KENNICK: A Bad Boy Romance Novel (10 page)

Give
yourself a little credit,
she thought, and it surprised her. She wasn’t used to
giving herself any credit. But the way that man looked at her…well, it seemed
like he was giving her an
awful
lot
of credit. And she liked the way that felt. Liked it very, very much.

Chapter
Fifteen

Kim could smell the food even as she stood on the
little cement steps. It smelled heavenly. But she could also hear something
rather strange. An intense buzzing noise that reminded her of something that
made her blush. Something she’d been given once as a joke gift, had used once
or twice out of curiosity, and then stashed away in her lingerie drawer. Yes,
it sounded
exactly
like that little
vibrator.

But for her to be able to hear it from outside must
mean it wasn’t a very little vibrator at all.

She considered turning on her heel and leaving;
whatever was going on inside the trailer, it wasn’t something that she wanted
to walk in on unannounced. Maybe she was early. Maybe he’d forgotten. But then
why the smell of delicious food? She stood, feeling sillier and sillier with
each second that she spent holding her fist inches away from the trailer door,
debating what she was supposed to do in this situation.

The question was decided for her when the door swung
open, making her gasp and nearly fall backwards off the step.

“Yes?” the man asked, his eyes lit with something like
amusement. It was Damon, the brother who was shaped like a boxer but apparently
had a penchant for cheeses. The smell of food was stronger with the door
open…so was the buzzing sound. She saw, as she gazed up at his massive girth,
that Damon was sporting a rather nasty, puke-yellow bruise over one eye and a
painful-looking split in his lip. She wondered what had happened in the twenty
or so hours since she’d last seen him, but it wasn’t really her place to ask.
Not yet, at least.

“I’m…I’m here for Kennick,” she said, gathering
herself together. Damon smirked and stepped aside, allowing her entrance.

Once more, she marveled at how the trailer opened up
once you were inside. This one was even bigger on the inside than Ana’s had
been. The buzzing sound came from a room on the left, and when Damon pointed in
that direction, she shot him a curious look.

“Go on,” he said, softly encouraging. Kim gulped,
wondering what weird situation she was wandering into. As she stepped to the
left, she peered around the small doorframe and immediately felt a mixture of
relief and embarrassment.

Kennick was laying, shirtless, on a sort of sofa
chair. The room was clearly a bedroom, but it was currently being used as a
tattoo parlor. Cristov was holding a tattoo gun to Kennick’s chiseled chest;
Kim barely caught a glance at the design before she turned away, hand to her
eyes, feeling that she had walked into a moment that was somehow more intimate
than she’d feared. Laughter followed her abrupt turning.

“You’re early,” Kennick’s voice came, loud and clear,
as the buzzing paused.

“How can I be early?” Kim asked, still averting her
eyes from his bare upper body. “You told me to come whenever.”

“Touché,” Kennick said. “Turn around, will you? I’m
not naked, you know.”

“You’re
half
naked,”
Kim shot back, but she realized she was overreacting and turned around, knowing
that much of her embarrassment was due to her burgeoning desire for the dark,
handsome Rom.

As her eyes fell to the work Cristov was doing on his
chest, she gasped. It was beautiful. A huge, intricate, geometric design that
reminded her of a mosque, with seemingly infinite detail. The overall shape was
a five-pointed star, but the clean, steady lines burst outward in a dizzying
array of curls and curves and points.

“Oh, wow,” Kim said, stepping forward despite her
earlier sense of shame. “That’s gorgeous.”

Cristov grinned up at her, putting his tattoo gun down
beside him.

“Thanks,” he said. “It would be better, but Cinderella
over here turns into a mouse after about three hours of work. He starts whining
and…”

“Shut up, Cris,” Kennick said, but the smile on his
face showed none of the irritation in his voice.

Kennick’s body, which Kim now gave herself permission
to admire in full, was as muscled and taut as it appeared under his clothes,
his arms covered in similar designs. She felt heat rising in her cheeks as her
eyes fell lower to the deep V that jutted from the top of his jeans, a smattering
of hair like a trail leading downwards to…

“My eyes are up here, lady,” Kennick called out,
teasing, as Cristov rubbed some sort of lotion over the freshly worked area of
his chest, then turned to pull off a sheet of saran wrap and fitting it smugly
over the brilliant ink. Kim wanted to run away and tear all her clothes off all
at the same time.

“Listen, if I’m really too early, I can go and come
back, or we can do this some other…” she said quickly, feeling overwhelmed by
the desire that was coursing through her veins.

“No, no,” Kennick said, jumping up and moving towards
her. She really wished he’d put a shirt on. Except she didn’t really wish that
at all. “Smells like dinner’s nearly ready, anyway. And tonight’s a good
night…these two will be out, so we can have the place to ourselves.”

“Yeah, all to yourselves,” Cristov teased, making a
smooching noise as he finished packing away his ink and tools. Kim turned to
look at Damon, who was looking on in silent amusement. When she felt Kennick’s
hand on her arm, she nearly jumped out of her skin, the flesh there burning.

“Let me put on a clean shirt and I’ll set the table,”
he said, moving past her through the cramped hall. She could feel the heat of
him as he squeezed by and felt an inexplicable desire to lean forward and trace
her tongue along his well-defined ribs.

I’m losing
it,
she thought.
I’m
seriously, seriously losing it.

“So, where are you two off to?” she asked, wanting to
distract herself from the smooth, feral movement of Kennick across the trailer
to his own room. She asked the question at Damon, but her eyes never left
Kennick.

“Movies,” he said. If it wasn’t for the burning
intelligence in his eyes, you’d almost think he was a bit stupid, his responses
always so simple.

“Yeah, Damon just
loves
the movies,” Cristov said. “You should see him tear up at the end of
Fargo.
He gets all weepy ‘cause the
sheriff loves her husband so much.”

“It’s a beautiful moment in American cinema,” Damon
said with a shrug, and Kim had to smile. She
did
love that movie, though it had never made her cry.

“So what are you going to see tonight?” she asked,
turning back to Cristov.

“They’re playing
Dog
Day Afternoon
at that art cinema a few towns over,” Damon said, apparently
coming alive now that the subject had turned to something that interested him.

“It’s a good compromise,” Cristov added. “Cause I like
movies with lots of guns, and Lurch over there likes movies that…what did you
say it has?”

“Showcase the subtle ways that society can make a man
deny what’s in his best interests, destroy his spirit, and drive him crazy,”
Damon said, turning away. “I’ll be outside.”

And with that, he was gone, the door slamming shut
behind him. Kim turned back to Cristov wide-eyed.

“I thought he was the silent one,” she said.

“Sometimes I wish he were more silent,” Cristov joked,
pulling on a light jacket. “Kennick cooked you some damn fine food, Little
Mayor. Hope you enjoy it.”

“Little Mayor?” Kim scoffed, wondering what the hell
kind of nickname that was.

“Well, ain’t you?” Cristov asked before following
Damon outside. Kim didn’t know if he could possibly know how honest a nickname
that was.

“Tweedledee and Tweedledum gone?” Kennick’s voice
surprised her as he emerged from his room, wearing a loose-fitting white undershirt,
presumably to give the raw flesh underneath it some room to breathe.

“Yeah,” Kim smiled. “Can I help set the table?”

“Oh, I think I can handle it,” Kennick said, pulling
some plates and utensils out. A bottle of wine – or, what Kim assumed to be wine,
since it had no label – already sat in the center of the booth that served as
the dining room table, and he poured out two glasses, bringing one over to
where she stood. Kim momentarily questioned the safety of drinking strange,
unmarked alcohol, but it smelled alright, if a little ripe. And she definitely
needed some liquid courage for this date.

The trailer had a similar set-up to Ana’s, except
instead of having the living room on one side and the bedrooms on the other,
there were two bedrooms on one side of the kitchen-slash-dining room, a living
room on the other, with Kennick’s bedroom right beside the bathroom on the far
end. Unlike Ana’s brilliantly decorated trailer, this one was very indicative
of the men who occupied it. It was neat, but relatively bare, with only a few
framed family photos on the walls and a huge, psychedelic print tapestry behind
the couch in the wood-paneled living room.

She’d gotten a quick peek into Cristov’s room and seen
some bright, colorful prints on the walls, but hadn’t managed to study them at
all. Kim was naturally sort of a nosy person, though in a far more subtle way
than her sister. She secretly dreamed of being left alone in someone’s room to
touch their belongings, examine their books and keepsakes, study the art they
chose to hang. She was fascinated by the way the things people owned told you
more about them than anything else.

“So, I made mushroom risotto and warm kale salad,”
Kennick said, starting to pull the fragrant dishes from the oven. Kim was a bit
surprised; she hadn’t expected this smart, handsome, buff man to
also
be a good cook, but it was clear
from the smell that he was. As he doled out two heaping portions, she slid
herself into the booth, mouth watering. She hadn’t eaten much that day, not wanting
to look bloated in her little black dress, but she was starting to regret that
decision. The last thing she wanted was to look like a pig shoveling food into
her mouth.

“Where’d you learn to cook?” she asked, wide-eyeing
the food as Kennick took his place opposite her.

“Here and there,” he said, stabbing into his own
plate. “Mostly there.”

Kim studied him across the table. She firmly believed
in the reality that when something seemed too good to be true, it usually was.
She remembered the things she’d read that day, when she should have been
working. She needed to know, before she got to talking to Kennick and liking
him even more than she already did, what the hell was going on.

Why had he invited her on this date? She knew it
wasn’t customary for Rom to date non-Rom people. So was she just a quick lay?
If she was, that wouldn’t necessarily be the worst thing in the world.
Especially not the way her body kept reminding her of that dream, and that she
hadn’t been with a man in longer than she cared to remember. But she needed to
know now, before she fell head-over-heels with someone ultimately unattainable.

Kennick seemed to sense her question and he paused his
chewing, narrowing his eyes at her.

“You look a bit concerned,” he said. “Are you allergic
to mushrooms?”

“No,” Kim said quickly. “It’s not that. It’s…I just…I
have some questions?”

“Was
that
one
of them?” he asked playfully. When she merely smiled in response, he let his
fork fall back to the plate and leaned back. “Shoot.”

“Well,” Kim said, spreading the paper napkin across
her lap, eyes averted. “I mean, okay…I did some reading and, well, it seems
like…”

She was interrupted by his laugh, her eyes darting up
towards his. He had his fork full once more, and it was raised halfway to his mouth,
but he had his dancing gaze trained on her.

“
What
sort
of reading have you been doing,
keshalyi
?
I can’t wait to hear.”

Now, he did place the fork in his mouth, and chewing
through his smile he waited patiently for the blush to recede from Kim’s cheeks.
She couldn’t help but smile back.

“Just…oh, it’s stupid, I know. I just looked online at
some websites. I was curious, I guess,” she said, and took a modest bite of the
food. It was as good as it smelled, and Kim’s stomach rumbled for more, but she
took her time chewing.