Prick Tease (Tangled Desires #1) Read online

  “I’m only twenty-nine.”

  “Practically dead, then.” I smirk. “Shouldn’t you be married with an army of kids or something by now?”

  He goes real quiet. I’m not actually sure I can hear him breathing at this point. The only sound is the hum the tires make on the uneven blacktop. “I don’t think that will ever be me.”

  “Really?” I twist to face him. “Don’t you want that? I mean eventually, after you’ve travelled and whatever else you do these days.”

  He shrugs. “I used to want that. Things change. But you’re only a kid. Don’t let this old man’s cynicism color your opinion. What about you? I heard a little of your conversation last night.”

  “Eavesdropping?”

  “You get pretty loud when you voice your opinion, Little Bit. At least you don’t screech like a banshee anymore.”

  “When did I ever do that?”

  He grins and shifts gears. “Between the ages of three and thirteen, if I remember correctly.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “So what happened between you and…?” He glances at me, all serious concern.

  “The asshole?”

  “Sure, we can call him that.”

  “Not that it’s any of your business, but he was sleeping with someone else.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” His fingers tense around the steering wheel. “The lucky bastard had you. He shouldn’t have needed to go elsewhere.”

  “Yeah, well.” Maybe if I’d been sleeping with him it would have been different. “We wouldn’t have worked out anyway.”

  “Do you want me to kill him? I could do that, you know. You tell me where he lives and I’ll take him out.”

  I laugh at the image his words create. “You’d do that for me?”

  “Yeah, of course. It’s no trouble.”

  “Because you’ve done that kind of thing before?” I peer at him through my eyelashes.

  “I’m going to decline to answer that. You know I can’t tell you shit.”

  “I know.” I always wondered if he hadn’t kept in touch because the missions he went on made it impossible. Or if it was solely because of that night. “And no, I don’t want you to kill Henley. Tom already offered to beat the crap out of him.”

  “Having big brothers comes in handy like that.”

  “Except you aren’t my big brother.” I don’t know why he has to hold onto that. Saying the words as if to remind himself of his place in my life. Especially when it’s not how I see him at all.

  “Your pack is my pack. Maybe we’re not related in the true sense of the word, but I grew up with you as my little sister rug rat. I like to believe we’re still family after all this time.”

  I don’t bother to disagree with him. It’s true when he says we were family. We spent fourteen years eating the same food, sleeping in the same house, using the same bathroom. He made mud pies with me and helped me learn to read. In some respects he was more of a brother to me back then than Rush, Mace, and Tom combined. Which is why it hurt so much that he’d kept in touch with the others but not me. Like that one night destroyed everything. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why didn’t you ever write me back?”

  He turns off the road and we bump along the driveway toward the old house. Even from here it’s easy to tell it’s in sad disrepair. The entire front porch sags in the middle, and one corner of the roof has been overtaken by gravity, too. Several busted windows have been covered with plywood, but nobody bothered with the three at the front. Broken glass still sticks out of the frames, and litters the ground.

  “Shit.” Pulling up on the weedy gravel in front of the house, he shuts off the motor of my Bug, and stalks across the yard before I even get out of the car.

  By the time I join him, he’s standing with the front door wide open, his hands on his head. A good part of the foyer floor is rotting, and a section of it is missing altogether. His jaw clenches, a nerve jumping beneath the skin. “I’m going to go take a look around back.”

  He strides off in that direction, and I follow. I’ve worked on some dumps before, but this isn’t looking particularly promising. There’s a point where you have to evaluate whether cost will outweigh sales profits. By the time I reach the back door he’s pacing across the lawn, cursing under his breath. The door itself is busted off its hinges, and I glance inside at the kitchen. My heart sinks. There’s been some kind of fire, probably electrical by the way it’s licked up the walls, and patches of plaster have flaked from the ceiling. I don’t bother to step inside while I run a tally in my head. And we’ve only seen a fraction of the house.

  I take off in the direction I last saw Razer, almost running into him when I find him in the old barn. “I’m so sorry. It’s more than you were expecting, isn’t it?”

  “He always was a worthless piece of shit.” He kicks a rock across the barn floor, then his shoulders slump. “But he was the only relative I had.”

  Bumping against his shoulder, I say, “That’s why you had us.”

  “Yeah. I was pretty lucky.” He glances down at me, and the pain on his face shocks me. By the time I was old enough to understand what had happened with Razer’s parents, he never talked about them. It was like they never existed. My parents love him as much as any of us. He was never just the boys’ friend to them, or another mouth to feed. I take his hand and he squeezes mine, pulling me closer. “I’m sorry.”

  “What?”

  He lifts my hand to his chest and tilts his face toward mine. “I’m sorry I never wrote you.”

  “Why didn’t you?” The way he’s staring at me is like the night he left all over again. I swallow hard against the sensation he drags up in me. Fighting with myself not to lean closer, not to stretch up on tiptoe and press my lips to his.

  He closes the distance instead. Déjà vu hits hard. It’s only a soft brush of his lips against mine. I melt into him, opening to allow the slide of his tongue against mine. Only he pushes me away. And just like that, we’ve travelled back in time.

  “Fuck, Little Bit. What are you doing to me?” He keeps hold of my hand for a fraction longer. “I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t…” He shakes his head, turns on his heel and stalks out of the barn.

  Pressing my fingers to my lips, I stand there, frozen, the sting of pleasure almost as sharp as his rejection. How am I supposed to get him to see me as anything more than the girl he avoided for the last seven years? How am I supposed to seduce him?

  And even if I do manage to get him into my bed and stamp my stupid V-card, eradicating Henley’s stupid moral code from my life, what then? This isn’t supposed to be anything. A second chance at having my first crush the way I always fantasized about. Nothing more. Except, what if it isn’t? Sleeping with him might just make these feelings worse.

  Razer

  The house is a rotting pile of shit. There isn’t much I can do about that, except get someone in to tear it down. Maybe subdivide the land then sell it off at a premium.

  But I can do something about keeping my fucking hands off Claire. One fucking promise. Seven years. Two kisses. So far I’m barely managing to keep my vow. I’d lost control. Let things wind me up. But I can’t let it happen again. I need to get out of Reverence as fast as possible, because every damn thing she does has my body reacting like a seventeen year old kid. I’m almost thirty, for fuck’s sake. Far too old to let her get under my skin just because she’s standing close, or says something I take the wrong way. I doubt she even realizes that concoction she lathers on her skin has me instantly hard whenever she stands too close. Or that I can’t keep from staring at the slight hint of cleavage her sundress allows me. It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours in the same town, and I’m already pushing the limits of what’s left of our friendship.

  I reach the car and slam my palm on the roof. The worst of it is that I hurt her. The first two years I was away we wrote often, becoming even closer than we were
before I left. Each time I’d received one of her letters it had been like Christmas, but it wasn’t until I came back to Reverence for her sweet sixteenth, until I kissed the girl I had promised to love as family, to protect with my life, to treat as the little sister I’d never been lucky enough to have, that I realized she’d stolen my heart out of my chest and shipped it home in each word on each page of each letter I sent back.

  That’s why I couldn’t write her afterward. She wasn’t for me. She was so sweet and young and innocent. If I’d been younger, it might not have mattered so much. Maybe I would have still been ignorant enough to believe her brothers wouldn’t kick my ass for fantasizing about her the way I did. But those six years between us, the fact that I was a man when she was still only a child, made my attraction to her perverted. I hadn’t meant to kiss her back then, hadn’t been able to help myself when she darted her tongue out over her lips, making them shine like a homing beacon, but doing what I did was a prick move. And she deserved so much better than that. At least she’d deserved an apology, or some kind of explanation for why I cut her out completely. But how do you tell a girl you can never be with that you love her more than anything in the world? That you have to stay away for her own good? That how you feel about her will destroy everything that’s made your life worthwhile? I couldn’t. I can’t.

  Hopping into the car, I pull out my cell and look through the directory while I wait for her to join me. I’m an asshole for walking off on her, but if I’d stayed I would have kissed her like I wanted to. She slides into the car quietly, while I make arrangements to get a quote on demolition, and then we head back into Reverence. The car trip back is quieter than the one out to the block. She doesn’t even try to get me to talk, and I find myself trying to come up with something to say to fix the uneasiness between us.

  “I’m sorry,” I say as I pull into Tom’s driveway. “I shouldn’t have done that. It won’t happen again.”

  “Why not?” she mumbles without turning from staring out the window. “Are you going to disappear for another seven years?”

  Something like that. “I’ll try not to, but I won’t make promises I can’t keep.”

  We both climb out of the car. “What if I wanted you to kiss me?”

  “You don’t. You’re just confused because of Henley, and I was an asshole and took advantage of that.”

  “Firstly, don’t assume you know what I want.” She slams the door and storms toward the steps. “And secondly if that’s how you take advantage then you’re severely lacking in skills. I know nuns that don’t kiss as chastely as you do.”

  “Nuns?” I am severely tempted to scoop her up and show her those nuns have nothing on me. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. Toes curl and panties fall off when I kiss a woman.”

  “I find that difficult to believe.” She plants her hands on her hips and glares at me. “You’re full of shit, Razer Bennington. I wouldn’t want to waste my time kissing you if you were the last man on earth.”

  “Is that so?” I stalk toward her. “You have no idea what you’re missing out on.”

  “Actually I do. You kiss like a wet dishcloth.”

  “Right.” I grab a handful of her hair, holding her in place, my mouth hovering mere inches from hers.

  “Excuse me?”

  We jump apart to stare at the young brunette standing at the bottom of the steps. She smiles and makes her way toward us. “Is Tom home, by any chance?”

  “No. Sorry,” I say. “He has late classes tonight. Can we tell him you stopped by?”

  “That’s funny. He doesn’t usually run classes on the weekends.” She glances at the front door as though maybe she thinks he’s inside and we’re giving her the brush off. “Tell him Kate stopped by.”

  “Will do.”

  As she walks away, I turn to confront Claire and finish what we started, but she’s retreated into the house. Twice in one day she’s wreaked havoc on my self-control. I need to get the fuck out of Reverence.

  Chapter Six

  Claire

  Razer stumbles into the kitchen, rubbing a hand through his mussed hair, while I’m pouring my second java of the day. It’s still early, but I’ve been up for a couple hours, going through the contracts for House to Haven and scouring the internet for anything to do with Henley or the CFN. I know it’s only a matter of time before I’ll find my face on one of the gossip magazines, but so far, all is quiet.

  “Do you want coffee?” I dump three sugars into my cup and stir, the spoon plinking against the ceramic sides while he runs his gaze over me.

  “Thanks, no,” he says, prowling across the room with long powerful strides. Goosebumps break out over my skin and my pulse jackrabbits at the base of my throat when he straightens the disks against my collarbone. “Was that another woman I heard this morning?”

  “Yeah, some gorgeous redhead.” There’s a dense shadow of stubble along the line of his jaw that wasn’t there yesterday, and I itch to scrape my fingers over it, but he steps around me to grab a carton of juice from the fridge. “I thought maybe…”

  He stretches out next to me, leaning against the counter, his shirt clinging to every damn muscle while he lifts the carton to his mouth. “She was with me?”

  I have to admit I’m more than a little jealous of the way the carton gets to touch his lips and I don’t. Stupid inanimate object doesn’t even know how lucky it is.

  “No, she wasn’t with me,” he says.

  “Well you got in kind of late.” I hide my admission behind the rim of my cup. He doesn’t need to know that I couldn’t sleep last night. That after our argument I hadn’t been able to drag my mind away from what could have happened if that woman hadn’t interrupted us. That running into the redhead this morning had made me nauseous and catty because I thought maybe she was with him. “Our Tommy seems to be a bit of a slut.”

  His arm brushes mine as he scratches the back of his neck, chuckling. “I don’t think that’s what they call it when you’re a guy.”

  “Oh right.” I roll my eyes, clenching my jaw. “He’s what? A legend? Just because he was born with a dick?”

  “Watch your mouth, little one. Good girls don’t talk like that.”

  “Well maybe I’m not a good girl.” I laugh. For so long I’ve watched my mouth, presenting the public face that’s been designed for me. It feels good to talk trash with the boys, and want things I’ve buried because that’s what’s expected of me. It’s freeing. I turn sideways, glance up at the man who’d always had a girl or two panting after him when I was younger. I didn’t have a chance back then, but then I’d been the good girl he expects me to be now. “What about you?”

  “Women?” He pops the carton down on the counter and leans on one elbow while his gaze flicks from the hint of lace across my cleavage to my eyes before sliding south again. “There’s been a few.”

  I don’t know why that annoys me. I expected his answer to be less subtle. Like a number, probably in the three digit range. I’m not naïve when it comes to the difference in our age and lifestyles. “Really? I can’t see it.”

  “What do you mean you can’t see it?” His lips compress into a thin line. “I wouldn’t lie to you.”

  I push off from the counter. For all this fancy lingerie, and the way he’s doing his damndest to avoid looking at my breasts, his gaze fixating more often than not at the dip at the base of my throat, Chelsea’s spank bank plan seems to be far less effective than digging at his composure with a few well aimed taunts. “I don’t think you’d know what to do with a woman if she fell in your lap.”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about.” His gaze narrows, flicking to that hollow again and then to my lips.

  “Don’t I?” I flutter my fingers over his chest. “I bet you couldn’t kiss your way out of a paper bag, let alone tempt a girl into your bed.”

  His jaw clenches, his eyes narrowing. “You don’t have a fucking clue what you’re talking about.”

  �
��Of course I do.” I’m practically purring, enjoying that he’s allowing me to continue touching him in such an overly friendly manner. I slide my hand up over the curve of his chest as I take his hand and guide it around my waist. “Unless you want to prove me wrong.”

  His grip tenses. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m making it easy for you. Prove. Me. Wrong.” I punctuate each word as I press up against him, and nip his jaw with my teeth. His stubble tickles my lips and sends prickles of sensation to my core. “Unless I’m right.”

  “You don’t know what you’re asking.” He curses under his breath, his fingers digging into my back. The sensation he creates is not unlike being zapped by an electric current. My skin prickles, stings almost, with how aware of him I am. The closest I’ve ever gotten to feeling like this is the time Tom convinced me to grab the electric fence between our property and the cow paddock. I'd gritted my teeth, tears stinging at the corners of my eyes and never wanted to experience anything like it again. But this... the only sting is in the distance between us, the hardened jaw, the steel in his spine that holds him in check. Give in to me, Razer.

  "I’m pretty sure I do.” I peer up at him through my lashes. Lips twitching ever so slightly as I calmly press my palm to the hard wall of his chest and slide it up to his shoulder. "But you haven’t got the guts.”

  I'm not calm. I'm not even remotely in control of the colony of butterflies fluttering their wings in a synchronized acrobatic display inside my belly. His gaze widens on me, his nostrils flare and I’m pretty sure he can feel me shaking despite how hard I’m fighting not to give it away.

  "This isn't a good idea." I don't know if his words are meant for my benefit or his. They're barely audible before he brings a calloused hand to my jaw, tilting it up as he lowers his face to mine, still maintaining too much distance for my liking. "You’re confused, hurting because of that asshole.”