House of Payne: Rude (7 page)

“Yeah, I can just see Mama Coco diving behind cover to avoid a hail of paintballs.” Then she pointed her fork at him. “By the way, call me Sassy Pants again and I swear to God I’ll call you Sugar Britches in public.”

“I’m cool with that.” He paused in his eating, his fork suspended as he nailed her with an in-your-face grin. “Sassy Pants.”

Ugh
. “I owe you a Sugar Britches. Don’t let me forget.”

He laughed softly. “I won’t.”

There was something oddly predatory about that laugh, so she tried pushing ahead to safer waters. “I was surprised to find that the Crystal Gardens at Navy Pier has that night open, but we’d have to start the party at eight, since there’s something booked before that. I also found a place called The Lake Loft, which is a bit of a drive up the coast, and Chic Chicago is also available. It’s inside the Loop, which is great, but only so-so parking, which is bad. Oh, and the loft place, in addition to being a half-hour drive from Mama Coco and Papa Bolo’s house, doesn’t have the amenities you need, like valet parking and quality liquor packages. And taxi service for a place that far out for people who over-imbibe is going to be expensive.”

“Cross the loft off the list.” He waved his fork in the air in an X pattern. “We’re Italians. We love food, wine and family, and we party our asses off when all three are combined. Speaking of, eat. I’m halfway done and you’ve barely started.”

Mainly because she was hungry and not because she was a fan of following orders, she dug into the Kung Pao and took a moment to savor its spicy bite. “If you’re not busy tomorrow, you should head over to both Crystal Gardens and Chic Chicago to see which one suits best.”

“Great.
We
will.”

She almost choked on a swallow. “Pardon me?”

“We’re gonna do that tomorrow morning, first thing. I’ve got to be at work by noon.”

“So… when you say
we
, you’re referring to you and your imaginary friend, right? Because
I’m
sure as hell not going. I’m not throwing this party,
you
are.”

“Look, we’ve already established that if I’m left to my own devices, I’m going to do a man’s job on it. And by that, I mean laser tag and spaghetti at my place. Or yours,” he added, looking around. “My place is just where I’ve been crashing for the past six months. Yours is way nicer, in a decadent, hedonist’s paradise sort of way.”

“I’m not even going to ask what that means,” she muttered, and shoveled in fried rice rich with veggies, shrimp and soy sauce. “I’m not throwing this party for you.”

“No, you’re going to be throwing it
with
me, because you love my parents as much as I do. How many times have you thrown this party in the past?” Rude kept talking while she tried to contradict him, until she finally gave up with a vexed sigh.

“I’ve only thrown the anniversary party twice. What’s your point?”

“I’ve
never
done it. I’ve always been away. Last year’s was the only one I’ve ever gotten close to attending, and even then I missed it by a couple days. So since I don’t know what I’m doing, you’ve got a choice of letting me do it my way, or helping me do it the way it should be.”

She sighed. It was tragic that his reasoning made a whole lot of sense. “I guess it is kind of hard to build a house when no one’s given you the blueprints on how to do it.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“And if Scout were here, she’d be all over helping you, the way she was with me when I threw the anniversary party for the first time,” she added fairly, finishing off the last of her meal. “Talk about not knowing what I was doing. It was a total fiasco.”

“What happened?”

“It’s more like what didn’t happen.” She grimaced at the memory. “I’d booked a venue sight unseen because, like you, I had gotten a late start and I was desperate. Come to find out, the place I’d booked had been a slaughterhouse in a former life, and the interior still smelled like rotting animals.”

“That’s a smell that’ll be sure to set the mood for a party.”

“No amount of Febreze or potpourri was ever going to make that right, so I had to get creative, fast. Luckily I found a party barge company that had just started up, and they were willing to work with me on pricing. By the time Mama Coco and Papa Bolo’s anniversary rolled around, that barge had been turned into The Macau Palace, the floating casino from James Bond’s
The Man With The Golden Gun.
”

“So it all turned out for the best.”

“Barely. If it had been stormy, it would have become the Barf-O-Rama barge and the first failure for the annual Panuzzi bash. Thank God we had great weather that night.”

“So you were the one who was behind the party barge shindig. Anthony was totally ape-shit over that party, if I remember correctly.” He speared the last of the sweet and sour pork, then reached for his glass. “I was at Camp Geiger for my MCTs back then and couldn’t get online to see what was happening, so he sent me a ton of pictures. You had all kinds of gambling tables set up, and then some murder mystery dinner theater happened, right?”

“Oh my God, yeah.” She laughed out loud, remembering. “It was awesome and crazy all at the same time. Everyone who was in on the murder mystery wanted to be either the murderer or the hardnosed gumshoe, and no one wanted to be the dead body. In the end, Frankie pulled the preggo card, saying that she’d drop baby Giovanni right there if she couldn’t have her way and be the murderer. So we all backed off and let the crazy pregnant woman figure out who was who and what was what.”

A smile appeared, so slowly she wasn’t sure it started in his eyes or at his mouth. It was just suddenly there, blinding her with its dimpled brilliance. “I knew it.”

She blinked, confused and distracted by the power of the dimples. “Knew what?”

“I knew your laugh would be a sound that makes everything else fade away.”

For a full second she was silent as the words echoed in her ears and the air dried up in her lungs. “Did you really just say that?”

“Don’t tell me no one’s ever told you what a great laugh you have.”

“Yeah.” From guys who had wanted to get into her pants, sure. But Rude? Huh-uh. No way did he get filed into that category. “It’s just… I’m sure you’ve heard my laugh before.”

“We didn’t used to have a laughing kind of relationship.”

“We still don’t.”

“Jury’s still out on that.” He gave her another one of those killer smiles before he pushed his plate away. “I like hearing about your first party. Gives me hope that even if I’m somehow caught with my pants down, I can still pull off a great bash without driving myself around the fucking bend.”

“The success of that barge party was a fluke.” Desperately she grasped at the subject, before she could drown in the madness rising inside of her. That was what it had to be—a bizarre madness that made her notice things about him that she shouldn’t, like how those shallow dimples bracketed his mouth, and how those broad shoulders made her suspect the rest of his body was sculpted with defined muscle and sinew, but she wouldn’t know for sure unless she asked him to take his clothes off.

Yep. She was definitely going mad.

Rude toasted her with the last sip of his rice wine. “Fluke or not, you pulled it off.”

“But I had no idea what I was doing that first time, so the party was basically one hot mess from start to finish. The second time I hosted it two years ago was way easier, mainly because I’d learned from every mistake I made the first time around.”

“That’s usually how it is with first times, yeah? Whether it’s putting together a party or having sex, you always get better with practice.”

“Okay, that’s it.” The breath once again whooshed out of her at the impact of his statement, but this time instead of being confused, she was seriously pissed. “You’ve been trying to get a rise out of me from the first minute you walked in, so fine. You want to play? I’m fucking great at playing, so why not? Let’s play.”

Chapter Six

The upside for Sass in throwing down the gauntlet was watching the surprise bloom in Rude’s eyes.

The downside was watching him pick it up.

“About time you gave me some kind of response.” The satisfaction in his tone unnerved her far more than any hostility ever could. “I was beginning to think you were slow on the uptake.”

“So you admit it. You admit to fucking with me. Good for you.” She nodded, a mocking tilt of her head designed to piss off a saint. “At least you’ve got the balls to own up to it. The question is why.”

He slow-blinked. “Why am I fucking with you?”

“Yes.”

“Oh shit, my bad. You
are
slow on the uptake.” With a sigh that held a world of patience, Rude pushed to his feet. “Okay, fair enough. I guess I’ll have to show you. Get up for a second.”

Confused all over again and not sure what he could possibly show her to make his motives clear, she did as he asked, setting aside her napkin and rising from her chair just as he came around to her side of the table. Before she was prepared for it, his arms closed around her and his lips descended to cover hers.

Oh…God.

That was the last conscious thought she had before the world as she knew it went up in flames.

His arms were like a cage around her, holding her as if he expected her to make a break for it. The logical side of her brain insisted that was exactly what she should do, but Rude’s lips on hers negated all logic.

It negated it because he felt so unbelievably
good
.

The best part about his kiss was that he wasn’t at all shy about it. His mouth boldly took possession of hers as if he’d waited his whole life to do it. No, the best part about his kiss was the way he slanted his mouth against hers in search of the perfect fit.

Then his lips opened hers, and she decided then that the caress of his tongue was the absolute best part. He was openly seductive in how he invaded her mouth, as if he wanted to woo and dazzle her with every stroke. It had to be working, because she was pushing feverishly against him without conscious thought. But she couldn’t help herself. If he’d wanted to woo and dazzle her, he had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

A big hand slid under her hair to cradle the back of her head. He held her in place as he deepened the pressure, and the barely contained passion in his intensity became the best part. She stood on her tiptoes in response, a mindless move to lose herself in the heat of him while her fingers dug into the fabric covering his back.

If he’d been naked, her fingernails would have left marks.

Then, as she began to wonder what he felt like without the irritating barrier of clothing, she realized
everything
about Rude’s kiss was the best part.

When he at last raised his head, his breathing wasn’t as disturbed as hers. But since he was the one who’d ambushed her, she figured that only made sense.

“Never in a million years,” he said absently, his hold on her not loosening in the slightest.

She blinked, her mind too hazy to make sense of his words. “What?”

“Never in a million years did I imagine a kiss like yours existed.” His hand remained at the back of her head, and slowly his fingers tightened to guide her gaze up to tangle with his. There was a firestorm in his eyes, and her heart skipped a beat in something that was almost—but not quite—alarm. “Kissing you is like being burned alive, but it feels so damn good all I can do is want more.” As if to prove it, he lowered his head again to capture her mouth, dancing his tongue with hers with such wanton heat it nearly made her knees melt out from under her. When he lifted his head again, this time his breathing was as ragged as hers. “Damn. Just think what it’ll be like when I get you into bed. We’ll set off every fire alarm in the building.”

Wait.

Bed?

When I get you into bed…

That snapped her out of her kiss-drunk stupor like nothing else, and all at once she became aware of the hard bulge behind his zipper. That wasn’t just any hard bulge.

That was
Rude’s
hard bulge.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.” Without a doubt, this was a four-whoa moment, the first in her adult life. Somehow it didn’t surprise her that Rude was the one who’d made it happen. “Slow down there, cowboy. Even if this was an actual date—which it
isn’t
—it would be major bad form to jump from the first kiss straight into the sack.”

“This is an actual date.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Only then did she realize she was clinging to him like he was a life preserver and she was adrift at sea. Belatedly she pushed out of his arms, and was just contrary enough to be irritated that he let her go so. “I don’t date men like you.”

“What the fuck, Sass.” He folded his arms across a chest she now knew was as hard as a frigging brick wall. “You’d better hurry up and explain yourself. What the fuck do you mean,
men like me
?”

Overwhelmingly masculine men. “Men I don’t like.”

“That’s bullshit.” The lift of a brawny shoulder shrugged her words away. “It’s not that you don’t
like
me. It’s just that you don’t
know
me. If you knew me, you wouldn’t be able to get enough of me.”

Good God, was he
serious
? “No really, I
do
know you. And what I know, I don’t like.”

“You knew the little asshole I was back in the day. He vanished a long time ago—so long that it doesn’t even seem like that guy was ever me.”

Almost against her will, she recalled Frankie’s assertions of Rude enduring such hell that he’d had trouble coming back into the real world and reconnecting with who he’d once been. She knew what that was like, better than he could imagine. But she didn’t know if she wanted to get to know this new Rude, when the old one had left such a sour taste in her mouth.

“It’s been years since I lived under my parents’ roof with you,” he went on when she remained silent. “And even when I was there, we almost never spoke. So it’s safe to say we don’t know each other. But what little I do know about you, I like.”

Now he was getting harder to believe. “Now it’s my turn to call bullshit. I haven’t changed that much from the time I was a foster, and you hated me then.”

“I didn’t
hate
you. I just hated that you were there taking my bathroom privileges away. And no one stays the same after that amount of time has passed.”

“Maybe I’m a special snowflake.”

“I remember the first time I saw you and I said that despite the ‘welcome home’ you got from my folks, you weren’t
welcome
and you weren’t
home
,” he announced without warning, and it surprised her enough to drag her gaze back to him. The bitter regret burning in his eyes took her by surprise. “The look on your face…it was like watching a light blow out. Your eyes went dead and you looked right through me. And you continued to look right through me from that point on.” He moved toward her, and kept on moving when she tried to maintain the distance between them. “I didn’t like being dismissed like that, Sassy. It made me get in your face every chance I could just so you’d acknowledge me.”

She backed up all the way to the breakfast bar separating the dining room from the kitchen. “I didn’t dismiss you.”

“Yeah, I know. I know it, because I now understand what that look was all about.” He stopped even as she put out a hand to stop him, palm out and about an inch away from his chest. He leaned in, his hands coming to support his weight on the counter on either side of her, hemming her in. “That look you gave me was from a girl who’d had enough.”

In silence, the hand she held up to ward him off dropped.

There was no way he could have known that. No way.

“In that moment, that girl did the only thing she could do just to keep going. She shut herself down, went numb and made it so she couldn’t feel anything. No sense of rejection. No hurt. No bone-deep fear. No anger. No crushing loneliness.”

“Stop,” she whispered. She didn’t have the strength to make it any louder.

“No loneliness,” he repeated, ignoring her. “No desperation. No helplessness when it came to getting yourself out of there. You shut yourself down and went into survival mode, and that had nothing to do with me.” Then he tilted his head, as he seemed to reconsider. “That’s not entirely true though, is it? I was the one who made you kick into survival mode. I pushed you into feeling nothing.”

Each word he uttered hit her like velvet fists—soft blows that hurt far more than she’d been prepared to deal with. A terrible tension built up in her inside of her, like a balloon filling up to the point of bursting.

“I’ve always called it the Nowhere Place.” The words came out in a voice she didn’t recognize, a thin thread of sound almost obliterated by the pressure crushing her from within. But strangely enough the tension eased with the confession, and she sucked in a careful breath and pushed herself to keep going. “It’s like I can crawl inside myself when things get bad and there’s no safe place to go in the real world. I don’t have to do it much now that I’m an adult and I can be in control of my own life. But there were times when…” She shook her head again when that terrible pressure started to build once more.

No.

No.

Letting out a little was good.

Letting out everything would unravel the locks and barriers and walls she’d put up around all the ugly things she’d shut away. That unraveling would destroy her.

Very slowly—as though he wanted to give her time to see him and make peace with what he was doing—he lifted a hand and rested it along her jaw, bringing her face up to his. “But there were times when…?”

“Just… that there were times when I never wanted to come out. It’s no big deal,” she added with a supremely casual shrug when he looked like he had more questions. “What I don’t understand is how you’ve now come to recognize that look. Our first meeting happened a long time ago.”

“It helps that I remember it like it was yesterday. And I now know that look intimately, because I saw it on my own face after my final tour. It was really strange,” he added, apparently not noticing how she froze in surprise. “I was in a hospital in Frankfurt, recovering from injuries I’d gotten on a mission that had gone… really bad. I was going to shave for the first time in something like ten days, and as I got ready to do it, I looked up in the mirror. What I saw was you.”

“I had a beard?”

“No, smartass.” Something weird and sweet curled through her when he bent his head over hers to press a kiss against her brow. “I saw that exact same blank look in my eyes, Sass. I was gone. Since I knew what I’d been through just to stay alive—what I’d had to fucking
do
—it hit me that the only way you could’ve had that same look in your eyes was if you’d been through your own kind of war.”

Monstrous things, horrible things, pushed at the locks in her head. Not just nightmarish memories, though. Mixed in with that chaos was a flood of questions about him, questions that could lead to him sharing private facets of himself. She didn’t want that. It would make her relate to him. Crap, for all she knew, it might even lead to admiration for the man he’d become.

The horror.

But underneath that lurked a purely selfish reason she wanted to keep her distance. If she invited him to share intimate details about his traumas, it might inspire her to do the same. Getting into some kind of touchy-feely trauma-sharing party with Rude was something she wanted to do only slightly more than she wanted to wrestle alligators. If she didn’t push him to share his pain, she wouldn’t have to reciprocate.

Simple.

And selfish.

So fucking selfish, she couldn’t stand herself.

Suffering was the loneliest thing a human could ever endure. No one else knew what it was to feel that kind of deep, inwardly screaming agony. Most of the world didn’t even know it was there, and certainly no one cared about it. Everyone was too busy taking care of their own needs, or being grateful that they weren’t the ones who suffered. No one reached out. No one helped.

Because no one cared.

That was why she ached to ask him about it. She wanted him to know there was a door that was open for him in case he ever felt like walking through it. She wanted to be the one who reached out a hand to him, from one human to another, to let him know that someone in the world cared. That someone gave a damn about his suffering. Suffering that had apparently been so bad it had forced him to crawl into a Nowhere Place of his own.

That wasn’t a place she ever wanted him to be.

“If…” His mouth was still on her brow. Gentle. Oddly careful, as if he thought she might shatter if he applied any more pressure. A painful ache squeezed up from deep inside to lodge in her throat. “If you want to talk… maybe we could do it later. It’s getting late, so…”

Coward.

Stupid, selfish, self-protective, uncaring coward.

God, she hated herself. No one had reached out to her until his parents had come along and saved her. And they’d saved her because they fucking cared.