Under Locke (3 page)

It was nice and I liked it. After living in an apartment where the walls were so thin I could hear every television show my neighbor watched, his place was friggin' great. The house was painted a deep tan with a front yard that would've been nice if he mowed it more often than every leap year, and comfortable. It wasn't exactly what I'd envisioned him living in before I'd punched his address into my GPS. While he wasn't necessarily neat, it wasn't a pig-sty but it was nicer after I'd spent two days cleaning
the floors
for what seemed like the first time since he'd bought it seven years before.

I whipped out the key he'd given me the day I showed up, and let myself in. The television blared from the other side of the wall.

Sitting on his favorite recliner, Sonny grinned at me the minute I closed the door. He leaned forward, clutching the remote to his PS3 in one hand. "You survived, Ris?" he asked, his grin widening so much it made his thick, auburn beard twitch with the movement of his facial muscles.

The resemblance slapped me out of the blue. When had he started looking so much like our dad? Not that I would ever ask that out loud while he was around unless I was in the mood to get pinched.

Instead I smirked, plopping down on the couch perpendicular to him. "Barely."

He laughed, loud and deep. Curt Taylor all over again. I wonder if he even knew how much alike they were? Probably not. I'd only gotten ten years out of the old man before he'd taken off, and that was ten more years than Sonny had gotten. And while I wasn't exactly our dad's biggest fan anymore, Sonny had fallen out of love with him a lot
sooner
than I had. A shitty father who only showed up once a year wasn't going to win any awards, much less one that disappeared out of the blue leaving a wife and two kids behind.

As much as I wanted to, I had to beat back calling him an asshole even in my head. I'd promised myself I wouldn't do that anymore. Another promise I'd lined up neatly in a row along the way.

"That's just the way he is,"
yia
-
yia
had said time and time again despite how much mom and I had wanted to fight his true nature.

So, so ignorant to the fact that you can't fight a person's instincts even if they were awful, even if they caused bad and painful things to those they should
ha
ve cared about.

"I knew you'd be the one to make it through the whole day," Sonny claimed in his own individual voice that resembled nothing like our dad's gravelly draw. Thank God.

Wait a second though.

"What do you mean?" I suddenly had a feeling that my brother had fed me to the heavily tattooed wolves—well, one wolf in particular. On friggin' purpose.

Sonny looked at me, his hazel eyes—the color that we'd both inherited from our sperm donor—narrowed. And then he coughed. "There were a few people before you, kid."

He'd been calling me kid for so long that it didn't even faze me anymore. Even if it did, he'd probably call me that more often. What did faze me was the gnawing feeling he was hiding something. "And?"

"Most of them didn't last past the introduction. Much less a couple hours." He flashed that lazy grin again. "I knew you would though."

It was my turn to narrow my eyes at him. Sonny had never lied to me before. He was unapologetic about everything he did. If anything, it'd been me who had kept things from him until the absolute last minute. Even past the last minute, and yet, he'd always forgiven me for lying.  At least eventually he did. I wasn't going to think that he'd start spouting crap now.

"I don't think that he likes anything very much."

Sonny
snorted
. "Last I heard from Trip, he'd called six people into the shop to get interviewed for that job."

Six people? Oh boy.

Before I could focus on the idea of six individuals before me getting the boot, he thrust a game controller into my hand and tilted his head toward the massive flat screen mounted to the wall. If it was strange that he was changing the subject so abruptly, I didn't catch onto it. "You can survive anything, kid, right?"

Damn him. Those were the same words I'd thrown back at him each time the rabbit hole had seemed to pop out of nowhere.

Chapter Three

"So you just moved from Florida?"

I smiled out of the corner of my eye at Blake, who was sprawled out on the empty couch by the reception desk, casually.

It was only my second day at Pins and Needles. Dex
had
already been waiting when I'd shown up ten minutes until four. Under the natural sunlight, his tattoos seemed to pop out even more starkly against the smooth, lightly tanned skin beneath the ink. Blues and reds and blacks fought a battle I didn't think any of them were capable of winning on the majestic scale.

Especially not when they were stamped onto the nearly flawless, somewhere around six foot three form.

Why couldn't he have been ugly at least? For some reason, dealing with an impatient, unattractive person seemed easier to swallow than a smoking hot one.

He was standing outside of the building—why, I didn't have a clue. He had a key, he could
have
gone in but I wasn't going to bother asking. The
less interaction we had the better, it seemed.

His fit frame leaned against the stonewashed walls that separated Pins from the real estate agency. He had a cigarette nestled between two fingers, taking deep drags as he faced forward. Just like the day before, his black t-shirt stretched across his chest and arms, the only light color on him was the faded denim jeans that molded to his legs.

Nice legs. Thick thighs. But
m
ost importantly,
the
thighs of a
jerk
.

“Good afternoon.” The words had barely left my mouth and I was cringing. Had I really just said good afternoon?
Awkward, so friggin’ awkward, Iris
.
I had to shake myself out of
thinking about his thighs and how uncomfortable I’d made myself feel
as I pulled my purse closer to my chest and forced a tight smile on my face.

The moment I was close enough to him, he flickered his gaze over in my direction and glanced at his watch. "I don't like waitin' around." Dex took another pull from the cigarette before dropping it on the ground, crushing it with the sole of his motorcycle boot.

What?

For a split second, I got the urge to check my watch but I didn't. I knew what time would be on the face. Three-fifty. Not four o'clock. Three-fifty. What in the heck was this psycho babbling about?

"I'm ten minutes early," I told him, standing five feet away so that I wouldn't come in contact with the fumes from his smoking.

Dex raised an eyebrow. "Yeah, and I've been here for ten minutes."

Something mean tickled my lips, teasing me to take the bait and be as callous with him as he was with me. I couldn't do it though. I couldn't risk pissing off a man with very little patience that I needed a paycheck from. So I swallowed hard and in the blink of an eye, hoped that he'd get explosive diarrhea at some point in the near future.

"Okay."

God, I was such a friggin' pushover.

Dipping a hand into the front pocket of his jeans, he pulled out his keys, giving me a once over before tilting his head up. "And quit wearin' that fancy shit. I know you
ain’t got
any ink but you don't need to look like some sorority girl either."

Fancy? I bought most of my clothes from the clearance rack at Target.

By the time his words—insulting my clothes—settled into my brain, Dex had already unlocked the front door and let himself in.

Maybe it should
have
bothered me that he told me to change the casual work clothes, but it didn't. The thing was, I couldn't get that pissed off. I felt resigned and annoyed.

Halfway down the hall by the time I came in, Dex called out on his path toward his office. "There's a week's worth of pictures to upload."

Did I have a clue what I was doing? Nope. I connected the camera to the computer anyway and thanks to my investigative skills—and the search option on the operating system—found where I needed to dump and arrange the thirty five pictures.

That's exactly what I was in the middle of doing when Blake strolled in, plopping onto the couch like they were old friends.

I nodded at his question, not wondering once how he'd found out where I lived before. "Yep. Near Miami, well, really Fort Lauderdale. Miami's way too expensive." It was. It totally was. Completely out of the price range of a customer service employee. Astronomically out of the price range for two unemployed girls, which only reminded me that I should check in with Lanie at some point.

He made a whistling sound. "Always wanted to go to Miami. Why the hell would you move here?"

At the risk of not wanting to be rude, I didn't laugh. "My old job had a lot of cutbacks. Since I was one of the newest hires, they let me go first. I couldn't find another job, one thing led to another, and I thought it'd be best to—," come mooch off my brother? "Come here. Mr. Locke knows my brother."

Blake laughed, loud. "Mr. Locke?" He laughed again. "
C
all him Dex. Please."

I smiled at him and shrugged. It wasn't like he'd told me what to call him. Plus, with as quiet as he seemed to be, the last thing I wanted to do was piss him off and call him something that he didn't approve of. My last boss had lost his mind if he wasn't referred to as a sir.

Which I figured completely merited the fact that we called him an asshole when he wasn't listening.

"I heard Sonny's sister or something was visiting the last time I went to Mayhem," he threw in.

"Are you... a member of the Widows?"

"No," he answered instantly, his face flushing out of what I could assume to be embarrassment for shooting down the idea so quickly. "I've known Dex for a long time. That's it. I know all those guys." Then he plunged in the knife. "
Only heard of
your dad though, never met him."

It took such a small part of me to smile like what he said wasn't a big deal, when it still was. Which was stupid. I was too old to still let him bother me. I'd been through too much to care about where he was and who he'd kept in touch with, when he hadn't kept in touch with his own kids.

But it did.

I'd gone from thinking about him once a year to all-of-a-sudden getting constantly bombarded with reminders of something—someone—I'd rather forget.

And it must have been noticeable on my face because Blake had a guilty expression on his.

"I'm gonna get a pop, you want one?" he asked, already pushing himself off of the couch he was on.

Avoiding the awkwardness? I think I liked Blake already.

"No thanks."

He shrugged and was around the desk a moment later, his Meshuggah t-shirt draped loosely around his shoulders, faded jeans sagg
ing
, before he was out of my line of vision. It kind of made me feel like an old grandma, dressed in black work pants and an elbow-length lavender blouse that covered all my fleshly valuables.

I just didn't feel like explaining my arm. Everything always changed after The Arm Conversation.

As long as I could keep wearing my longer sleeved shirts, I could put that bomb off for a while.

~ * ~ *

I'd been staring at the screen for the last hour. The notes that Dex had set down almost two hours ago seemed to be mocking me in mute delight.