Red Hots (2 page)

“I
can do that. No promises though.”

“Not
a problem. I understand, Sir.” Finally she removed a piece of paper from her
purse and handed it to him then removed her wallet, ending the conversation about
their private lifestyle.

Looking
down at the paper, he recognized the address of the Office of the Commonwealth’s
Attorney. While he was practicing, he’d met with a few colleagues from the
other side of justice there when they were working the same cases.

“What
kind of lawyer is your friend?”

“Kin
Langston is one of the assistants to the Commonwealth Attorney,” Lolli said
with friendly pride.

Things
and people changed in the field so the person wasn’t familiar to him,
especially after almost six years since the last time he was in a courtroom. He
no longer even followed current cases in the media but filled his spare time
with financial channels and reports when he wasn’t tending to his obligations
at the local dungeon where he was a member.

Connie
returned to the front, carrying a box that he assumed contained all the things
she would need to prepare the order. Soon he’d finished with the business side
of the order, got the filled out card from Lolli and the customer was headed
out of the store. That done, he went to his office to make headway on the work
demanding his attention, especially since over an hour of his day would be
taken up by playing delivery boy.

Two
hours later that’s where Sweet found him when he came down from the upstairs
apartment. That was one of the things about having a business in Virginia
Beach. The city allowed residences above businesses and Sweet had made use of
it since he’d split with his last submissive. Sweet put on a front that ending
things with Melinda hadn’t changed him, but Masaun was good at reading people. That
was what made him an excellent trainer in the lifestyle. His brother wasn’t
living above the store because he couldn’t afford to have his own house
elsewhere, but because Sweet was hiding…burying himself in the
company—literally.

“How
are things today, big brother?” There was a relaxed appearance to his’
impassive face, but Sweet’s eyes were shadowed and humorless, lacking joy.

“Profitable.”
Masaun lowered his gaze back to the computer and spreadsheets before him as he
entered a few more numbers before giving his brother his full attention.

“Profitable?”
Sweet leaned forward, resting his hands on the back of the chair across from
the desk. “Most people use words like well, good, exciting…”

Raising
a brow at him, Masaun leaned back in his chair and sighed. “It’s a store not an
amusement park.”

Sweet
tilted his head and squinted at him. “Tell me, Masaun, when was the last time
you were at an amusement park…any park for that matter?”

“When
were you?” he countered.

His
brother sighed. “Touché.” Sweet claimed the chair, slouching in the seat to
rest his head on the back and placing one ankle on top of the other knee.
“Connie said you’re taking a delivery today. What gives?”

He
laced his fingers over his abdomen and shoved away the annoyance of the time he
was about to lose. “Yes. Lolli came into the store today and placed an order.”

“Dom
Razor’s submissive, Lolli?” Sweet lifted his hand and rested the side of his
face in the L made by his thumb and index finger.

“Yes,”
Masaun hissed.

“You
matched them together at The Dollhouse and it seems to have worked out well.
Maybe you can incorporate some of your skills in selecting a sub for yourself.
Don’t think I haven’t noticed it has been
years
since you did more than
just scene with a submissive.”

Eyeing
his brother, he said, “I’m not even going to attempt to decipher your point.
Yes, it has gone well for Razor and Lolli. However, if you’d like to talk about
the dungeon, might I suggest you close the door first?”

Sweet
didn’t even glance over his shoulder at the door he’d left standing much wider
than the small crack Masaun normally maintained when he was inside working.

“What
we do in our personal lives isn’t anything to be ashamed of or hid—”

Masaun
allowed a single brow to creep slowly up his forehead, ending in a high arc above
the eye.

“Fine.
I’ll drop it.” Sweet’s exhalation of frustration was loud and harsh, but he
ended the discussion. “The delivery?”

Relaxing
some, he said, “Apparently, Lolli feels it’s important to send a basket of
support to a guy on the Commonwealth Attorney’s team, today.”

“Ah…your
old playground. Makes perfect sense now why you’re being such a controlling,
arrogant ass.”

Masaun
growled.

Sweet
smirked, a small twinkle reflecting in his brother’s eyes before it was
extinguished by the shadows over that haunted his soul for too many years.

His
younger brother was the only person Masaun would allow to find humor in the
things he did. If it wasn’t for his love and respect for Sweet and both of
their healthy fear of their mother, he would have taken a strap to the man
across the desk from him.

“Anyway.”

“I
can take the job if you’d like,” Sweet volunteered.

Masaun
sighed. “No. I’m sure you have plans for the two cases of chocolate and other
confectionery supplies that came today.”

A
kind of crooked smirk twisted his brother’s mouth, not even close to a smile.
Creating decadent treats truly was a joy and a love for Sweet, however, no one
could tell it by his stoic face. Another joy for Sweet used to be being a Dom
as well, but Masaun kept that to himself even as he wondered what it would take
to get his brother invested again.

“I
would.”

“Figured.
Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it.” Masaun glanced at his watch,
seeing it was about time to head out. He rose.

Sweet
stood too. “Alright. I’ll be here until about nine or so tonight so I won’t be
at
the house
until around ten.”

He
knew his brother meant The Dollhouse but was being respectful of the fact he’d
just asked him not to mention it at work.

“Got
it.” Moving to the door, he felt the need to swing by his house and put on a
suit before entering his old realm. It wasn’t that he was dressed like a slob
in his slacks, shirt and tie with the store logo on it. It just felt
insufficient at the moment.

However,
he easily pushed those feelings aside as he watched his brother turn right
toward the kitchen of the business. This was their store; they had built this
together and pride in that knowledge and having a stress free life was more
than worth it. The only thing that was better to him was being a Dom.

~YH~

After
thirty-five minutes driving through the start of rush hour traffic, Masaun
walked into the Virginia Beach Court House building, carrying the mammoth
nostalgic candy basket. He felt like at any time someone was going to ask him
to sing. After passing through the security check and having the package wand-scanned
three times, he was allowed to continue into building ten where the CA and his
team had been housed since the new court house was built eighteen years ago.

As
he came to the reception desk, a wooden nameplate rested declaring the woman as
the CA office’s executive assistant. The brown-haired woman who looked as if
she had her hands full at the end of the day glanced up at him. “How may I help
you?” Her voice was soft, professional and heavily southern laced.

“Yes.
I’m delivering this for a Mr. Lang—”

“One
second.” She held a finger to Masaun and cut him off as a man came out of the
elevator and strutted down the hall past them, definitely an attorney. Grabbing
a file, she bolted down the hall after him. “Mr. Compton.”

Masaun
watched the woman disappear around the corner as she chased the man’s long
strides to either his office or an important meeting. Not a patient man, Masaun
decided he would locate Mr. Langston himself, drop the package at the desk if
it was open and leave. Traffic would be bad enough as he headed home, so no
need for him to stand here twiddling his thumbs.

Deciding
to start in the opposite direction from where the executive assistant went, he
went along the hall reading the different name plates on the doors. He passed a
conference room that had several people boxed in around piles of legal papers,
files and books filled with historical case references. Shaking his head, he
reflected he didn’t miss that.

Two
doors down, he located a brass plaque with Assistant Commonwealth Attorney Kin
Langston. Moving before the open doorway, he froze. Before him wasn’t a male
attorney, Asian, he had surmised by the spelling of the first name, but all
woman.

She
was standing behind her desk talking on the phone, with her free hand in a fist
on her hip. The statuesque black woman wore her thick ebony hair with brown
highlights in twisted waves that hung over the front of her olive, form-fitting
suit. Her hair was parted down the middle, causing the tresses to caress the
sides of the creamy chestnut complexion of her face. A face that took his
breath away, made heat spread in his gut and caused his cock to instantly awaken
in his slacks when she gazed up at him.

CHAPTER two

“I
don’t give a damn what their excuse is in your department, I want that
information. This asshole is a perverted son of a bitch that preys on little
children and when he’s done, he disposes of them in the most heinous way.” Even
as Kindle listened to the clerk on the phone her gaze was fixed on the man
before her.

The
clerk was hemming and hawing about why they didn’t have parts of the
documentation one of her assistants had gone to pick up. The coroner’s report
was an important piece for her case. However, she didn’t even comprehend any of
his words. It was virtually impossible to think, hear or breathe with such a
sexy man before her.

In
her profession, she was around more men than women. A lot of them were
attractive and overly confident but none of them seemed to compare to the man
standing in her doorway, holding a gigantic package in his hand. For that point
alone, she should have been distracted enough not to see the man. But she not
only saw him, she was reacting to him in a completely biological way.

It
shocked her that she could even recognize a biological response in herself
since the last time she felt this way had been more than four years ago when she
was on a date. Try to deny her attraction if she could, but she stood staring
at him as she gave mindless verbal cues to the person on the other end of the
phone. She probably sounded like an idiot.  But, she could not find it in
herself to care, just like she couldn’t find the strength to pull her gaze
away.

She’d
always been a sucker for bold, direct eyes. Eyes that seemed to see deep inside
of her, beyond her own awareness of herself, and he had them. He had her
trapped in his laurel green eyes. The clear, greenish-gray combination was
doing things to her. It didn’t help that he was also a sexy, six-two, brown
haired, broad shouldered hunk.

She
wasn’t the only one taking in her fill. The delivery man was doing the same to
her. His gaze roamed her face and traveled down her body, causing heat to
follow in its wake. The urge to be able to read his mind and know what he
thought had her skin tightening, caging her inside of herself. When he lifted
his striking eyes back to her face, she was knocked speechless by the intense
heat and curiosity she saw there. In that heartbeat, she knew he had been
assessing her. For what purpose she didn’t know. Yes, there was a sexual
undertone but something else she couldn’t decipher.

“Hello.
Hello…you still there?” The man on the phone barked in her ear.

Jarred
out of her fixation, Kindle looked down at the notepad on her desk and took a
deep breath. She realized that there wasn’t only a quivering low in her belly,
but her knees were shaking too. What the hell?

“Of
course I am,” she snapped, angrier at herself for getting distracted by a
pretty face and wide shoulders. She didn’t have time for wool gathering, not
with the case set before her. “Look, tomorrow morning I will have someone there
to pick up that report and it better be ready.” Ending the call, she set the
receiver back in the cradle.

Lowering
her professional veneer over her face, she pinned the visitor with a sharp look
that had strong men trembling on the witness stand and trying to gird up their
loins for her verbal barrage of questions. “Are you lost? I’m sure the exec
assistant at the front can help you.” She picked up her legal pad and pen and
looked down to review her notes.

It
was her way of telling the man that whatever silly delivery he had from one
lovesick spouse to another, he had stopped at the wrong office for help.

“She
had her hands full.”

Exhaling
loudly, Kindle lifted her eyes first then raised her head slowly. It was her ‘I
don’t have time for this’ act. Most people usually went scurrying, but not this
man. It was probably best she point him in the right direction so he could go
away, quickly.

“Who’s
it for?” She dropped the pad onto her desk so that it smacked against the high
gloss wood desktop.

“You.”
He moved into the office, holding out the monstrosity. Unhindered by the heavy
bundle, he strutted upright, even and confident.

“What?
That can’t be possible.” He was standing so close to her now that she could
clearly see that the package contained candy…lots of candy. Bewildered, she
rounded her desk.

“Are
you Kin Langston?” His voice was a low, deep timbre, just husky enough to make
her think about late night pillow talk.

Squeezing
her hands into quick tight fists to get control, she said, “Yes.”

“Then
I have the right person.” He set it down on the corner of her desk, making sure
the base was resting evenly on the top.

“Who’s
it from?” She couldn’t help but feel giddy at seeing all the candy she’d grown
up loving—licorice whips, sugar daddies, bit-o-honeys, now or laters, Mary
Janes and so much more.

“There’s
a card inside, but I believe the customer said she was a good friend of yours.”
He pointed to the small purple envelope in the front.

Standing
less than an arm length away from him, she would have expected to be able to
smell his cologne or aftershave like most of the suited men she worked around,
but she couldn’t. There was a soft sugar scent coming from the candy bouquet
but that was it. She shoved away the slightly disappointed feeling. This man
was just a delivery guy that she’d never see again, so the thought was foolish,
she chided herself.

“Emmalee,”
she murmured, more to herself than the man standing beside her. Even without
opening the card, she knew her best friend’s work. She and Emmalee Eagleton had
been friends since they were preteens.

“Evidently,
your friend seems to think you’re stressed and in need of something.” He
paused. “A stress relief.”

There
was something in his voice that pulled her gaze away from the sugar treats and
to his face. For a moment, she allowed her gaze to roam from his face, down the
shirt, the tie with ‘Decadent Treats’ written on the bottom of it, his grey
slacks to his soft leather black shoes. Were those pants breakaway? At any
moment, was this guy going to start some kind of striptease candy-gram?

It
wasn’t a stretch at all to imagine this man as a stripper, not with his
handsome face and build. She could easily see through his conservative work
outfit that he kept himself in shape. Neither was it out of the realm of
possibility that Emmalee would do something like that. Her best friend was the
same one who dragged her out to a male review show after Kindle found out she
passed the bar, Emmalee saying they both had been too consumed by school for
too long. Emmalee at that time had been in the thick of getting her doctorate
in physics. Now she was a professor at Old Dominion and one of the smartest and
kindest people Kindle knew.

“Emmalee
would know.” She fingered a loose strand behind her ear and let out a nervous
laugh. “What job isn’t stressful nowadays?”

“It’s
all in your perspective sometimes. However, being a lawyer on big cases can be
worse than most.” He crossed his arms over his broad chest.

There
was something in the tone of his voice that made her think he understood how demanding
her job could be. Maybe he delivered to a lot of lawyers. She shrugged
mentally. “You have that right, especially when the most public, high-profile
and heinous of cases come to your boss and trickles down.”

She
wasn’t sure why she was opening up to this man, confessing some of the
emotional stress she was carrying deep in her gut that no one knew about. Not
even Emmalee was privy to that. Kindle didn’t like to add to her friend’s
concern.

Now
here I am pouring out to the candy man like a drunk to a bartender. Damn, Kindle,
are you about to lose it?

It
had to be the ‘stranger effect.’ Unable to resist and needing something to do
besides stare at the sexy, intense man beside her, she unwrapped the cellophane
that was shrink-wrapped around the basket, creating a loud crinkling sound in
the room, and pulled out a pack of sugar babies.

“Do
you mind me asking you what you do to relieve that stress, after work?”

Placing
one hand on her hip and shaking the pack of candy, she asked, “This isn’t your
lead in to asking me out, is it?”

His
face, too serious by far for a delivery guy, became even more stern with a slow
lifting of a single eyebrow. Kindle could swear she could actually count the
seconds it took to reach its peak height. She’d never seen a man, anyone, with
that much control. The simple action had her heart racing and that boggled her
mind. Too often she found herself doing interviews and cross examinations of
violent criminals and she always remained steady, but she could feel her
stomach tighten with a slight quiver under the look of this man.

“No.”
One word and no further explanation or smile to soften the blow.  Way too
intense.

Even
though she didn’t have the time or space in her life for a date, she still felt
crestfallen and offended. As if there was something wrong with her that an
attractive man without a ring on his finger wouldn’t be trying to pick her up.
She shook that feeling away, realizing the man most likely believed she was
above his dating pay-grade. Not that she was a social elitist.

“Nothing.
My job is twenty-four-seven,” she informed him.

“Wow,
a government law practice that’s run like a corner convenience store.” He gave
a quick glance around her office. “I’m surprised you don’t have a couch in here
to sleep on at nights. Guess you do it in the car.”

Is
this jackass making fun of me? It was past time for him to leave.
The hell if she would allow someone
to be condescending to her in her own office.

Crossing
her arms over her breasts, she looked at him as if he wasn’t playing with a
full stack. Evidently he didn’t realize all that went into being a criminal
lawyer. Often people watched law shows that had people having time for social
gatherings in the evening at a bar or illicit romance outside of work. Those
shows didn’t reveal the real grind of the job; like how much time the team
spent going through old cases or reviewing deposition after deposition, trying
to find holes to plug or creating holes in the defense’s argument. Hell, with
all the cases she’d had fall into her lap lately, she hadn’t seen her dining
room table for months, maybe even the last year.

“Not
literally. I just meant it’s a lot of late hours and taking things home. It
leaves little room for anything else if you want to be the best and elevate
your career.” She sighed and moved behind the desk to get her purse out of her
bottom drawer. “Anyway, work calls. Do I owe you a tip?”

“No.”
Again with the single word. 

Halting
her movements, she inhaled and stood to her full height. “If there’s nothing
else.”

He
reached into his back pocket and removed his wallet.

Is
he about to tip
me
?
But she saw him pull a card out.

“Pen,
please.”

Without
questioning him, or thinking, she grabbed the pen she’d been using from the top
of her legal pad.

His
fingers brushed the tips of hers when he took it from her. The light contact sent
an electric current zinging up her arm, and her heart beat hard against her
ribcage. Pulling her hand away, she squeezed it into a fist and tried to figure
out what had happened.

Carpet
electricity most likely. Had to be.

She
picked up her notepad and a file and held them both to her chest; one, to show
him she needed to get going and two, as a shield. Something about this man was
causing her to act outside her normal abrupt nature. A disposition she’d
cultivated over the nine years she’d been practicing law. They called her No
Nonsense Langston to her face and Barracuda Langston behind her back and she
was proud of both of them.

After
scrawling something on the back of it, he reached into the basket and removed a
movie theater size box of Red Hots and slipped the card into the side flap. It
disappeared inside. Grabbing a piece of tape from her desk, he sealed the
opening again.

Her
fingers flexed on the side of the items in her hand.

Bold
as brass, he held the box with her pen resting on top out to her, his laurel
green gaze challenging her, daring her to take it.

Had
he felt the powerful current too? she wondered.

Schooling
her own features until she had her steely mask back in place, she took the two
things from him, quickly. However, she grabbed them in a way that ensured she
didn’t touch him.

“One
day, Kindle, you’re going to determine that this
job
is consuming your
soul and taking everything away from you. Finally, you’ll realize you need
something else and a way to just let go. Then open the box.”

He
stared deep into her eyes for no longer than a heartbeat, but it seemed longer,
and she was unsettled by the urge to lower her eyes. But she stood taller and
held his eyes.