Page 10 of Last First Time
His laughter shuts down immediately and he gives me a scorching look. “I definitely want to come with you. Right now, in fact.” He reaches for my hand, tugging me out of my defensive pose. “Let’s take my car.”
“Why yours? What’s wrong with Towanda?” I gesture toward my giant black pick up, lovingly named after another of my all-time favorite movies,Fried Green Tomatoes. Towanda is about a million years old, and most of her floorboard has been rusted out and then patched in, but she is about as far away as possible from that puke green VW bus that my parents had always driven, and that we had sometimes lived in when things were extra dire sometimes. Nope, I loved my uncomfortable, gigantic, noisy gas-guzzling truck. Take that, Mom and Dad.
Reed leans down toward my cheek, and murmurs in my ear, “There’s nothing wrong with your butt ugly truck. But my car has a backseat. In case you and I have a campaign emergency while we’re out today.”
Goosebumps break out where his breath has rushed against my skin, carrying those words of sinful promise to my brain, which promptly shut off at the raw sound of sex in his words. Even with my entire body still aching after last night, I want him again right now. Maybe even here on the sidewalk, pressed up against the building, the bricks scraping my back raw—I shake my head quickly to clear it. “Okay, we need to go.”
He laughs again and leads me to his stupid fancy pants Tesla. It’s a giant SUV style vehicle that makes me feel even more tiny and short than I actually am, and I know without even asking that this dumb thing probably costs more than I make in a year, maybe two.
But I don’t mind his wide hand across the small of my back, and that frisson of electricity that comes where I feel his skin against my skin. No, that’s stupid. I have to get my crazy hormones under control or this friends-with-benefits thing with Reed is never going to work.
“Kar?” Crap. He has that tone in his voice where obviously he said something already, and I’ve missed it because I was daydreaming about his touch.
“What?” I ask as grumpily as possible. This is going to be a long, horny afternoon, and even if I haven’t ruined our friendship after all, I’m still feeling pretty grouchy about how stirred up he makes me feel every time we’re within a few inches of one another now. Handsome jerk.
“Did you want to hand me the list of locations? Or were you going to make me guess?” His lips curl up into his mischievous smile. “Maybe you want me to exert some of my political clout in order for you to tell me?” He tilts his head toward the spacious and comfortable looking backseat, and then waggles his perfect eyebrows at me.
A shocked laugh bursts out of me. “Stop that, or we’re going to be humping in every single parking lot in Valentine before the day’s over.” I swat at him playfully.
“You make that sound like a bad thing. But Kar, I want to spread you out on every available horizontal surface and eat you like you’re my last meal.” His words are laced with so much heat that I shiver against them.
I clear my throat, fighting the flush that has overtaken my body. This man is going to be the death of me. “Okay, Casanova. Let’s head over to 1412 Orange and see how it looks.”
The car ride passes in awkward, thighs-pressed-together silence. I feel like he’s cataloguing every single instance that I shift in my seat and achieving immense satisfaction from all of my flustered, desperate behavior. To make matters worse, I can’t stop breathing heavily ever since he’d dropped that sex bomb in the car.
The car comes to a rest in front of the seediest looking warehouse I’ve ever seen. “Oh,” I say. I didn’t even know we had places this dodgy looking in our little town of Valentine.
Reed nods sharply. “Well, let’s go have a look around. It can’t be as bad inside, right?”
Actually, it’s even worse inside. The back wall is home to a pile of rags and garments that looks like some kind of animal is nesting in it. The entire building smells of urine and mildew, and one of the side walls is actually half collapsed from rot.
“Well, it needs some work.” Reed peers around at the empty space. “How much are they asking?” He lets out a low whistle when I tell him the figure, then shakes his head. “Completely unreasonable. Let’s try the next place before one or the other of us ends up needing a tetanus shot today.”
The second location is very obviously a former meth cookhouse. The interior is filled with rigged up buckets, bottles, and sinks, and stinks to high heaven. “I’m calling Aaron as soon as we leave here,” he mutters. All I can do is sigh. Each place seems worse than the last.
The third place has been aggressively vandalized. Spray painted profanity covers the walls, the porch had been torn to shreds, and it looks like someone had even taken a sledgehammer to the kitchen area. “What in hell happened to this place?” I ask.
Reed shakes his head. “Remember when the Novoskis had to leave town? This was their restaurant.” He shrugs. “So, it was either a disgruntled employee or one of the Novoskis themselves.”
I swear as colorfully as possible in three separate languages, and then we drive to the last place on my list.
It looks like a one room schoolhouse, but at least it isn’t an actual crime scene like the last few places we’ve been. “Maybe it’s bigger than it looks once you’re inside,” I say hopefully. Reed puts his arm around my waist again, snuggling me against him. I don’t mean to enjoy it, but I do. Every single inch of me is enjoying every single inch of him, even though we’re both fully dressed this time.
“At least this one’s clean,” he mutters. And it is. But it also looks like a project for the town’s Historical Preservation Society, and not like the next home of the best bar in town. It still has a slate chalkboard along one wall, and the windows are old, circular, and so drafty they might as well not be there. A handful of benches line the outside of the walls, and there’s even a worn wooden desk near the chalkboard.
“Oh, Reed.” I feel tears prickling at the backs of my eyes. “What am I going to do about my business?”
He pulls me close to him and kisses my hair. “We’ll figure it out. You could always open up here and then wear one of those schoolgirl outfits. It would boost your tips exponentially.”
I sniffle. “Don’t make jokes right now. I don’t have a sense of humor even on a day when I’m not about to lose my business.”
He puts a finger under my chin and makes me meet his eyes again. “I won’t let that happen to you. Hell, I’ll give you the money myself if that’s what it takes to make your dream last.”
I can feel myself flush, partly with embarrassment but also some anger. Sometimes I manage to forget that Reed is ludicrously, insanely, buy-a-yacht-and-private-jet type of rich. And then he drops something huge all casual-like into our otherwise normal conversation, and it reminds me all over again how different we really are. “Don’t joke about that. It’s not funny, and it’s not cool.”
“Who said I’m joking? Come on Karisma, it’s just money. It would probably take me a few months to free up enough trust assets, but it’s really no big deal.”
My throat tightens as he keeps talking. “Well excuse me, but it’s a really big deal to me. I get that it’s basically pocket change to you, but it’s my entire life’s work that you’re talking about. It’s every penny I’ve ever scraped up in my entire working history, and it’s the reason I’m not living in the back of my parents’ old car and feeling hungry at night anymore.”
