Breaking the Rules (35 page)

So Neesha hung back, ducking into a hamburger joint to use the bathroom and check to make sure the scanty, sequined top she’d taken from Eden’s drawer covered her, heart pounding, already ashamed of herself for choosing to do that which she’d vowed she’d never again do.

But her choices were limited, and she’d latched onto the idea that she’d be safe—safer—in Los Angeles, with a burning determination to get there.

Or die trying.

“Customers only,” the man behind the counter said sharply, and sure enough, when Neesha looked up, she saw he was talking to her as he handed a bag of food to a tired-looking blonde in high heels and a very short skirt.

She didn’t know what he meant.

“The bathroom,” he said, with plenty of attitude, “is for customers only. You want to use it, you buy a burger or fries. Otherwise, get your whore-ass outta here.”

Neesha turned to leave, but the blond woman spoke. “She’s with me,” she said in a raspy heavy-smoker’s voice that had the same kind of drawl that Neesha had heard when she’d watched
Dallas
. “Give me
another cheeseburger, Richard, and supersize the fries. Honey, come on over here. You’re new in town, aren’t you? You working with anyone yet?”

Neesha nodded yes, then shook her head no.

“Looks like my latest girl blew me off,” the woman said. “Probably too stoned to lift her head offa the bathroom floor. But I got a gig lined up. A private party not far from here, and I sure could use some help. I’ll give you … Hmm. Twenty-five for the night, plus a five-dollar bonus for each gentleman you take into the back room.”

“You taken up highway robbery now, too, Clarice?” the counter man said.

“Hush, you.” The woman didn’t even look back at him as she held out the bag with the food to Neesha. “I’ll have you back here in two hours, hon, tops. With cash in your pocket.”

Neesha looked from her to the counter man, who was shaking his head.

“What’s a private party?” she asked Clarice, who smiled.

“Why don’t you come on over here,” the woman said, clicking over to a table in those heels, “and sit down. Have a bite to eat and I’ll tell you exactly where we’re going and how it all shakes down.”

I
zzy came, hard and fast. Without making a sound.

Which was a whole lot more difficult than he’d thought, but
definitely
doable.

Eden kissed him then, still laughing, because—as she nearly always was—she was on his wavelength, and she knew exactly what he was thinking. Yes, they would definitely be doing this again, later.

Her kiss was impossibly sweet and almost unbearably tender—the kind of kiss two soulmates share at the end of a movie about them finding each other again after ten years apart. It was the kind of kiss that would happen right before the credits rolled and the happy-ever-after was solidly in hand.

And as Eden pulled back to look at him in the dim light from the rental car’s dashboard, he saw tears in her beautiful eyes and he found himself—rather suddenly, as if he’d fallen out of his bunk onto the hard, cold, metal deck in the middle of a deep REM sleep—pulled out of what should have been the afterglow of a truly magnificent moment.

His body was still humming from his recent release. She was still warm and soft around him, and her breasts were still tantalizingly bare.

She was so fucking beautiful. But Cynthia was beautiful, and Maria was beautiful, and Tracy had been beautiful, and Renee had been, too. Izzy had bumped into beautiful often enough in his life to
know that mere beauty wasn’t enough. It was the brain clicking away in Eden’s gorgeous head that had brought him running back for more.

And when Danny’s credo popped into his mind—
Is the fucking you’re getting worth the fucking you’re getting?
—Izzy’s current answer was an immediate
Hoo-yah, yeah
.

But that didn’t make it hurt any less when she whispered, “You know, I never stopped loving you.”

And he knew how to play the game. He knew that was his cue to embrace the lie and to kiss her back with that same Hollywood tenderness while he murmured, “Ah, baby, you know, I still really love you, too.”

But he was tired of it—of her revisionist history. And even though he knew that in this moment she believed it was true, it goddamn wasn’t. If she’d really never stopped loving him—if she’d ever really loved him in the first place—she would’ve let that love give her strength and comfort when Pinkie died instead of running her ass away and hiding from him all those goddamned months.

So he hesitated and some of what he was thinking must’ve flickered in his eyes, because she got very still and asked, “Do you believe me?”

Of course I do
. Izzy knew he should say it. It was his ticket to getting his rocks off again later tonight—which he already wanted to do, pretty freaking desperately.

But he was also filled with an overwhelming urge to be honest and just say no.

And in the end, he didn’t have to say anything, because she said it for him, as she pulled herself off of him, as there was nothing for him to do but lift himself over the parking brake and back into the driver’s seat.

“Of course you don’t believe me,” she said quietly as she pulled up the front of her dress and got her straps back into place. “I don’t blame you, I really don’t. And it’s okay. It is. I always do this—too much, too soon. It’s just … what I do. I get scared and …”

She shook her head and didn’t finish her sentence, and yet it was
the most honest thing she’d said. She got scared. No shit, Sherlock. And when she was scared, she tried—any way that she could—to make her future less of an unknown and as secure as possible. And if she had to do that by making herself indispensible via copious amounts of sex …?

So be it.

“I’m going to be honest with you here,” Izzy said, just as quietly as he set to work cleaning himself up. The condom went in a plastic grocery bag because tossing it onto the pavement of the parking lot wasn’t merely nasty for poor Ferd Quertmansonton, who was going to be late for work tomorrow morning, and therefore he’d get stuck parking here in the distant reaches of the lot. Which meant he would be even later because he’d have to make the hike to the office building through the blistering heat, so he’d hurry and wouldn’t look where he was stepping as he got out of his car, which meant he’d skid on the used condom, which wouldn’t just gross him out, but would give him an excuse for his tardiness as he’d stop to make a call to security, who clearly wasn’t patrolling the lot as often as they should at night, the negligent bastards. And
that
—the potentially stepped-up security—would be
très
nasty for Izzy, who had already marked this location as a place to return for some desperately needed privacy, should the five-people-living-in-a-tiny-one-bedroom-apartment thing become temporarily permanent. Of course,
that
was also dependent upon
Eden
still wanting to continue getting jiggy after they had this conversation, in which he
was
going to be honest.

“But I want to start out with us both in the same place, okay?” Izzy continued. “So you have to be honest, too. Here it comes, ready?”

Eden wasn’t looking at him, and it was possible that she shook her head no.

He said it anyway. “The sex? Me and you? Is freaking unbelievable. I mean, I’m talking fan-fucking-tastic.”

She smiled at that, but she still didn’t look at him. She was giving her full attention to turning her panties—white, but not at all virginal—right side out.

“Do you agree?” he pushed her, as he tucked himself in and zipped his shorts back up. “A simple yes or no will suffice.”

“Yes,” Eden conceded.

“Good,” Izzy said. “It’s now an established fact that we both think the sex is great. Let’s put another indisputable fact into our little world. Because I think we can probably also agree that you didn’t marry me because you loved me.”

“What if I did?” she said suddenly, turning to face him. “You don’t know what I was feeling.”

Eden could be pretty freaking convincing when she wanted to, but …

“Ah, come on,” Izzy said. “You still barely know me. I’m just some teammate of your brother’s that you collided with once, when you were having a really shitty night.”

And then, six months later, she’d made the mistake of implying that the not
-entirely
-shitty night she’d spent at Izzy’s place had resulted in her being six months pregnant. And instead of denying that it was impossible, that the baby couldn’t be his because they hadn’t had the kind of sex where essential baby-making body parts had connected, Izzy had gone with Dan, to see Eden, who was back with her mother and stepfather in Vegas. And he’d been so charmed by and enamored with her all over again that he’d offered to marry her—to give her health care for her pregnancy and delivery,
and
to give her someplace to live besides that crappy house with her fucking lunatic stepfather—the same fucking lunatic stepfather who was now breaking their balls about Ben.

It
hadn’t
been about sex—Izzy and Eden’s legal arrangement—or so he’d claimed. But they both knew that it
had
been about sex at least on
some
level, because Izzy’d been as hot for her then as he was now. Except back then, he’d kept his distance as much as he could, because he’d been stupid enough to believe that he was courting her. He’d stupidly believed that if he took his time and tamed her, like some wild animal, she would come to trust him, and maybe even love him, too.

“After that, we had what, one date?” Izzy reminded her now. “And then yeah, okay, I helped save your life, except I didn’t get there soon enough, did I? I didn’t get there in enough time to save Pinkie.”

And there it was, lying right there in the car between them. The real reason Eden had left. Even though the doctors had all agreed that her baby wouldn’t have survived to full term, regardless of whether she’d been kidnapped and manhandled by crazy people.

She hadn’t believed them.

Except now she was not only shaking her head, she was reaching for his hands. “Izzy, please, you can’t believe that—it’s
not
true. There was nothing you could have done.” Her voice shook and her eyes filled with tears. “There was nothing anyone could have done. Pinkie was already dead. Believe me, as soon as I was out of the hospital, I tried to find out what caused it, was it something that I did or didn’t do, something I ate? God, I was sure it was, but I did all this research and … No. It wasn’t your fault, and it wasn’t my fault. It
wasn’t
. It’s a miracle, you know, the way that an egg and sperm can grow into a perfect human being, and it makes sense that it doesn’t always happen right, not a hundred percent of the time. Some babies don’t get made properly—there are all these scientific words for what happens to them, but the bottom line is that they can’t live on their own, and they die. Most of them die in the first three months of a pregnancy, but some of them are stronger than they maybe should be, so they live a little bit longer with something really wrong with them, the way Pinkie did.”

Eden believed what she was saying—and not just for right now, either. Her conviction rang in her every word. And Izzy was glad for that—that she didn’t blame herself for something she couldn’t have prevented.

“But if you didn’t blame me,” he said, and goddamnit, he had to wipe his eyes because he, too, had tears in them, and his voice shook, too, because talking and thinking about Pinkie always broke his heart, “why did you leave?”

He’d shipped out, overseas on assignment with Team Sixteen, on
the same day Eden had been released from the hospital. He’d come back several weeks later to find her gone, his apartment cold and empty.

“Because you didn’t believe me,” she said, her voice very small in the darkness. “I knew you thought I lied about who Pinkie’s father was.”

And Izzy couldn’t deny that.

She’d told him it was Richie, her ex-boyfriend Jerry’s low-life, drug-running boss, who’d gotten her pregnant—and not with her permission, either. She’d pissed Richie off when she’d tried to convince Jerry to get a real job, because working for Richie was likely to get him arrested. Richie’d warned Eden to back off, but when she persisted, he’d sent Jerry out of town, then wormed his way into her apartment, gave her roofies, and videoed himself having sex with her. Which, when Jerry saw that video, transformed him from boyfriend to ex.

Ironically, the asshole had stayed tight with Richie, who claimed he’d made the recording only to show his buddy Jerry proof that Eden was regularly stepping out on him.

Izzy’d seen the video, and it was pretty damn obvious that Eden had been under the influence of some kind of chemical substance at the time it had been recorded.

“I was upset,” he said. “And I was
wrong
. As soon as I was thinking clearly? I knew what must’ve happened. Richie wasn’t alone with you when he made that tape. He couldn’t have been.”

And it was obvious—after Izzy’d had some time to think about it—that at least one other person had been there, with Richie, working the camera. And whoever that person was?
He
was Pinkie’s biological father.

Because Richie had been African-American, and Pinkie’s father had been white.

Which meant that Eden hadn’t merely been raped that night. She’d been the victim of a gang bang.

“Goddamnit,” Izzy said now. “Thinking about it makes me sick.”

“I don’t remember any of it,” she reminded him quietly.

Which was one of the reasons she’d been so open to the idea of bringing Pinkie into the world, and having him be part of her life. His had been a seemingly immaculate conception.

“You know that Jerry’s in jail,” Eden said now.

“I hadn’t heard that,” he said.

“And Richie was killed, along with most of his crew,” she said. “Some kind of meth lab explosion. At least that’s the story I heard.”

Izzy looked back at her steadily because there was an unasked question in her eyes. “I didn’t have anything to do with it. You asked me to stay away from him.”