Asa (Marked Men #6) (16 page)

I let out a breath and felt my heart flutter. “Holy hell, is that hot.”

Dixie snickered next to me and Zeb chuckled. She tugged the big guy’s arm. “Yeahhhhh … and that’s our cue to go. Have a good night, Royal.”

I absently waved at her and started toward the bar. Asa pushed off the bar rail and grabbed something from the back shelf behind him. When I reached the bar he had turned off most of the lights except for the ones that lit up the actual bar top and the space behind it. He had also come around the other side, so when he got to where I was waiting, he dropped his head and gave me a stinging kiss that made me grab on to the front of his plaid shirt with both hands.

“Everything go okay between you and Ayd?”

His voice was gruff as he pulled out a couple of the bar stools to make space at the bar for us and set down a small, squat bottle of something. I was more than a little bit drunk, so I just nodded and moved easily when he suddenly turned and put his hands on my waist to lift me up. I squeaked in surprise when he turned with me trapped in his grip and set me down on the edge of the bar with my legs dangling over the edge. He put his hands on either side of my hips and looked at me closely since we were eye to eye.

“Seriously. I know you were worried about what she was going to say about us spending time together and she can be pretty fierce when she wants to be.”

I leaned forward and shoved my hands into his thick, blond hair and sighed. “She loves you so much. She wants you to have a good life.”

I bent just a little bit so I could kiss him on the end of his nose.

“You have to be a good person in order to have a good life, so I think that’s a bit of a stretch.” His words rumbled out of his chest as he took a step closer to me, which forced my legs apart to make room for him. His words made me so sad that I suddenly wanted to cry, but that also could have been fueled by the copious amounts of tequila I had consumed over the night.

“There is good mixed in with all the bad, Asa. You just refuse to see it or acknowledge it.” He grunted at me and then skimmed his hands under the hem of the blousy, off-the-shoulder shirt I had worn over leggings for girls’ night. His palms were warm and rough as they traveled over my ribs, taking the fabric with them. My hair poofed up and fell in a static-y mess around my now-naked shoulders. His gaze went molten as it traveled over my bared torso and my breasts encased in a lacy, purple bra.

“I see you, Royal. There is so much good in you that I never really know what to do with it.”

His hands snaked around behind me and hit the clasp on my bra. It took my sluggish brain a second to realize what his intent was as I was suddenly topless on top of the bar. I gasped a little and my gaze automatically shot to the series of black orbs secured to the ceiling that hid the surveillance cameras I knew were all over the place. I automatically went to lift my arms to cover myself up but he wouldn’t let me.

“Asa, Big Brother is watching.” I sounded a little strangled because he had leaned forward and was rubbing the tip of his nose against the puckered peak of one breast.

“I’ll take care of it. You don’t even want to know what I walked in on Brite and Darcy doing in the storeroom, and I guarantee that I knock whenever Cora is here and the back office door is closed. Not to mention the penchant my sister seems to have for disappearing into bathrooms with Jet. I want to have a drink before I take you home. Just roll with it, Red.”

I whimpered a little as he turned his attention to the other nipple and moved his hands to my backside to pull me closer to the edge of the bar, so the ridge in his pants was pressing tightly against my center.

“I need to be topless for you to have a drink?” His hair was like raw silk between my fingers, and now he was doing that swirling thing he did with his tongue around each nipple that made me forget my own name.

“You do.” He breathed the words across my now-damp flesh and it made me quiver from head to toe.

He took a slight step back and I felt like I was going to drown in the rivers of whiskey desire that made up his liquid-gold gaze. He put a hand in the center of my chest and nudged me backward until I was braced on my hands and my head was almost hanging over the other side of the bar. I couldn’t see his face anymore at this angle but his reflection was clear in the mirror that ran all the way behind the bar. He was looking at me like he wanted to own me. The look on his handsome face was enough to have my core going liquid and clenching in want, aching with a need so sharp it almost hurt.

“Asa?” He shushed me as he traced a random pattern across the taut skin of my stomach with the blunt edge of his fingernail. I stiffened automatically when his fingers hooked under the stretchy top of my leggings. “What exactly are you doing?”

It was a stupid question. I knew what he was doing, I was just having a hard time rationalizing that I was actually allowing him to get me naked on top of the bar. I felt like I should probably be protesting harder, should be using some sort of reasonable argument to prevent this from going down. But I wasn’t. It was hot, the sight of him standing between my legs as he worked my pants down my long legs and tossed my heels somewhere over his shoulder. He sighed in pleasure when he encountered nothing underneath, which I knew he would do. I had just anticipated that taking place at his place, not here. I don’t think he knew I could see him in the mirror, so it was the first time I actually got to see what others saw when he looked at me. It was beautiful.

His eyes were heavy-lidded and focused only on me. His nostrils flared in excitement and I could see the way he actually licked his lips in appreciation. He looked hungry and almost as needy as I always felt around him. This was the Asa that kept me rooted to the spot. This was the Asa I could have if I got him to let go of everything else he was holding on to. This was the Asa I no longer wanted to deny that I loved.

He dipped his head down and kissed me right above my belly button, and let his tongue dip in and out of the small indent. It made me laugh, and he finally lifted his head and met my upside-down gaze in the mirror. I felt like the heat radiating in that glowing gaze would fuse us together forever.

He smiled at me and my heart tried to fall out of my chest and land at his feet. He straightened and picked up the bottle he had set down on the bar moments ago.

There was a small pop as he slipped the top off of it and the earthy and musky scent of scotch hit my nose. I knew what he was going to do, thought I was prepared for it, but somehow having a gorgeous guy pour a shot down the side of your throat and then chase it all the way down your body just wasn’t something anyone could really prepare for.

The booze trickled across the top and down the side of my breast. A little bit of it found its way all the way across my stomach and pooled in my belly button, and there was the trail of liquid that hit the point of my body where it was wrapped around him and ran over the inner curve of my thigh. Asa used his mouth to get every single last drop. The sensation of his mouth moving over every single surface of my skin was electrifying. When he finally got to that sensitive spot where my leg curved in to the parts of me that were all kinds of flutter and greed, I lost my ability to hold myself up anymore and collapsed on the bar with my hair falling into God only knew where on the other side of it. I could see his blond head between my legs, felt the wonderful torture he was subjecting me to with his tongue and teeth. It was when he reached up with his one free hand, the one that wasn’t busy teasing and playing with all the wet heat between my legs, and laced our fingers together that I lost it.

It was so sweet, so tender, and so out of character for him that it made me fall apart and burst into a million and one tiny slivers of pleasure and love. In the mirror I watched him as he watched me break for him. His eyes glowed from someplace deep within and I wondered how anything survived inside that kind of fire within him.

I lay there, unable to move at all as he rose to his feet. He put his hands on the bar next to my hips and leaned over me. He placed a light kiss on the center of my breastbone, and then one on each cheek. When his mouth finally settled on mine, I tasted myself and scotch, and it was enough to have my girly parts getting worked back up again. I curled my free arm around his shoulders and threaded my fingers through the back of his hair.

“A good life doesn’t seem so far out of reach, looking at you laid out before me with the taste of you all over my tongue, Red.”

The words were so quiet I almost thought I had imagined them but when he kissed me again it was so soft, so sweet, and I could swear it had part of his heart in it, and I knew that I would give everything I had in me to give to make him wake up and be right here in this place with me, right now. This was too good to miss and he deserved to experience it even if he didn’t think so.

I traced the outside of his ear and felt him shiver. “You better make sure Rome doesn’t get more than he bargained for when he comes in tomorrow and looks at the video feed from tonight.”

He chuckled and straightened up. He moved away from me to gather my scattered clothes and helped me off the bar so that I could get dressed. He had to hold me up when all the blood rushed back out of my head, which led to some pretty intense kissing and groping since I was still naked. It made us both groan and he reluctantly pulled away, telling me he was going to make sure the video wasn’t going to pop up anywhere it could return to haunt either of us. His smile turned from playful to predatory in the blink of an eye as he walked backward and told me:

“My turn when we get back to my place.”

My oh my, I really LOVED taking turns.

“Have you talked to Mom at all lately?” Ayden asked the question from the other side of the Nova where she was fiddling with the old seat belt and staring out of the window. She was getting ready to head back to Austin with Jet on Saturday and had asked to spend the day with me before she left.

I missed her, but sitting around my apartment all day chitchatting sounded like zero amounts of fun, so I picked her up and asked her to come along with me on an errand I had been itching to do for over a month. So far the conversation had been pretty superficial and mellow, but now that she had brought up family, I knew it wasn’t going to stay that way for long.

“A couple months ago. She called from somewhere in Nevada. The guy she had hooked up with ditched her at a truck stop and she wanted money to get home.” Only I wasn’t stupid and I knew money to get home really meant money to stick in a slot machine until the next trucker came along.

“Did you send it to her?” Ayden sounded mad. She always did when our mom came up in conversation. The way we were raised meant we never really had a shot at much. I was so proud of Ayden for clawing her way out of the gutter on her own the way she did.

“No. I told her I would come and get her and she could come stay with me until she got back on her feet. She hung up on me and I haven’t heard from her since.”

Ayden snorted and turned away from me to look back out the window. “Figures.”

I couldn’t disagree with her and had nothing to add, so the conversation sort of waned until the neighborhood around us really started to shift to obviously unsavory and rough. Her dark head turned to look at me again and her eyes narrowed just a fraction.

“Why do you want to talk to this girl? She stole money from Rome, she sounds ungrateful and unapologetic. Why are you wasting your time reaching out to her?”

For weeks I had been thinking about Avett. About the way she just disappeared, the way no one had heard from her, including her parents. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to her terrible attitude than her being an ungrateful and spoiled brat. I knew all too well that that level of defiance and chilly disregard for the way her actions affected others had to come from someplace deep and dark that was so far down very few people could actually understand or recognize it. I was intimately familiar with self-loathing and could feel it rolling off the younger woman in waves.

I cocked my head toward my sister and lifted a questioning eyebrow. “I think there are those that would question why you wasted not only your time but most of our childhood on me, Ayden. Eventually we all need someone to try and save us; even if they fail, the fact that someone tried might be what matters most in the end.”

She blinked eyes that matched mine slowly and crossed her arms over her chest. “You saved yourself. You fought to come out of that coma. You turned your life around when you came to Denver. You have said a million and one times how sorry you are for the things that happened in the past. You were your own savior, Asa. No one did any of the work for you.”

I pulled the Nova to a stop in front of a duplex that had clearly seen better days. It wasn’t a rusted-out trailer in Kentucky, but it might as well have been. I turned off the ignition and sat back in the seat so I could turn to look at Ayden. She was watching me carefully and I could see how frustrated she was with the entire conversation in the way her shoulders were tensed up and the way her hands had curled into tight balls on her lap. It was the way she used to look whenever I got into trouble and she had to do something desperate and drastic to get me out of it. I reached out a hand and put it on top of her fists.

“I died in that hospital, Ayd. There were no angels playing harps. There was no redemption and repentance. I died and it was very clear that I was going to get exactly the kind of fate I had been courting with all the messed-up shit I had been doing to other people. All I could see was every wrong I had ever committed and every bad decision I had ever made exploding all around me. For once I could see how all of that affected you. I was dying, and I knew what was waiting for me on the other side, yet I couldn’t go knowing that was all you were going to have to remember me by. I had to come back and give you something else to hold on to, some kind of good memory to go with the endless miles of bad I laid at your feet. I wanted to have the chance to show you I could be the kind of brother you deserved all along, so no, I didn’t save myself—you saved me. Just like you’ve always done for my entire life.”

I saw her bottom lip tremble until she snapped her teeth around it to keep it still. Her fists unclenched below my palm and she curled her shaking fingers around my hand and her already husky voice rasped with even more emotion when she told me what I think I had needed to hear from her all along.

“I have always been proud that you’re my brother, Asa. Yes, there have been times in the past I would have gladly fed you to the wolves, and it’s no secret that I had to leave home because I didn’t know what to do to help you anymore, but we both made it out alive and are better people for it. I know you’re sorry for the way things went down when we were younger, but I need you to open your eyes and take some credit for the way you have turned it around to make things the way they are now. I’ve long since come to terms with the Asa from my childhood. What I want to do is love the Asa that’s here with me now. You need to let go of those boulders weighted with all the bad things from the past that are dragging you down before you get crushed under them.”

It was eerily similar to what Royal had been telling me the deeper and deeper I sank in with her. I don’t think I was ready to let any part of those stones go just yet, but a sexy redhead was slowly and surely eroding bits and pieces of the rock the more and more time I spent with her. By the time she was done, maybe she would be able to carve out something that was worthwhile, something that didn’t eviscerate me to look at.

I leaned over enough that I could kiss Ayden right on the center of her forehead between her midnight eyebrows and I felt her let out a shuddering sigh.

“I’m never going to let you down again, Ayd. That is the one and only thing in the entire world that I can promise and know it’s a promise I will keep.”

We stared at each other for a long and silent moment. The seriousness of the words I had said to her and the fact that I could see that she understood that I really, truly meant them finally worked to absolve me of some of the guilt that seemed to suffocate me whenever I thought about the things she had done to keep me safe.

We both needed a little bit of space and a little bit of air, so we were eager to get out of the car. I told Ayden she could wait on the curb if she wanted, but she just rolled her eyes at me and followed me up to the front door of the duplex. I knocked on the door and winced as it rattled in the frame. Several large flakes of peeling paint landed on the top step next to my boots, and memories of a trailer built like a tin can started to dance behind my eyes. Why Avett would stay here when her parents were so willing to give her a handout was beyond me, but something kept hounding me that there was more to the story than anyone was seeing.

Nothing happened after the first knock or the second and Ayden asked if we could just go. I contemplated actually forcing my way inside the building but figured with my luck someone would call the cops on me and I’d end up back in Royal’s squad car, this time for trespassing. It wasn’t like I actually had any proof something fishy was going on with Avett, just my gut instinct that the pink-haired hothead had somehow bit off more than she could chew with that tweaker boyfriend of hers.

Ayden had turned and was walking back to the Nova muttering under her breath about little girls not knowing what was best for them when the door suddenly cracked open. One of Avett’s hazel eyes peeked out. Even with just the sliver of her showing, I could tell she was a mess. Her dark hair was showing at the crown of her head where the pink typically lived, she looked thin and pale. There was an ugly scratch on her cheek. The hand that was gripping the door had a broken nail on each finger with cracked and scabby wounds healing on each knuckle. The girl looked like she had been in a fight; I wasn’t sure, but if she had, she didn’t look like the victor.

“What are you doing here, Opie?”

Her voice was strained, scratchy in the way one got after screaming or yelling for a long period of time. The entire picture made me frown and had my hackles rising up.

“People are worried about you. I thought I would come check on you and see if I could put their minds at ease.” No way was that happening now. Brite would lose his ever-loving mind if he saw his only child in this condition. “The druggie boyfriend do that to you?”

I crossed my arms over my chest to show her I wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry and she pulled the door open another inch. Her bottom lip was split open and it took every ounce of self-control I had not to tense up in rage when I saw the black-and-blue marks that ringed her neck like some kind of horrific necklace.

Avett moved several strands of faded pink hair out of her face and adopted a pose very similar to my own. Even bruised and battered, she was still a defiant little thing, and I had to admire her spark even if it was firing in all the wrong ways.

“I haven’t seen him in a few weeks. He said he was in trouble and took off right after I gave him the money I took from the bar. This is from the guys that came looking for him. Apparently he’s in bigger trouble than he led me to believe. They thought I was lying when I told them I didn’t know where Jared was. This”—she pointed a finger at her battered face—“was their way of persuading me to tell them the truth about his whereabouts.”

Her raspy voice wobbled and a chill slid up my spine. I knew all about how bad men tried to use the people in other bad men’s lives to try and get information. I would bet all my meager belongings that what I could see was only half of what she had been forced to endure while trying to protect her useless man.

“Why are you still here, Avett? Go home. Let your dad take care of you, let your family help you out. Where do you think this road you’re on is going?”

Ayden had taken a few steps back toward the door and Avett shifted her gaze to my sister as she quietly told her, “This road ends up with you hating yourself and walking away from people that love you. It dead-ends with you sitting by the bedside of someone you love praying for them to wake up from a life-threatening injury because there’s always more trouble around the corner and eventually it’s going to catch up with you and with them.”

The young woman shook her head and laced her fingers together as she took a step back toward the open doorway. “You don’t understand. Jared isn’t a bad guy. He loves me, he just has a problem. He needs me.”

Ayden and I exchanged a look. We both knew it was impossible to try and help someone that wasn’t willing to help themselves first.

Ayden’s voice was hard when she told the younger woman, “His problems don’t automatically have to be your problems.”

“Rome didn’t press charges, your parents bent over backward to give you a shot at a steady and normal life. I’m here because you remind me just a little bit too much of myself right before everything went to shit. How many chances do you think you get before your luck runs out?” I laughed drily and lifted a hand to rub the back of my neck. “Because let me tell you, when the luck runs out it’s a really scary thing, and what’s waiting for you on the other side isn’t something I would wish on my worst enemy.”

She just shook her head again, and shoved her mangled fingers through her hair and whispered, “I love him.”

She gave me a look that let me know the conversation was over and then turned on her heel and disappeared back inside the doorway.

I stood there in silence for a long moment trying to situate how I felt about what had just happened. Feeling helpless to help someone wasn’t something I was used to and I couldn’t say that I cared for it very much. Ayden grabbed my elbow and gave me a little tug to get me moving. She bent her head and rested her cheek on my shoulder.

“That kind of love kills.” Her voice was quiet and I could hear all kinds of memories and fear twisted through it.

“It’s not love.”

Ayden murmured her agreement, and we both fell silent as we got into the car and headed back toward downtown.

“So what are you going to do about her? She can’t just stay in that place while people are looking for her junkie boyfriend and using her as a bargaining chip.” It was all too familiar to my sister and I wished I had refused to let her come with me. She didn’t need any kind of reminder about the way things had been for us back in the day.

“I’m going to talk to Brite and my guess is he’ll go in there and bodily move her out of that crack den. I know he’s frustrated with the choices Avett has been making over the last few years, but there is no way he’s going to sit by and let her purposely put herself in danger over some loser with a drug problem.”

Ayden let her head flop back on the seat and shifted so she could put her boots up on the dash. If the car had been in pristine condition, I would’ve had a fit, but considering it was still a work in progress, I figured I could let it slide.

“Brite might not get a choice in the matter.” I knew she was talking about me and all the trouble that I used to actively bring right to our doorstep. She turned to look at me and I felt my heart along with several pieces of the soul that I thought had long been lost start to fuse back together when she told me softly, “You’re a good man, Asa. You might not see it because you’re so used to looking at the man you were before, but you are right here in front of me and I can see the good shining out of you. The fact I can see it means you should be able to as well.”

I couldn’t say anything to that. There were no words, and even if I’d had them I was too afraid that if I tried to use them it would break this moment, this second that I had been waiting for ever since I had woken up from that coma. I was a good man in Ayden’s eyes, and with her saying that I finally felt forgiveness for all the things I had put her through. I could literally feel some of those bricks made of guilt that barricaded me from everything happening around me start to crumble away.