Dare To Love Series: Daring Ink (Kindle Worlds Novella) (7 page)

“Really?” She didn’t bother to look at him as she shoved her key in the lock of her front door. “I find that hard to believe.”

He grabbed her chin and tilted her face up so she had to look at him. She had to see how this was tearing him apart. “Why?”

“Because I have no problem walking away from you.” She shook off his hand, unlocked her door and stepped inside. “Try not to make so much noise with one of your club girls tomorrow night. Some of us need our sleep.”

Before he could say another word, she slammed the door in his face. As a series of thumps sounded, one for each lock, he watched the peephole. If it stayed dark, that meant she was just on the other side of the door. He still had a chance to talk to her, to plead his case.

“Penny.” Her name left his lips, half in prayer, and then a light appeared, singing through her peephole and he knew she was gone.

He’d lost her before he ever really had her.

Ch
apter Eight

The
next night, Sawyer sat on his bed with his ear pressed to the wall that separated his bedroom from Penny’s, listening for any hint that she was home. It was fucking pathetic, but he couldn’t think of another way to get through to her than by talking.

“Honey, are you there?” he asked.

Silence that punched him right in the gut.

He tapped on the wall.

Nothing.

“Please. I know you’re there. I heard you earlier.” He thunked his forehead on the wall.
This isn’t creepy at all. I’d totally want to date me right now.
“I’m sorry. None of this is coming out right. Penny, just give me a second chance. You won’t regret it.”

Nada.

He settled back into bed and flicked off the light. “Goodnight,” he said to the wall. “Hope to talk to you in the morning.”

*****

Alone
in her dark bedroom, Penny barely dared to breathe, which made the whole crying sniffling thing a lot harder on her. But she wouldn’t answer him and she refused to answer him or let him hear her cry. God, she was crying. She didn’t cry when she found out her mom had been lying, she got mad. She didn’t cry when she found out the whole scholarship to art school had been a lie, she’d done her best to prove she was supposed to be there. She didn’t cry when she realized that someone she trusted at Daring Ink had been stealing her designs, she’d set her mind to figuring out who it was.

But now she was crying. For him. For a man she barely knew.

According to logic, Sawyer’s betrayal should have hurt the least. The fact that she was fully dressed, laying in bed with a pillow over her head to muffle her tears didn’t make one bit of sense, so she did what she always did at times like these: She went to work.

By the time the lunchtime lookie-lous started coming into Daring Ink, the tattoo studio was blindingly clean. The metal sparkled. The leather gleamed. The glass appeared nonexistent.

“Oh my God, did you have to cover up a murder? This place reeks of bleach.” Staci ambled into the studio and tossed her purse down on the formerly pristine display case. “And you look like hell. Do we have Mr. Tall, Blonde and Buff to thank or to punch for this?”

“Punch.” At least then they’d be even because she felt like shit after no sleep, a bucket full of tears and a gallon of Clorox.

Staci looked at the three men wandering around the studio looking at the flash. They all had on expensive shoes and cheap, ill-fitting pants. They were the kind that window-shopped but never bought.

“You three.” She pointed a long canary yellow fingernail at them. “Vamoose. Come back when you have balls enough to get decorated properly.”

As soon as they crossed the threshold she flipped over the Open sign and locked the door. “No one else comes in for another hour. Tell me everything and leave nothing out.”

So she did. She poured it all out, including the screaming orgasms and the weird but sweet way he’d told her goodnight through the wall last night. By the time she got done, Staci was on her second soda and her third piece of gum.

“I see two options.” Staci held up two fingers in a V. “You can kill him or I can. I know people, and this is Miami, so there are a ton of ways to dispose of the body without anyone knowing a thing.”

“I don’t want to kill him.” She may have thought about it, but she didn’t actually want to off him and Staci really did know people.

“I have a cousin who’d break his leg, a compound fracture at the very least.”

Penny shook her head, a smile tugging at the corner of her lips. “I’m not going to jail because my heart’s broken.”

As soon as she said the words she realized they were the truth. Somehow, between slipping shut-up-already notes under Sawyer’s door and right up until that elevator ride from hell last night, she’d let him in. Was it love? Not yet, but it was something that would have grown into it. She knew it as well as she knew that anyone who got a lover’s name tattooed on their forehead had exponentially upped their chances of breakup in the near future.

“Look.” Staci sat down next to Penny on one of the tattoo tables and put her arm around her shoulders. “You’re my best friend and I love you, but twenty-five is plenty old enough to learn that a fuck is a fuck and a great fuck is totally amazing, but neither is love.”

“Tell that to my heart.” The one so broken that shards of it were poking into her lungs and making it hard to breathe.

Staci cocked her head to the side and gave her a considering look. She brushed a stringy strand of hair out of Penny’s face, which, Penny knew after she’d made the mistake of looking in a mirror earlier, gave Staci an unencumbered view of the dark circles under her eyes and the bright red coloring on the tip of her nose.

“Oh hell.” Staci leaned her head against Penny’s. “You got it fast and hard—and I’m not talking about the banging.”

Penny let out a chuckle that turned into a sniffle that morphed into a quiet wail. “What do I do now?”

Her best friend—the woman who could fix a busted pipe, balance a ledger and call in muscle to rough someone up—shrugged her shoulders. “That is something only you can figure out for you. But if you decide to go with the leg-breaking thing, let me know and I’ll get you the family discount.”

*****

As
Sawyer’s granddad always used to say, desperate times called for desperate measures. Looking around his bedroom a week after the disastrous elevator ride and he figured this stunt would either get Penny’s attention long enough that she’d finally talk to him, or he’d get kicked out of the building.

His bedroom looked like an electronics store. Speakers. Subwoofers. Sound bars. He had it all stacked up on top of each other facing the wall dividing his bedroom from hers.

“You have officially lost your mind, man.” D’Andre surveyed the room with a mix of awe and fear. “She is either going to report your ass to the cops or the mental health professionals. My vote’s for the psych ward.”

Sawyer flipped his friend off. “Please, you’ve known me for ten years. I’m crazy but I’m not that kinda crazy.”

“You’ve never tried to blow a hole through your wall with sound before.”

He adjusted one of the speakers that looked like it was about to tip over. “I’m not going to do that, I just can’t think of anything else. She won’t talk to me because of your big ass mouth.”

“Is that not why I hauled all of my very expensive, top of the line and formerly perfectly calibrated equipment down from the penthouse floor for you?” D’Andre asked. “I admit it when I’m wrong.”

“So do I, but she won’t listen. I’ve sent flowers that she trashed, balloons she left in the hall until they deflated like a drunk dick, and I’ve gone to her studio.” The past week had been hell. He’d gone from never wanting the same girl twice to never wanting anyone but Penny. She’d taken over so much space in his brain that he almost got kicked out of the grocery store last night for standing around and smelling the peaches too long. Obviously, he had lost his mind and was at a breaking point. “None of it has worked. If she’d just listen, I’d tell her I’d do whatever it took to get her to forgive me.”

D’Andre lifted an eyebrow. “And you think busting her eardrums is the way to make that happen?”

“I think it’s a way to get her attention.” Maybe. Hopefully. He was a man of action without options here, so he was making his own.

“All this for some girl you’ve known for what, a week?” D’Andre shook his head, sending his dreadlocks swinging.

“She’s more than just some girl.” She was Penny. His Penny.

“Are you telling me you’re in love?”

Was he? He felt a little deranged and he was more than willing to make a total ass of himself in front of God and everyone to get her back. It definitely wasn’t the kind of thing they wrote about in greeting cards. “Something like it.”

D’Andre laughed. “Good luck to you man. I’m outta here.”

His best friend let himself out while Sawyer looked around one last time. This was crazy, but it just might work. He hit play.

*****

For
the third time that week, Penny lay naked in her bed and promised herself she wouldn’t cry herself to sleep. Inhaling a deep breath, she let her eyelids drift shut and tried to picture skulls and bad rose tattoos rather than the honey-brown happy trail dusted across Sawyer’s six pack abs or the way her heart kicked into high gear whenever he walked into the room.

Skulls and bad roses, she chanted to herself, skulls and bad roses, skulls and bad ro—

Music blared through her wall and she jackknifed into a sitting position. The noise was everywhere. Heart pounding against her ribcage, she spun around on her bed and scrambled off of it, then rushed to the doorway to turn on the lights. She slapped her hands over her ears and looked around for the source, but the only thing unusual was the way her paintings bounced against the wall dividing her bedroom from Sawyer’s.

Sawyer…

Still keeping her hands over her ears, she tried to pick out the lyrics blaring through the drywall. The song had a solid thump-thump beat followed by a man with a Scottish accent promising to walk 500 miles to fall down at a woman’s door. That if he was getting drunk it would be with her. That if he was lonely, it would be because he was without her. That if he dreamed it would be of the time he was with her.

Emotion clogged her throat and tears sprung to her eyes as the singer went back to the chorus about walking so many miles to be with the woman he loved.

Sawyer…

He’d fucked up. He’d been trying to make up for it, but she was scared. Falling in love, if that’s what this was, wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t neat. It was ugly and hard and scary but absolutely breathtakingly thrilling at the same time. She grabbed a T-shirt from the hook by the door and put it on.

Could she dare to risk giving Sawyer a second chance?

Could she dare not to?

A pounding echoed up from her floor and it wasn’t musical. It was the person in the condo below her banging something against their ceiling but she didn’t care. She was already out the door.

*****

The
song came to an end and Sawyer turned off the speakers. The silence was more deafening than the blast of music. A dull, throbbing ache pounded against his sternum as he sank down onto his bed and surrendered to the inevitable.

He’d tried. 

It hadn’t been enough.

Penny didn’t want him.

Someone knocked on his front door, loud and fast. That wasn’t the cops. He’d done the law-enforcement-open-up knock too many times not to recognize it. Adrenaline spiked in his veins and he sprang off the bed.
Penny. It had to be Penny.
He sprinted through the condo to the front door, then yanked it open.

“You asshole.” Penny stood on the other side in that same oversized Daring Ink T-shirt she’d worn the first night he’d seen her, but tonight she had tears running down her face. “You woke me up.”

Okay, that wasn’t ‘I’m giving you a second chance’, but he could work with it. He had to. There was no way he was giving up now. “I couldn’t think of anything else to do to get your attention.”

“Well you have it for the moment.” She strode into his condo just far enough to allow him to shut the door.

Panic and confusion mixed with the adrenaline already making his heart race, the combination of which turned his brain into one vast wasteland. He couldn’t think of a thing to say. He had the woman he wanted two feet away from him and he’d lost his vocabulary. Then she turned and looked at him. His Penny. The woman who showed him that it was time to stop trying to get lost in other people and find himself. He blinked and all of the words came rushing back. 

“Penny, I’m sorry. I was an idiot and I should have never made that bet and once I did I should have told you about it.” He closed the distance between them, not touching her, but close enough that he could feel her anyway. “I know you have no reason to trust me right now, but if you give me a second chance you won’t regret it. You don’t want a boyfriend? Fine. I’ll be whatever it is you want me to be, just let me be with you.”

She pivoted so they were face-to-face and only inches apart. “Too bad I already have a boyfriend.”

His stomach dropped to his toes. “What?”

Looking up at him, she smiled. “He’s tall, is mostly intelligent except for a few bone-headed mistakes, is super sexy and he’s got the biggest, most beautiful dick I’ve ever seen in my life.”

He let out the breath he’d been holding. Wasn’t that just like her, life with her would never be boring. “What a lucky guy.”

“Because of his dick?” she asked.

“No.” He cupped her cheeks and tilted her face up. “Because he has you.”

He claimed her mouth as if this was just the beginning. The kiss was a promise—not to fuck up again, to always be someone she could trust, and for the future. She moaned against him as he glided his hands down her back to her pert T-shirt-covered ass and lifted her so her soft, wet core rubbed up against his hardness. Fuck. She wasn’t wearing a damn thing under the T-shirt. He’d been right that first night.