Under Locke (9 page)

“Hold up!”

I forced myself to turn around and see him jogging over. “Yes?”

He cut the distance between us to stop just two feet away. “What the fuck are you doin’?”

I blinked. What? “You told me I could leave when I was ready.” I blinked again. “I was ready.”

Dex’s amazing eyes, even under the dim streetlight that cast shadows in the shadows, looked incredulous. “Girl, I said you could leave when you were ready but not by your fuckin’ self. You can’t be walkin’ around this side of town all alone
so
late.”

Did this man just... scold me?

And what the hell did he mean this side of town? This side of town seemed safe enough.

“My car’s just right there,” I told him, pointing in the general direction of the nearby lot.

Dex shrugged. “You gotta have some self-preservation or somethin’, babe. Can’t be walkin’ around here by yourself.”

“It’s right there,” I repeated, pointing again. It was seriously thirty steps away.

“I don’t give a fuck,” he pointed out. “C’mon, I got a business to close. Last thing I need is your goddamn bro callin' me, bustin' my balls over somethin' happenin' to you.” Dex wrapped his fingers—long, not too slim but most, most, most definitely manly—around my forearm and pulled me across the street.

I wiggled my arm in his grasp a little, pointing at my car with my free hand. “You can let go of my arm." I jerked it again futilely, thankful he'd grabbed the good one. "I don’t need a babysitter, but I appreciate the gesture,” I groaned under my breath, shaking my arm in his grasp once more.

“Obviously you need a babysitter if you’re walkin’ around shitty ass Austin alone this late, babe.”  He shook his head, yanking me not so gently around Blake’s white Nissan Frontier and toward my old Ford. “So fuckin' stupid,” he hissed under his breath.

Jerk. Total jerk.

"I'm not stupid and I'm not a friggin' idiot," I snapped, wiggling my arm again but he didn’t let go.

He also didn't say anything. The only noise that came out of his body was a sharp inhale that was impossible to miss.

"Can you please let go of my arm now?" Why the hell was I saying please? I tried jerking out of his grasp, feeling like an idiot for asking permission to get control back of my body. I should
ha
ve jus
t…
demanded it, dam
n
it.

"No."

His simple, curt answer grated on me.

“Not till you’re in the car,” Dex explained.

I pulled at his hold. “Let. Go. Of. My. Arm.” I lowered my voice into a whisper. “Or else.”

He didn’t need to know that
the
or else
depended on me slapping his tiny nuts with the back of my hand.

Dex didn’t respond and he didn’t say anything either as he pulled us to a stop in front of my Focus. I was fishing through my purse the minute my arm was free.

“Thanks for walking me over,” I murmured to him, still indignant. Still pissed. Still keeping my eyes a million miles away from Dex The Dick’s face.

You need the job.

You need the job.

You need the job.

But that didn't mean I completely shut up. My dumb mouth kept going. "I'm not stupid enough to not pay attention to my surroundings, by the way."

Well, that could
ha
ve been a lot worse.

Normally, I would
ha
ve been shocked by how angry I felt all of a sudden. It was as if the two days of working with this asshole and the
last ten years of my life
had suddenly joined together in a tsunami of pissed-offness that threatened to drown everything in the world. Normal Iris would
ha
ve and should
ha
ve just continued to ignore Dex Locke. Pretend like his words hadn't bothered me but that Iris was a victim of the tsunami, apparently.

He didn’t say anything for a long minute, an ink covered hand pulled at the sleeve of his crew neck shirt. His tight gray crewneck shirt. Guh. It seemed so friggin' unfair. It should be a standard that attractive men be just as nice on the inside as they were on the outside. But they weren’t
a
nd it sucked big time.

“Ritz?” he asked in a softer tone than I’d ever imagined hearing from him. The dry, bored tone seemed to be a staple in his vocal cord usage.

I groaned. “My name’s—“

“Ritz.”

“No,” I told him—well, his neck.

“Look at me,” he said but it sounded more like an order.

I didn’t want to, and I knew he knew it too.

“Babe, look at me,” he repeated the command, still in that lax, casual voice.

Slowly, like a snail making a long trek, I rolled my eyes over to his face, taking in the flawless bone structure staring back at me from over demon flesh incarnate.

When my eyes landed on his bluest of blues, he frowned. That handsome, angled face shifted in uncomfortable displeasure. Should it have been a surprise that a look that resembled guilt seemed so foreign to him? No. “Chill out, yeah?”

I forced that same look he'd copyrighted onto my face. Flat, plain, and emotionless. “Sure.”

He blinked. “You’re lyin’.”

I tried to take a step back. “Goodnight.”

Dex's hand whipped forward to grab the hem of my shirt, stopping me. “Ritz.” His tone was insistent.

“That’s not my name.”

He chose to ignore that. “Will you look at me?” he growled, exasperation dripping from his words. That soft voice disappearing in an instant.

I looked at him but felt a million miles away.

Dex cut the distance between us, towering over me. His brilliant eyes searched over my face, resting on my mouth for a brief moment before looping back up to my eyes. "Son already bitched me out."

I tugged on my arm. "Goodnight."

“Babe," he said, tugging on my button-down. "I got a bad temper and that was a
crap
day for me. I say shitty things when I'm pissed
.
"

Sure, because it was that friggin’ easy. He had a shitty day so he could call me names behind my back. Right. Made total sense.
Not
.

Dick.

I just stared back at him.

“Just let it go, 'kay? It drives me fuckin' crazy you won't look me in the eye,” he breathed. "I don't do this awkward shit, babe."

“If I look at you from now on will you leave me alone?” I asked him in a whisper.

Something shuttered across his eyes. “You’re not gonna let this go?”

My chest flared with white hot anger. Getting fired would be better than quitting if I was standing up for myself,
wo
uldn’t it? Sonny was my brother, he’d understand in a heartbeat if I explained. Then afterward, some kneecaps would be busted.

There was always the job at the damn strip club. Lord.

Schooling my features, I leaned forward to close the short distance between us to a microscopic one despite the near foot in height difference.

“It’s not everyday someone I don’t know calls me a fucking idiot,
then insults my clothes and my time management.” I looked him right in the eye, not caring that he winced. “I’d say I’m sorry that I had to ask you for help, and that I can’t pretend you didn’t hurt my feelings, but I won't. If you would've showed me what to do slower or not rolled your eyes each time I wrote something down in my notebook, I wouldn't have had to. I'm not stupid or an idiot or a moron or whatever else you've called me.” In all honesty, I hadn’t intended to tell him he’d hurt my feelings but once the words were out in the universe it was a done deal. Whatever. I couldn’t take them back so I had to stand by them. “And now, I’m just pissed off, and I want to go home.”

And Dex, Dex just looked at me with those irises the same shade as a crayon. “Yo
u don’t know what it’s like to have a shit day, princess?”

Princess?

Princess?

This dickwad had no clue.

I sucked in another breath, steeling myself. I wasn’t going to be a pushover again. No. Friggin’. Way. I was done. If I could get fired, it’d be better than leaving on my own. So I laid it out on him as politely as I could. “When I have bad days, princess,” I whispered, opting at the last minute to leave out the Duke Dickface teasing my tongue
,
“I cry. I read. I clean. I eat crappy things. I swim or do the yard. I don’t make people feel like crap
, your royal highness.
”

Chapter Six

“Are you sure this won’t get you into trouble?”

Sonny’s upper body had disappeared beneath the car minutes ago with tools and a pan. I plopped down on top of a tire that was sitting off to the side of the bay at the body shop he worked at, watching him because I had no idea how to help. “It’s fine, Ris. Trust me.”

Well, shit.

The shop was closed on Saturdays; there was a very clear sign by the gate that we’d come through. Personally, I’d rather not get arrested for trespassing but Sonny didn’t look worried even a hundredth of a fraction. Plus, I’d spotted three bikes and two cars parked alongside the big adjacent building to the bays, so I figured we either weren’t alone or somebody was using the space as a parking lot.

Only I wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or not.

“You trust me, don’t you?” he asked in a teasing voice when I didn’t respond.

"No." I extended my leg out to nudge his knee with my toes. “Yes.”

Because I did. A lot. Sonny had never let me down when he knew I needed him.

Regardless, I still didn’t want to risk him losing his job all because I couldn’t change my own oil. “You're positive?”

A dirty blue rag went airborne and smacked me in the face. “Quit asking.”

"Sheesh," I muttered but made a face and picked the rag up with my index finger and thumb before tossing it back at him.

He worked quietly for a few minutes, the sound of metal on metal and
drip, drip, drip
filling the silence before he spoke again. “Wasn’t your mom’s anniversary last month?” he asked in a muffled voice.

I froze, sucked into the fact he remembered the date.

But just as quickly as my appreciation for him flared, a distant but familiar feeling that was both pressing and heavy swam around in my stomach. It was awkward and irregular shaped, but after a second it went away like it always did in the past. I licked my lips and focused on answering him. “Yeah. It was.” Eight years had passed since my
m
om had died and it’d felt like something that happened two lifetimes ago instead. Which was a good thing, I thought. Will and
yia-yia
would agree, too.

It’d taken me years to get over my dad leaving. Years of crying and suffering and feeling like the hole his absence left in my life would never go away. At ten, it's unfathomable that the father you love and adore would just... leave. By the time he showed up again when my Mom got sick, I'd gone from being upset to downright pissed.