Jolie Blonde (Vigilare Book 3) (25 page)

“Yeah. Not until today. But I swear I saw it. I mean, unless my eyes were playing tricks on me,” she says. “And there’s only one way to test it. And you’re about to bury that test.” She eyes the skull curiously.

“Don’t even think about it.”

“Just one little cut. We use the same scars.” She offers up the intricate band of beads on the inside of her palm, still fresh and healing from Dr. Shaw’s cautery blade. “Skim our hands right over the top of this skull. Then we touch palms. That’s it. Simple as that. Something happens when the blood comes in contact. Maybe it’s like synergy. Nothing happens until the parts come together, you know.”

“Like blood brothers? Seriously, Brie, do you hear yourself?” Lon dodges the validity in her inquiry. Convinced the best and only place for the skull is deep down in the bottom of the earth, he follows through with his plan lowering it into its burial plot. “Nothing good can come from this thing. You should know that by now. We’re getting rid of it.” Ever so carefully he lobs dirt down into the well, effectively covering the cone-headed nuisance.

“I’m just saying, I think we should at least try it before we bury this thing. What if that’s the key? The meshing of our blood?”

Lon stops his work momentarily. “And what if it is. What are we going to do then?”

Brianna furrows her brow. “Well, I hadn’t really thought it through. I just wanted to see what would happen.”

“The thing you should be concerned with is Johnny.” He gets back to work, packing grass pads down over his dirt mound, hopeful in returning his father’s soil to its natural state in dissuading the nosy senior from further investigation. “If my spit and his caused that fluorescent glow, like you say it did, what’s he been up to?”

“Remember when he and I stole the skull from the ETNA compound? Years ago?” She does not wait for his reply. “I think he cut himself on it, too. He said it’s nothing, but I think it is.”

“Well, I don’t know that cutting yourself on that damn thing is necessarily what triggers that glow thing to happen. If it ever really happened.” He questions the distant memory. “Dr. Godfrey’s cut himself on it before and he’s never mentioned an emerald green glow.” Lon’s voice grows chastising with the last part of his thought, taking into account how ridiculous it would sound to a sane individual.

“On accident? Or on purpose?” Brianna questions Dr. Godfrey’s motive.

“On purpose, I’m sure,” Lon says. “He’s never said anything about it. But I’ve seen the scars on the insides of his hands. It’s identical to ours but it doesn’t have the bubbly things,” he explains the tiny beads resembling that of a delicate pearl necklace.

“So then, Dr. Godfrey could be infected, too?” She gasps.

Lon chuckles. “We’re not infected. Chances are, we’re not anything. If we were
extraordinary,”
again, he uses the hematologist’s favorite word in summarizing his extraterrestrial aspirations, “don’t you think it would have presented itself by now?” He stows his shovel in his backpack. “All I know is, it’s been three years and nothing’s happened. To any of us. I think it’s all a bunch of crap that Dr. Godfrey wants so badly to be something. But it’s nothing, Brie. We’re better off if it’s nothing.”

“Probably,” she agrees, although that outcome not as intriguing as the opposition. She grows quiet before asking her next question, having secretly wondered its answer since her initial conversation with her
bad boy
friend at LSU. “Do you think Johnny set his father’s house on fire?”

“Not a doubt in my mind.” Lon slaps his hands together, dusting them of grass and dirt, happy with his burial skills.

She looks up at him, her eyes wary of his answer to her proceeding question. “Do you think he knew his father was inside?”

“Maybe.” He shrugs. “Hate to think that of him, but I wouldn’t put it past him. He runs on self-preservation, Brie. I don’t think there’s much he wouldn’t do to get what he wants.” Lon looks at her, mindful of Johnny’s affection for the jolie blonde. “That’s why you need to be careful around him.” He stands, offering her a hand.

“Thank you,” she says, feeling a bit unfitting of the gesture, what happened at the jail weighing heavily on her heart. “Um…you should probably know that I kissed Johnny. Or he kissed me,” she quickly corrects as he was the aggressor. “When I went to see him. In jail. Today.”

Lon’s jaw grows painfully square as his teeth press hard and fast together with the information. Catching his fist in the opposing palm of his hand, the popping sound echoes in the quiet night. He says nothing, taking off at a hasty pace toward the house.

“He didn’t kiss me because he wanted to. Not like romantically or anything. He only did it to shut me up,” Brianna tries to lighten the blow, following after Lon.

Do you care

If you dare

To love someone like you’ve

Never lost your share

Brianna mills around in Lon’s room after having showered off the cataclysmic events of the day. A very strange feeling, being back in his bedroom, seems to conjure bygone emotions. The intimate space and its decor still the same as when she spent the longest week of her life in it after her parents’ death.

Having helped herself to Lon’s dresser, her frame is draped in another of his oversized t-shirts. She pulls the collar to her nose, her eyes closing indulgently as she inhales the fresh linen scent further piquing her memory of days gone by.

“You find everything okay?” Lon interrupts her thought. Returning from the shower, he stands in the doorway to his room, his shoulder propped against the casing.

She spins around, his presence pulling her attention. Swallowing a quiet moan, her eyes give away her affection as she takes him in. Standing there with nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist, his beefy and inviting torso is exposed.

Brianna compares her youthful memory of him, his t-shirt (the same one she wears now) tucked in his back pocket, exposing a rather lean and developing frame. Quite the contrast to the fully developed, lump-in-her-throat-causing image before her now—swollen mounds of flesh perfectly concave and convex provide a most provocative anatomical landscape.

“Um. Yeah,” she whispers, eventually finding the words to answer his question, as undeveloped as those words may be.

A bit thunderstruck himself, Lon takes his time perusing his favorite jolie blonde there in the dim lamplight of his room, her heavenly body cocooned in his fabric of old. Having never found himself envious of a t-shirt, he is now, wishing his flesh that close to hers. Even though the fabric is loose, his eyes do not miss the curve of her breasts, her hips, the way the material stops just below the rounded contour of her bottom giving way to long, toned legs, the sheen of their skin shiny.

“I’ll…um…be on the couch, if you need anything,” he excuses, reminding himself that he should be mad at her for sharing another kiss with Johnny.

“Lon,” she calls, her voice breathy, filled with pent-up endorphins. “Are your parents coming back tonight?”

He pauses at the door, his chest keeping up with hers in its abysmal rise and fall. “No. It’s the last big fish of the season. Mama always goes with daddy. They won’t be back until week’s end.” His eyes mirror hers, growing salacious with the answer, confirmation that they are completely alone.

“You wanna…” she sucks in her breath, finding the courage to continue, “sleep in here with me?” Her emerald greens replacing lust with hopefulness as she fights between diverting them bashfully and meeting his confidently.

He growls, a low simmer, standing his ground at the door casing as he taps his head lightly and frustrated on the frame. “Why’d you kiss him?”

Shaking her head, she knows it was wishful thinking to think Lon may have moved past her confession. “It didn’t mean anything, Lon. I swear.”

“I didn’t ask if it meant anything. I said, why’d you do it?”

“I don’t know,” she answers honestly with a shrug of her shoulders. “I mean, he kissed me. I didn’t ask him to do it. It just happened. And I probably kissed him back,” she admits. “It’s kind of natural if someone kisses you. You kiss them back. But it was like a second. Maybe two.”

“‘It’s kind of natural if someone kisses you. You kiss them back?’” He repeats her statement, completely questioning its merit. “Even if it’s not me? What was all of that about last night? You want me. You want to be with me,” he paraphrases her passionate affirmation. “You can’t want me and go kiss some other guy. It doesn’t work that way, Brie.”

“I know, Lon.” She tugs at the roomy shirt, winding it up in her fist at her waistline. “I covered my lips with my hand. I wiped it away. I even told him he can’t do that,” Brianna reviews the play-by-play. “What was I supposed to do? Slap him? Push him away?”

“Yeah,” Lon emits with an acerbic chuckle. “Any of those options are a hell of a lot better than kissing him back.”

“Alright, fine,” she gives in. “If it happens again, I’ll slap him. There. Can we please drop it?”

“It better not happen again,” his words release in the same sarcastic chuckle to lessen the sting of her messed up reasoning. “It can’t happen again. I don’t want…” he pauses momentarily, rephrasing his thought, knowing he’ll always
want
her. “I will not
have
someone who wants Johnny. Or any other man for that matter.”

“I don’t want Johnny,” she rebukes.

“Then what’s with the kissing?” He still hasn’t forgotten about the first kiss she and Johnny shared in their youth. “What is it you feel for Johnny?”

She takes some time contemplating. “Um…friendship. Probably pity. I do feel sorry for him. Look at his life…his upbringing. You have to feel some sort of remorse for the guy.”

“Come on, Brie. Girls don’t kiss guys they pity.” He’s not buying her philanthropy routine. “Is it the whole
bad boy
thing? You like the danger? The excitement? What?”

“Maybe.” She throws her arms up in the air letting them fall dramatically, her hands slapping against her thighs. “Sure. I like that I can talk with him about my criminal justice and law interests and he gets as excited as I do. I like that he’s always ready and overly willing,” she points out, “even if it is illegal. I mean, it’s kind of cool having a friend who’ll go through the thick of it with you.”

“A
friend?”
he enunciates, challengingly. “Does Johnny know he’s in the
friend zone
with you?”

“Yes!” Now her reply is laced with an abrasive chuckle. “Johnny knows we’re only friends. I’ve told him, I love you and that I could never love him the way I love you.” She thrusts her hands on her hips defensively. “Apparently you’re the only one who doesn’t know that Johnny and I are just friends.”

Lon is speechless momentarily, questioning his own jealousy—petty or substantiated? “If I wasn’t in the picture, would you and Johnny be together?”

“What kind of question is that? How am I supposed to imagine you not in the picture?” Brianna considers his undeniable presence in her life, nearly from infancy.

He crosses his sinewy arms over his equally hunky chest refusing to be put off. “If you didn’t know me, would you and Johnny be together?”

“No,” she answers without contemplation. “Would I be attracted to him? Yes. Would I act on that? No. Johnny is not right for me. Frankly, I don’t know that he’s right for any girl.” She shrugs, considering his harried past. “And I don’t even know that he’s all that into me. I think he halfway does it just to bother you. I mean, look. One stupid, little, meaningless kiss from Johnny and you’re interrogating the hell out of me.”

“I don’t consider it meaningless when another man’s lips are on your mouth,” he bites. “It’s fucking infuriating, is what it is.” Firmly thumping his fist against the door casing, he releases his frustration as well as condemns himself for his language in front of her. “I’m sorry.” Gripping the back of his neck, he squeezes with a painfully kneading hand. “Here I am worried about your mouth and I’m running off at mine.”

“Well, if it’s my mouth you’re so concerned with, then show it some attention.” She looks at him, a mixture of challenge and wanting, purposely wetting her bottom lip with her tongue.

He walks to her, unable to fight the chemical pull any longer. His head dipping slightly to meet hers, the air between them is thick with their torrid breath. Brianna offers up her mouth, pressing it firmly against his, a purposeful display that, unlike Johnny’s kiss, she is eager to instigate this one.

Lon wastes no time in taking the lead, reclaiming what is his. His mouth all-consuming and distressed to eradicate Johnny’s mark, the amour with which he caresses her lips and tongue takes her breath away, literally.

Retreating to come up for air, her bottom lip scrapes between his covetous teeth as they draw blood. Gasping for a few brisk inhales to satisfy her lungs, she returns her mouth to his, the disconnect tormenting.

Lon’s already scathed flesh (from his early morning brawl with Johnny) at the corner of his mouth pulls open with their mounting pressure. Neither particularly concerned or affected by the metallic taste of their mingling blood, they ignore its presence continuing on with their oral foreplay in pursuit of an end game resulting in a much deeper physical and emotional exchange.