
I took a sip of her offering. Dry nuttiness against notes of orange and spices, and I hummed with approval. It wasn’t a bad choice at all. She knew her liquor.
Better.
But not good enough?
Where are you?
Does it matter?
My finger hovered over the phone, because no, it shouldn’t.
I don’t like liars.
***
You said see you soon.
Miss me already?
I’m wondering where to aim.
Don’t worry. I see you.
That’s enough for both of us, HD.
I frowned at the unknown abbreviation.
HD?
If I told you, I’d have to concede.
Then concede.
What’s the prize?
You.
You shouldn’t play games with those you don’t know.
I know so much about you, it should scare you.
Enjoy the drink.
A demain. Tcha-tchao.
Until tomorrow. The fractured remains of high school French class translated that little nugget of information. So the chemist was French or pretending to be.
On instinct, I glanced at the door, and there she stood, flickering in and out of view behind the ebb and flow of customers, a man’s wet dream in the flesh.
A set of heels thin enough to pierce a man’s neck lengthened legs that belonged wrapped around the waist of whoever pounded into her.
Preferably me. Her long hair framed pouty lips and baited me as the tips grazed the top of her ample cleavage with each rise and fall of her chest. Her thin, green, off-the-shoulder sweater caressed her curves more softly than the teasing touch of a lover’s hand, and all I wanted was to tear it off and bury my face between the firm mounds of her breasts. I swallowed a hefty gulp of whiskey.
She was a fairy among men, ready to pluck out her prey and drag him to the otherworld. A harbinger of shit to come, yet I willingly snared myself in her trap.
She waved over her head at me and beamed with a mischievousness that struck me like a dart to the chest and addled my sanity as I fought to stay seated when she left. This time, I didn’t send Paulie or Big Charlie after her. Not when I knew she’d be back another day.
A prickle of amusement heckled the steady thrum of my pulse, and I knocked back the last of my whiskey to the memory of her eyes creasing into crescents above her smile.
The drink simmered on the back of my tongue, then scorched a slow path down my throat and warmed me inside out.
Not so different from the sensation she’d left me with.
“His mouth’s twitching.” I whipped my head up at the sound of Liam’s thick, silvery voice. Huh, she distracted me enough to miss my brothers’ arrival. That was a whole other problem.
“You’re smirking,” Brody commented. “It’s weird.”
Liam and Brody dragged their chairs out. Liam twisted his around, chairback against the table, and they both sat.
“Now that, right there, is a clear sign a púca took our brother.” He elbowed Brody and gestured at my face. “Not sure the look suits him.”
I flipped him off, then scratched at my jaw and waved a server down for two more whiskeys. The buzz in my veins fizzled out as the grind of the routine settled back in.
Since the progression of our father’s Parkinson’s to stage five six months ago, we decided to visit him together at the assisted living facility once a month.
That meant subjecting ourselves to his spiteful mood fluctuations as a pack instead of individually, now that he was confined to a bed or wheelchair, with bouts of memory loss and slurred speech.
Liam and Brody always downed a good dose of alcohol beforehand.
I never nursed more than one. After all the shit he put us through, he wasn’t worth more. I went for my brothers’ sakes, not his.
“We get an umbrella too?” Liam mocked.
“No.” I twirled the yellow decoration between my thumb and index finger, then I folded the garnish up and pocketed it. “Get your drinks in, and we’ll go.”
“Hot date after?” Liam waggled his eyebrows as the server set our drinks down.
Instead of answering, I swiped his glass and swallowed down a hefty gulp. So much for my one-glass regimen. That woman was a Pandora’s box waiting to happen, and fuck if the idea of throwing it wide open didn’t rage through my system.
A day after our visit to our father, my irritation still simmered.
I flicked the butt of my cigarette onto the ground in the back alley of my preferred tattoo parlor and squashed it beneath my boot.
Same as I’d do to our father if both Liam and Brody weren’t so opposed.
Neither of my brothers deserved his berating.
Me, he could have at it. I couldn’t care less.
I’d stolen his clan position years before his health would’ve forced him to give it up.
When gambling and alcohol soured the little we had left of a father, I’d beaten him bloody before he could do it to us.
That was before his Parkinson’s hit full force and his muscles locked up, before the tremors got so bad he saw in us what he couldn’t be anymore.
I rolled my shoulders and neck. The newly worked skin over my right pec twinged delectably, a shot right to my nervous system.
Getting a new tattoo was a high that lasted hours.
One that tugged me out of the abyss of nothingness and towed me through bumpy waves under sunny skies for hours of relief.
Until, in time, my demons dragged me back down into numbness and apathy.
Every day, I fought them. From the moment the gleam of sunrise splayed over my face until the instant my pillow swaddled me to sleep, I kicked.
I slashed. I struggled. If my heart pumped, if my desire surged, if my craving for life peaked, my fingers grazed the surface of that murky water, ensnaring me tight.
On occasion, they broke free and wiggled over fresh air that spoke of hope and possibilities.
Until a wave submerged them again, and the nothingness dug its claws even deeper.
Today was more of the same, meaning I was on another search for that new high to rocket me out of the hole of my mind’s making. Another tattoo was as good a choice as any.
As I traipsed back inside for the next round of my tattoo session, “Every Breath You Take” by The Police grooved in the empty lobby area, the music old-school, just like Levi, the same man who’d given me my first tat twenty years ago.
He waited for me in his office—gloved, his goggle glasses back on, and wearing his baseball cap backward, like he’d forgotten his teens ended forty years ago.
“Lady friend left that for you.” He nudged his head at a to-go bag on a chair reserved for the clients’ guests as he finished changing the plastic coverings on the equipment.
The bag crackled as I glanced inside. A water bottle and an insulated stainless-steel thermos.
A purple paper umbrella was taped to the thermos.
I twirled the accessory between my fingers as I drank down the water.
How in the fuck had she gotten past Paulie and Big Charlie, who were keeping watch in the car out front?
“Where is she?”
“No idea. Probably took off the moment she dropped that off with my receptionist.” He wiped down the chair. “If you’re ready…”
I sat back, set my gun aside as we’d agreed, and took out my phone as Levi got back to work. There was a lightness in his movements that soothed my reactionary instincts. I pulled up the messaging thread with my stalker, whom I renamed síbhean, Gaelic for fairy woman.
Not because of any supposed ethereal beauty.
But because she was an opportunist. Sly in obtaining her goals. Adaptable against predators. Playful in the face of danger. And a woman worthy of note.
Cillian
What’s in the thermos?
Síbhean
A Bloody Bull.
Is that a threat?
?? ?? ??
I burst out laughing, and everyone on the street turned to look at me.
Too good.
My mouth twitched.
It’s a cocktail.
I thought you might want something a bit hearty and savory with a kick after your session.
From which bar?
I made it.
The machine whirred. A buzz rubbed over my skin. The pain sparked, cutting through my chest as Levi began shading over the raw skin. It grounded me, pulling me out of the water for a breath of fresh air.
Poisoned?
Would I tell you if it was?
Calm down.
Not poisoned.
Trust me, you’ll like it.
I don’t trust you.
You want to.
I snorted. The nerve of her.
No.
Would you feel better if I tasted it for you?
No.
Be right there. I can’t let you suffer this kind of loss.
I tried this once in New Orleans after a night of drinking.
It’s the perfect type of pick-me-up.
I didn’t get to reply before a knock tapped against the door. Immediately, I was casing the exit, reaching for my gun set on a side tray.
“What is it, Cassie?” Levi yelled, his attention glued to his design on my pec.
It wasn’t his blonde receptionist. Instead, my stalker moseyed into the room, wide-eyed and lips pursed in feigned innocence.
“Sorry, not Cassie.”
The whirring of the tattoo gun ceased.
“You’re not allowed in here. Cassie!”
“Don’t worry.” She waved her arms in front of her. “I’ll be quick. I simply need to test the drink for your client.”
Her wink invigorated me more than all the needling from the tattoo.
My gaze flitted down her body, covered in a tight-fitting, neck-to-calf woolen dress designed to coerce all the blood to my cock, and a set of heels thick enough to bash in a man’s skull.
I’d gladly shimmy that dress up her thighs and past her hips to swat those round globes red before—I shut down that train of thought.
No spanking. No fucking. No nothing. I shoved my tongue against my teeth and ground my jaw.
“You have some nerve. I’ll give you that. Not an ounce of self-preservation.”
She shrugged, reached into the bag, and pulled out the thermos. “I have to. You wouldn’t let me in otherwise.”
“There is no in.”
“Want to bet on that?”
Her nails grazed over the lid and slowly twisted it open. Never had the act of untwisting a cap looked more appealing than the way her fingers wrapped and curved around that bottle. I swore between my teeth.
Her eyes snared mine as the rim settled against her mouth.
Her throat bobbed with each swallow. Her tongue lapped at a drop dangling from her plump lower lip.
An urge flamed to lick it myself. To charge her, shove her against that wall, dig my hands over her scalp, and prove exactly the menace I was to her.
My fists bunched as my pants tightened around my groin.
“See.” She lowered the damn thermos as I squeezed the chair’s foam to a pulp. “Completely safe.”
No, she fucking wasn’t, and she damn well knew it too.
“Get out,” I said, my voice brittle, lost to need.
The airy laugh she left behind drove me closer to that edge.
I teetered, balancing on a tightrope over a void of full-blown chaos.
The edge I’d searched for years. The one I’d barely skimmed, no matter how hard I tried to leap over it.
Yet she bulldozed her way in and shoved me to my limit, forcing my arms to wheel me back to stability.
Don’t come back.
I’m too stubborn not to.
I stared at her phone contact long enough to receive a new message.
Levi continued to work my skin, the gun buzzing between us, but the unwelcome churning in my gut dimmed the high of the pain.
For a long while, my thumb hovered over the contact options.
In the end, I tapped the block icon on her latest phone number and swiped aside the message.
There was no place for a woman in my life.