“I’m sure it’s not that easy to just leave,” Amelia continued, a gracious means to skip past that part because he was the one folding in now with pain he couldn’t talk past. “I guess that’s why you like simple things. Maybe sometime you can tell me your simple stories, if you have any. And if not, just make them up, and you can pretend for a little while that things aren’t so complicated.”
“I’d like that,” Emory said and regarded Amelia with renewed fascination.
On his level too, she paid him no deference in hopes of currying his favor or seducing his affection, and Emory no longer wanted anything from her either. Enough was enough. She didn’t have to sing.
Behind them, a car blared its horn.
The light was green.
NINETEEN
MIRABELLE
Outside of Vegas, the convoy rolled into a vacant lot behind a small strip of shops. The quaint street was lost in time, the prelude to a ghost town on the cusp of charming and sweet. Safe behind the car’s tinted glass, Jack leaned over the center console. His lips swept against Mirabelle’s, and a calloused palm caressed the inside of her bare thigh.
“Someone might see,” she said and lifted a hand to his chest.
Jack fumbled with her underwear. “You said that this morning.”
“No, I said someone might hear.”
She had woken up to his mouth between her legs, and while the pillow muffled her moans, that didn’t matter in a house that echoed. Jack hadn’t cared and always took whatever he pleased. Sometimes he’d pull her into an empty room, and their lips would crush together, and his hands would tremble, and it was all a dizzying rush of beating hearts and limbs entwined.
“I want you,” he whispered.
“I’m wearing lipstick, and we need to be careful.”
Mirabelle nudged him away. Sure enough, his lips were red and dick was hard. She tossed him a napkin from her purse but couldn’t do much about the rest.
“Jesus, Miri, who fucking cares? It’ll come out eventually. Youknow what I’ll say when it does?” Jack pointed to a sun-bleached fence post beyond the car’s hood, a stand-in for Emory, perhaps. “Fuck you. She could be with a scumbag but ended up with me.”
Mirabelle crossed her arms and dropped her eyes. There was nothing to say that she hadn’t already, and they only ever fought about that.
“Alright, you got me,” Jack sighed. “Consider me careful.”
Mirabelle tapped the tip of his nose, crooked for having been broken too many times.
“I consider you cute.”
“Don’t call a grown man cute.”
Jack craned his neck to the rearview mirror and wiped his lips with the napkin. He’d always had boyish good looks, a veritable dreamboat with baby blues, sandy hair, and a blinding smile of straight white teeth.
And he hated it.
His tattoos were something like dousing a clean canvas with dirty dish water, anything to wreck the pristine gleam.
“Get your fine ass out of the car,” he commanded with a throaty laugh and stuffed the crumpled napkin into his pocket. “Slow,” he added when Mirabelle opened the door.
She bent over and let her red-thonged bottom peek from beneath her black skirt. Jack always liked that, the naughty exploits when no one was looking.
“I’m not a whore,” she’d told him their first night together as she slipped out of a silver dress as glitzy as a low-hung moon.
Only a whore would say something like that while doing her own undressing. Jack had prowled across the room, and she’d told him not to get too excited. She wasn’t a virgin, either.
Over the years, she’d heard from the girls in the inner circle that he liked it rough. Those girls were the chosen ones who earned their keep for more than just a night. A few married into the organization. A few more held out hope. All had stories they swapped as eagerly as the men they sometimes shared.
But Jack was deliberate in his conquests. There were certain things he wouldn’t do. Mirabelle was one of them. For years, she’dnursed the bitter sting and rebuffed him when he finally came around. She didn’t need his pity, but it wasn’t pity, and his redlines were only business, not personal.
