Shane (The Mallick Brothers Book 1) Read online

  The girl jerked back like someone had struck her and Helen smiled slightly. “I’m assuming you won’t be staying for dessert,” she said and the girl nodded, thanked Helen for dinner, and all but ran from the room.

  “Ma, seriously?” Ryan called a couple minutes later after, I imagined, he followed his girl outside and got the scoop. “She was a nice girl.”

  “Yeah, what were you thinking bringing a nice girl here?” Helen called back and was met with silence because they all knew she was right. If the entire family was in the blood-spilling, dirty money business, it really wasn’t meant for normal chicks. Hence the ex-con Mark brought home and the fact that I was, essentially, a paid escort. And Fee, well, I guess running a phone sex business gave her a certain kind of edge.

  Shane walked in a minute later, reaching for my hand and slapping the cash from his brothers down into it. He looked at his mother with a smirk. “Aren’t we a little old to still be cock blocking us?”

  “Oh, please. He wasn’t getting past first base with her and you know it,” Helen laughed.

  “Got a point,” Shane agreed. “Can I steal Lea or are you not done interrogating her?”

  Helen’s head tilted, her eyes keen. “Well, I have all the time in the world to get to know all about her, right?” she asked and I could see Fee pressing her lips together, knowing where that was going. “Since you two seem to be a bit more serious than I realized.”

  “Ma…”

  “Of course,” I rushed to say, not willing to give up the ruse yet.

  Helen gave me a smile that said she wasn’t fooled, but was willing to see how far we were willing to take it. “Then by all means, steal her.”

  “Your mom knows exactly what is going on here,” I told him as we moved into the hall.

  “She knows I have never had a serious girlfriend,” he corrected. “So she’s looking for holes in our story. The sooner I got you out of there, the better. You saw what she did to Eli and Ryan.”

  “But you already ate,” I declared. “And there was no chance of me fucking you anyway.”

  Shane’s head jerked to look at me as another male voice started laughing heartily, drawing my attention. I found Mark standing in the middle of the hallway just outside the family room, like he was moving toward the kitchen but my words stopped him dead.

  “Gotta love the honesty,” Mark said with a nod as he moved away.

  “No chance, huh?” Shane asked, taking my words as a challenge.

  I turned to him fully, straightening to my full height and keeping eye contact. “Not the slightest.”

  “Wanna put some money on that?”

  “Gentleman’s bet,” I suggested.

  “Oh, baby,” he said, moving toward me, making me back up until the wall prevented any further retreat. He closed in on me, the whole front of his body pressing into me, making my breath catch, making an undeniable spark of desire start deep in my core. His arm raised, elbow planted somewhere beside my ear, his forearm arched over my head, his head ducked to look me in the eye. “No one would ever accuse me of being a gentleman.”

  My chest felt compressed under the realization of what he was. Trouble. With a capital T. It seeped out of his pores. It was like an aura around him. Not just because he was a criminal, a violent bastard, and that everything about him screamed ‘womanizer’. No, he was trouble because he was a continuation of a fucked up cycle for me.

  He was just another on the assembly line of bad choices.

  Hot? Check.

  Foul-mouthed? Check.

  Sexy as all get out? Check.

  Dangerous? Check.

  Sure to fuck up my life even more than it already was? Yeah, I was going to go ahead and put a big fat check right there too.

  Thank God I didn’t tell him where I lived. If he just showed up at my door one night, I was pretty sure there would be no denying him.

  “See?” I said, swallowing a little hard. “There’s another strike against you.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m in a good guy phase.”

  To that, his lips tipped up in a somewhat condescending smirk. “Baby, I give that a week.”

  I lowered my eyes at him. “Why?”

  “‘Cause you ain’t exactly a good girl.”

  With that, he pushed off the wall and away from me, going to go sit with his brothers. As for me, I took a couple slow, deep breaths, trying to calm my sex drive.

  Then, deciding both the kitchen and the family room were dangerous, I followed the sound of little girl laughter outside where I found the girls playing in their new playhouse.

  “Can I join your club?”

  “That depends,” Becca said, mustering all the authority she had in her five-year old body. Which was a surprising amount.

  “On?”

  “If you think boys stink.”

  I let out a snorting laugh, smiling big.

  Well, it looked like I found my place.

  “I definitely, definitely think boys stink.”

  FOUR

  Lea

  The rest of that evening was mostly painless. About an hour after I joined the “boys stink” club and answered a million little girl questions to why I liked Shane (to which I had to come up with an inventive lie) and how I learned to put my makeup on, the rest of the family came looking for us, inviting us in for dessert where I made sure to spark up conversation with Mark, Hunter, and Fee so I could avoid the towering presence of Shane beside me.

  After that, we got silently back on his bike and drove to my car. He was surprisingly staid as he handed me my two-fifty and told me with twinkling eyes that held promise that he would see me around.

  “Fat chance of that,” I said with a head shake.

  Because I was going to avoid his ass like the plague.

  The last thing I needed in my life was more uncertainty, more complications, more things to stress myself out over. I just traded one shitty situation in; I didn’t need to test drive another.

  But I couldn’t complain.

  I had two-fifty from Shane and the hundred from his brothers that would make it possible to not go hungry as I waited for my first paycheck from Fiona. And it was a whopper of a paycheck too. Apparently phone sex was booming. I blamed video games. A whole generation of men used to huddling together in their parents’ basements killing fictional characters and never learning how to interact with anyone, let alone the opposite sex. But thank God for those socially awkward freaks because they allowed my cabinets to fill up, my fridge to be overflowing, and my closets to get a few more clothes on the hangers.

  The night shift took some getting used to and I was running pretty fully on caffeine and slips of sleep. So when I got home after a long shift, wanting to take a shower to wash off the slimy words of my last caller who really needed to have his ass thrown in jail he was so creepy, and reached for the knob in the shower and water started spurting everywhere?

  Yeah, I kind of flipped shit.

  The water, like always, was frigid and had already started to completely overflow my tub, my entire body soaked from my fumbling, when I finally found the number for the company that owned the building. The robot at MBRO Corporation informed me that it was after hours (in the middle of the day) and that I could leave a message and someone would get back to me as soon as possible.

  “This is 2D. My bathroom tap is broken and there is water everywhere. I swear to fuck if you don’t get your lazy, cheapskate, slumlord ass over to my apartment right about fucking now, I am going to report you to every agency I can find until they fine you so fucking much that you’ll be living in a God damn cardboard box on the street.”

  I ended the call, charging back into my bathroom, frantically looking around for the cut-off and finding it nowhere, knowing that in some apartments, for fuck knew what reason aside from maybe shitty construction, the switch wasn’t in every unit. I cursed the piece of shit building in new and inventive ways until I heard a sharp rapping at my door.

 
Sure it was the neighbor below who likely had water dripping through their ceiling, I was yelling as I threw a mass of soaked hair over my shoulder. “I already called the slumlord,” I called, reaching for the locks and sliding them. “It’s not my fault they run a…”

  The rest of my sentence got cut off mainly by my own surprise.

  Because there in my doorway in jeans and a gray tee, with a big, busted toolbox in his hand, looking way too freaking good right about then, was none other than Shane freaking Mallick.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  His lips tipped up, looking me up and down leisurely, surely seeing my nipples poking out of my shirt and bra thanks to the soaked, freezing material. When his eyes found mine again, they were a little wicked. “Lazy, cheapskate slumlord at your service,” he said, giving me an easy smile.

  No.

  No freaking way was Shane my God damn landlord.

  Also, no way was he such a shitty landlord.

  “You own this building?”

  “Yep. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to stop that fucking leak before we get five different kinds of mold that will condemn this place.”

  With that, he pushed in past me, brushing into my shoulder in the process and a shiver coursed through me that had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I was soaked to my skivvies. I stood there numbly for a long moment, taking deep breaths.

  Because what the actual fuck?

  In what universe could my one time fake date be my landlord? And why hadn’t Fee warned me? I’d talked to her a couple times about the building I lived in.

  It better not have been some ruse on her part. She and I were going to have a chat about it the next time I saw her.

  There was a loud clanging noise, drawing me back to the present, and I moved through my bedroom to the bathroom, my feet sloshing in my shoes as I went. Shane was kneeling on the side of my tub, a wrench in one hand, water cascading down on him from the shower head, making him look like he was in some kind of freaking commercial.

  Yeah, I should have stayed in the kitchen.

  Where it was safe.

  My sex clenched hard at seeing his wet shirt sticking to the muscles underneath and his biceps contracting as his hand twisted the wrench. But right then, thankfully, the water got high enough to finally go over the lip of the bathroom doorway, puddling into my bedroom.

  Glad for something to do that didn’t involve staring at Shane doing manual labor, I went to the kitchen to get a mop and bucket and set to work slowly sopping the water up as Shane banged away.

  A couple long minutes later, the flow of water suddenly stopped.

  Shane grabbed a bath towel, dropping it on the floor, sopping up the water then squeezing it into the tub as it drained. We worked like that for the better part of a half an hour until the floor was no longer a giant puddle and just glistening with water that would eventually air dry.

  “I would thank you,” I said, propping the mop up against the wall, “but it’s your fault this happened in the first place.

  “Because I’m such a slumlord,” he guessed.

  “Seriously though. I mean, the elevator seems like it’s been out of order since the seventies. The place is a shithole. I can’t believe someone hasn’t called the freaking cops on you and had this place condemned yet.”

  “Baby…” he said with a strange smile.

  “Stop ‘babying’ me,” I snapped, not because I didn’t like it, but because I liked it too much. “And what?”

  “Do you ever wonder about your neighbors?”

  “Not particularly. They keep to themselves.”

  “Never stopped to think why?”

  “Because this is a crappy area and no one wants to get attached in case we get gunned down or mauled in the parking lot?” I asked sarcastically, lips twitching.

  “No one who lives here would ever call the cops because, Lea, no one who lives here wants to draw attention to themselves.”

  “Oh, don’t be so dramatic. Some of us are just low on cash at present. I mean, look at Barney and his wife…”

  “Barney and Gerty are forgers.”

  “Forgers?” I repeated, brows drawing together.

  “Yeah, they fake IDs, passports, marriage and divorce documents, citizenship papers. They’re the last of a dying breed and the best there is. On this coast, at least.”

  “But,” I said, shaking my head, not willing to accept that sweet old Barney was a criminal. “But they live in a hellhole.

  “Where no one would think to look for them,” Shane agreed. “Ever been inside their house? I swear to fuck every God damn faucet and door handle is pure fucking gold. Gerty has expensive taste.”

  I swallowed hard, deciding to save that information for a later date, knowing it was likely useful for me to know someone who could give me a new identity if it ended up looking like I had done a shitty job hiding my real one from being discovered.

  “Okay then. What about the couple that…”

  “Dealers. Sell pot.”

  Annoyed, though not fully aware why, possibly just because he was right and I hated being wrong, I pressed. “Fine, but you can’t tell me that shut-in down in the corner…”

  “Yeah, no. That weird fuck milks snakes.”

  “I’m sorry. Milks snakes?”

  “For the venom. To make anti-venom.”

  “Wait. So you’re telling me that there is a guy two doors down from me with an apartment full of possibly deadly snakes.”

  “Not possibly deadly; they’re very deadly. Also, very illegal in this area. So no one is calling the cops in here.”

  I sighed, knowing I lost my argument. “If you tell me that someone in this building is like cooking meth or something like that…”

  “Nah. No meth. I’m not having my property, crappy as it is, get blown to kingdom come because someone watched too much fucking Breaking Bad and decided to try their hands at street corner chemistry.”

  “Well there’s that at least,” I shrugged. “So what was wrong with my shower?”

  “The thing inside that stops the water was jammed.”

  “The thing inside. Is that the technical term?”

  “Do you get off by being a smartass?” he asked, looking amused.

  “Only when it takes someone like you down a notch.”

  “Someone like me, huh?” he asked, starting to move. Toward me. And that, yeah, that wasn’t a good thing. I was pressed up against the sink vanity, the linen closet to my side preventing me from scooting toward the door. Trapped. And everything about Shane seemed predatory. I had never felt so much like prey in my life. “You still in that good guy phase?” he asked, planting his hands on the vanity on either side of my hips, caging me in.

  “As a matter of fact, I am.” A giant liar, I added inwardly. Bad boys always had been and always would be my thing and I knew it.

  “Yeah, well, let’s see what we can do about that,” he said.

  Before I could even register the giant, flashing warning sign those words created in my head, his lips crashed down on mine. He even kissed like bad guys kissed: hard, punishing, greedy, unconcerned with the concept of chaste first contact, of getting to know someone else’s preferences. His lips crushed into mine, his hand going behind me to grab the base of my skull, holding me in place while he tasted me. His teeth grabbed my lower lip, sinking in hard enough for a gasp to part my lips. He took the opportunity and slipped his tongue inside to claim mine as shocks of desire sparked over every inch of my skin, making me hyper aware of the way his firm body pressed into mine, making my ass crush into the vanity. My nipples hardened as my traitorous arms went around him, pulling him closer, flattening my breasts to his chest. He made a growling noise deep in his chest as his lips claimed mine again, not giving me a second for air, for thought, for anything other than to get completely consumed in the need.

  His fingers snaked out, snagging my hair, then curling into a fist and pulling hard, making me jerk back. His head d
ipped and his lips found the overly sensitive skin of my neck, moving over it until I felt my hips jerk against his, begging for fulfillment, pressing against the hard outline of his cock restrained by the thick jean material. His tongue slid up my earlobe, making me shiver almost violently on a quiet moan.

  And of course, of freaking course, that was the moment he decided to pull back.

  Forcing my eyes open, I found his a bit heavy-lidded too, but that was completely offset by the cocky smile he had in place. “I think that phase of yours is over,” he told me, releasing my hair and moving away. Damn if I didn’t need to grab the edge of the vanity to keep myself upright, a motion I was sure he caught judging by how the smile spread. “And now I know where to find you,” he added, grabbing his tool box and moving out of the room, dripping water everywhere as he went.

  “Great,” I mumbled to myself when the front door slammed.

  I turned slowly, looking at myself in the mirror. I was never the type who could hide their feelings well. Vocally, because I was a loudmouth. But also because my face always betrayed me. My eyes in particular. Right then, they were heavy-lidded, bedroom needy. My face was flushed.

  I brought a hand up, pressing it against my heart that was still beating way too fast, forcing myself to take deep breaths and ignore the pulsing feeling of my untouched-for-a-woefully-long-time pussy.

  I exhaled hard, going into my bedroom, tossing off my sopping clothes into a pile inside my bathroom and slipping into fresh panties and a new tee. I reached for my phone and called work.

  “Hey, it’s Lea. Put me into Fee.”

  There was a short pause before Fiona picked up. “Lea?” she asked, sounding surprised. “Why aren’t you sleeping?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that your brother-in-law owns my freaking building? I mean that couldn’t have possibly slipped your mind. Like, ‘hey, Lea, nice shoes, oh and by the way… that guy you had pay you to take you on a date, yeah, he totally owns the building you live in. Just so you know.’ Something like that.”

  There was a pause and I knew her well enough at that point to know she was pressing her lips together, her eyes downright mischievous. “Oh, was it a meet-cute? Tell me it was a meet-cute.”