The Darkest Link (Second Circle Tattoos) (27 page)

If all he was going to do was play, she would show him a little trick or two, regardless of him wanting to call the shots. The next time he slid into her, she rolled her ass back toward him, taking almost his full length.

“Fuck,” he cried out, letting go of her hair to grab hold of her hips. “As good as that felt, babe, you just scored a time-out.” He pulled out of her completely.

“Reid,” she cried out. “I’m so close.”

“Shh. I know, babe, that’s half the fun,” he said, waiting for a moment before he slipped back inside her, this time filling her completely, and pulsing so deep inside her before he started to move in earnest.

Lia moved her hands farther apart to get a better grip on the back of the lounger. The sound of metal on pavement periodically pierced the air, as Reid’s thrusts pushed the sun lounger forward. If anybody was out on the balcony, there wouldn’t be any doubt as to what they were doing, but Lia couldn’t bring herself to care as Reid pushed her closer and closer to climax.

“Are you close, babe? Because I’m dying to come inside you. One day, I’m going to fuck you without a condom so I can feel every inch of you.”

Lia nodded, unable to speak.

He leaned his chest over her again as he placed his hands on top of hers on the lounger and pounded into her.

Within moments it felt as though the night sky had cracked wide open and swallowed her whole. Her body exploded violently, squeezing against him. She felt every pulse as he came deep inside her, finally making her his again.

* * *

Reid fell to his side and took Lia with him. Every time they were together, they became a little more adventurous, a little more playful. And she trusted him implicitly, which made every part of him sing.

He wrapped his arm around her and pulled her to him, looking up at the stars in the sky. It was the same sky that he’d looked up at when he was in Fort Pierce, and that it seemed darker and the stars shone brighter could only be attributed to the company he was keeping. Whether they were in Fort Pierce or Miami, he wanted to be able to look up at it with her for the rest of his life. If you counted the days on the calendar, he probably had fallen in love with her too quickly. But he didn’t want to change it, and neither did she.

Lia grabbed the throw off the back of the sun lounger, and between the two of them, they managed to open it and cover themselves without really moving.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Lia said.

Her thoughts echoed his own. “I’m probably going to sound like the world’s biggest pussy, but everything about tonight just seems brighter because I’m here with you.”

They sat in silence, cuddled close to each other. Reid ran his fingers up and down the bumps of her spine while Lia doodled circles over the tattoos on his arm.

“Do you ever think you’ll let me tattoo you?” she asked.

He hadn’t had any new ink done in years, but suddenly he wanted some badly. “Draw me another bike like you did that night. I’ll help you get it mechanically correct, and then you can tattoo it for me. It’ll be like having a piece of you permanently on my body.”

“I love that idea. Send me some photographs of some of your favorites and I’ll see what I can come up with.”

“So, do I get to be naked when you do this?”

Lia laughed. “Well, that all depends on where you want it placed.”

“I don’t give a shit where it gets placed; I just want to have real easy access if I get turned on while you’re doing it.”

“Well, in that case, I’d better bring all my gear home.”

They fell quiet for a little while again, until Reid remembered they hadn’t talked about what had happened to her mother.

“You want to tell me what happened today? About your mom? I was worried after our phone conversation.”

“I was concerned about her so I went over to the house and found my dad sitting in an armchair and my mom unconscious. He told me he was watching her, keeping an eye on her, and that we didn’t need to call the police or ambulance or anything because she was still breathing. He was more concerned about somebody finding out that she took an overdose of her pills than he was about the long-term implications for Mom. So I called 911 myself and went with her in the ambulance.”

Franklin Carlisle really was an asshole of epic proportions. “So how is your mom now? She okay?”

“Medically she’s fine,” Lia started, and went on to tell him about the treatment her mother had received, and her mother’s strange request to see her pills.

“You don’t think she’s just trying to make it look like an accident now because she wasn’t successful?” Reid asked.

“Here’s the thing. I went to her house to get the drugs because my dad was supposed to be out for the afternoon, and then he came home early. Thankfully, I’d managed to get all of them into my purse before he came into the bedroom. Dad was . . . strange. He was intimidating, in one of those film noir creeping bad guy kind of ways. Telling me I’d make a really poor opponent, whatever that meant.”

“That
is
weird. You don’t think the stress of deciding to run is getting to your dad, do you? I mean, crazier things have happened than people going over the edge in pursuit of the thing they want most.”

“I don’t know. Part of me hopes it’s just some strange tactic to try to keep us in check. But here’s the thing. When I took those pills to Mom in the hospital, she showed me the date of the prescriptions, which were all refilled fifteen days ago. And she counted out the number of pills in the bottles and compared it to the prescription. And in every bottle there was the exact number of pills compared to the number of days missing. If Mom did overdose, it wasn’t on those pills.”

“So you think your dad had something to do with that?”

“Part of me thinks he did. But then part of me thinks Mom could’ve just gotten her prescription refilled early and saved a handful of each tablet from the previous prescription. But I don’t know why she would have done that.”

“Yeah, just because she can prove it wasn’t those meds doesn’t mean she didn’t take different pills that you guys don’t know about. So what are you going to do?” he asked.

“I don’t know. But I think this has shaken Mom up enough that she’s willing to move out as a precaution. I’m going to find her a place in this building, just to rent for now, until she knows what she wants to do.”

“Smart move,” Reid said.

Just then, Lia’s stomach rumbled. She groaned, embarrassed by the noise.

“I’m always coming between you and food,” he said, pushing the blanket from them. “Come on, let’s go see if we can find something to eat.”

They cleaned up quickly and slipped into more comfortable clothes. Reid pulled on a pair of shorts, Lia a robe. He filled her in on his trip home as they dressed. Once in the kitchen, Lia sat on a stool while Reid tried to figure out what to eat.

“You know, when we finally move in together, we’re going to have to do something about the fact that you don’t cook. Because I refuse to live on takeout.”

Lia didn’t say a word. He looked over the breakfast bar counter to find her with her mouth quite literally aghast.

“It was a joke, babe.”

“Which part was a joke?”

“Well, I don’t expect you to turn into some kind of Sally homemaker. I kind of like you as you are.”

“So, the whole moving in together thing . . .” She left the words hanging in the air.

He walked back around the counter toward her, spreading her knees so he could stand between them. “Finish that sentence, babe.”

Lia blushed. It wasn’t something she did often. “So, the whole moving in together thing, is that something you want to do?”

“Yeah. But I’m guessing from the immediate lack of excitement that you don’t want to move to Fort Pierce.”

“I think I’d wither away there,” she said. “In the words of Meatloaf, I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that.”

Reid burst out laughing. “Meatloaf? Really?”

“But I know how much it means to you,” she said. “The garage, the boys. I know that’s important in your life.”

She was right. It was. But there was something else. “I don’t know how much plainer I can be than this. I love you, and that makes you the most important thing in my life, regardless of anything else.”

Tears filled Lia’s eyes. “I love you, too.”

“And this makes you cry because . . . ?” he asked, cupping her face in his hands.

“I’m happy, you big oaf. But it doesn’t solve the problem of where we are going to live.”

“We have some time, babe. I can’t do anything more with the garage until the insurance pays out. And I’ve been trying to figure out whether there is a way to have a garage there that Jarod runs and put the bike business here. But I think that with the price of Miami real estate, I may still end up with quite a bit of a commute from here.”

He’d thought a lot about it on the flight home from Chicago. He wanted to be closer to his sister, especially since she’d been droning on and on about how she hoped to start a family soon. But he
needed
to be closer to Lia because the ninety minutes that currently separated them just felt too damn long. And the idea of falling into bed with her at the end of a long day was motivation enough to make the tough decisions. The only thing he hadn’t fully gotten his head around yet was stepping away from the boys he mentored, but even that was possible if he just bit the three-hour round-trip once a week.

“Either way, with your permission, I wondered if I could stay here for a while. Take you out for dinner maybe, hang out on the beach, and maybe fuck on that balcony again.”

“Does it have to be in that order?” She giggled. “Because it’s too late for the beach, takeout is fine, and the balcony is waiting.”

The studio was relatively quiet for a Monday. Trent and Cujo were doing something most unusual, tattooing the same guy at the same time. Cujo was working on a biomechanical tattoo on the guy’s thigh, while Trent was busy with a portrait on his upper arm.

Lia looked down at her phone, which was illuminated with the thirteen calls she’d missed. All from her father. She’d collected her mother from the hospital first thing in the morning. There had been no time to take her mother home to collect her things before work, so her mother was spending the afternoon in Pixie’s condo. It was probably overkill on the precautions, but Lia had a suspicion that if her father was able to contact her mother, he’d be able to persuade her to go home with him.

She could only imagine her father’s frustration when he found out that not only had his wife been discharged but she was nowhere to be found. The doorman on duty at her building had e-mailed to let her know that her father had tried to insist on being let up to her apartment, but he had refused.

Still in the process of ramping up her tattooing time each day, Lia was on a reduced shift. Two o’clock already, time to finish work for the day, and she had a long to-do list. She needed to rebook the physical therapy appointment, take her mom to Star Island to pick up some stuff, and draw a tattoo for a client who was coming in the next day. “Oh my God, I can’t keep all of this straight in my head,” she mumbled to herself.

“You need a planner like mine,” Pixie said, stroking the craftily decorated, highly organized day planner. It was one of her most cherished items, and when the two of them had lived together, Lia hadn’t been able to contain her amusement at Pixie’s regimented approach to decorating the planner every Sunday afternoon after they got home from work.

Lia looked at it in disgust. “Do you really need stickers to show it’s cleaning day when you get home from work tonight?”

“Of course. How would I remember to clean?”

“Everybody else would be happy to just write ‘cleaning day.’ Wait, scratch that. Most people wouldn’t even write cleaning day down.”

“Are you kidding me?” Pixie asked. “Look at this.” Pixie opened up her Pinterest page, and it was filled with images of highly decorated planner pages. Some of them looked as if there wasn’t even any room left to write.

“Some people have too much time on their hands,” Lia said.

“Well, you did ask me how you were going to keep everything organized,” Pixie said, sounding a little hurt.

“In fairness, I didn’t ask you anything at all. I think I just blurted something out about trying to keep things straight in my head,” Lia said, pulling her friend into a hug. “But I’m sorry, I just have a lot on my mind. Your planner is beautiful. It just looks a tad like Michael’s vomited on it,” she said, unable to control her laughter.

“I forgive you,” Pixie said with a giggle. “Even if you do look like one of the Andrews Sisters vomited on you.”

“Funny,” Lia said, stepping away. She looked at the clock that hung on the studio wall next to a mixed-media piece she’d created six months before. A social commentary piece, with images ripped from
Vogue
magazine, scattered on the ground next to a large tree. She’d missed doing her art since the accident and considered starting a painting that evening when she got her mom settled. “I’m done for the day. Do you, Dred, and Petal want to come up for dinner tomorrow night?” she asked.

“Sure. But it will just be me and Petal because Dred is flying back up to Toronto to meet with some contractors about the house.”

“So are you going to move up there permanently?” The conversation she’d had with Reid the night before was on her mind.

“I’m just kinda going with it, to be honest. I mean, we need paperwork for me to live in Canada, and we need paperwork for Petal to be here. So right now, we’re all about dealing with the logistics while making sure we stay within the law. I’d love to live there, but I hate the idea of not living here.”

“What you’re dealing with makes me feel stupid.”

“Why?”

“Because you have lawyers, and international boundaries, and a little person, for heaven’s sake. And you guys are making it work. I feel like I should be considering moving to Fort Pierce for Reid, but the idea of leaving Second Circle and Miami makes me feel ill.”

“You know one of the things you and I have never talked about was your money. But I’ve realized, being in a relationship with Dred, that while money can’t buy happiness, it can certainly make things happen. I’m sure the two of you can figure it out, even if you have to live in both places for a while.”

Lia grabbed her purse and left the studio. Pixie’s comment played over and over in her mind. It was because of her that he even needed to consider moving to Miami. If he was staying in Fort Pierce, he wouldn’t need to worry about being financially able to have two businesses. So if she was part of the cause, didn’t it make sense that she could be part of the solution?

In a fit of inspiration, she called her real estate agent and asked for some advice.

An hour later, Lia found herself standing outside an old warehouse on the outskirts of Brickell. The agent handed her papers showing the layout and details of all the fixtures and fittings. It was twice the size of the garage in Fort Pierce, and as much as Lia wanted to surprise Reid with it, she didn’t understand the first thing about making bikes. It had great light, but it needed a lot of work.

“Why has it been empty for so long, or so cheap?” she asked.

“To be honest, it’s not the greatest location. It’s safe enough to put a business here, but there are better business parks. The second thing that puts people off is the amount of work it’s going to take to bring everything back up to code. It’s probably going to cost twenty-five percent on top of asking to put everything right. But for the right business, it’ll be perfect.”

Lia did the math in her head. She could more than afford the rental of the storefront in South Beach that the agent had already shown her. And she hoped Reid meant what he’d said the previous evening when he suggested separating the garage from the bike business.

“Do you have any sense of the offers that have been put in so far for this place? It would be good to know what the current owners have previously rejected before I consider making an offer of my own.”

“I’ll get those for you as soon as I can.”

Lia looked down at her phone. She needed to hustle back across the bridge, grab her mom, and drive over to Star Island. Given what had happened on her previous visit, she considered waiting for Reid to return from visiting Nathan, but if she timed it right, she could have her mom in and out before her dad returned from a standing last-Monday-of-the-month appointment at his law firm.

She thanked the Realtor and got into her car. The engine roared to life and she smiled. It’d never purred so well before Reid got his hands on it. Then, come to think of it, neither had she.

Doubt crept into her mind as she wondered what Reid would make of her plans. Dred had gifted Pixie her own business to make party dresses, and she’d accepted it gracefully. Now she could only hope that Reid would do the same.

* * *

Palm trees lined the pathway that led to the white building, the main office for the Department of Correction’s South Florida Reception Center. The lawns and gardens could be considered quite pretty, as long as you forgot it was actually a prison and didn’t look up at the fencing and barbed wire that lined the rooftops.

On the drive from Lia’s, Reid had gone back and forth on his decision to submit a visitor application to the warden to see Nathan. He’d never considered what it took to run a prison before, and finding out he needed permission to set foot inside had been the first step.

In the weeks since the fire, Reid had been busy dealing with the police, the
Colombo
-esque investigator who had tracked the source of the fire to Molotov cocktails thrown through the glass windows at the side of the building, the customers whose cars had been damaged and
their
insurance companies, and feelings of guilt for letting his employees down.

He’d offered all of the guys a minimum of two weeks’ pay, but that was nearly up. He had some cash in the bank, money he’d been saving to upgrade their painting booth, but since there was no longer a booth to upgrade thanks to the fire, that didn’t matter. These men were all good guys, and the majority had mouths to feed. There was no way he would leave them in the lurch unless he had absolutely no other choice. The insurance money had to be reserved for starting over, though, so once the painting booth money was gone they’d be out of luck.

He’d attempted to call Winston Bell at his office in Chicago, but his calls had gone unanswered and his incredibly unhelpful assistant refused to provide a cell phone number. He’d even considered asking Lia to see if there was a way to find out if her father had it, but then he realized he would only be putting her right into her father’s bargaining path.

Getting the permit to visit had been an interesting process. First he’d tracked down the lawyers that Harper had referred to as the M&Ms. Then he’d called Mathieson, Martinez, Montrose, and Morales and talked to Gabriel Morales. At first the lawyer had questioned Reid’s motives, but Reid asked that he just pass the message along to Nathan that he’d like to visit.

With papers, identification, and an iron-fist hold on his temper, he stepped inside a prison for the first time in his life.

He passed through all of the different security procedures.

“We’re only allowed to visit two days a week, and you guys take hours getting us in there,” an older woman shouted.

It amused him that people complained about the process. Yes, it was time-consuming, but when faced with the alternative, which was prisoners’ potentially receiving weapons and drugs from the outside, he was kind of cool with it. He was escorted to a clinical room with others waiting to meet their friends and loved ones.

Reid glanced toward a man walking in his direction, but then looked away, scanning the room. The man stopped near his table. “Reid?”

This time he took a good look. Nathan’s face was a lot gaunter than the last time he had seen him, his skin gray and haggard. He looked a decade older and twice as mean. His head was shaved on both sides, and his arm was littered with what could only be called prison tats. The kind done with the ink of a ballpoint pen and a needle.

The words he’d planned to say fled, and while he’d been prepared to deal with anger, he felt ill-equipped to deal with the overwhelming surge of sorrow he felt for his former friend.

“Yeah. You wanna sit?” Reid said, nodding toward the plastic chair on the other side of the table.

Nathan eyed him suspiciously but took a seat. “I’m only here because I’m curious. What the hell do you think we have to say to each other?” He leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms.

“Why did you do it?” Reid asked, without thinking the question through.

“Because I could. Next question.”

“She loved you, you know. At one time.”

Just for a moment, Reid could have sworn that he saw Nathan’s guard drop just a little. The tiniest flash of remorse. “Yeah, well, what’s past is prologue as they say.”

“What the hell happened to you? Aren’t you sorry for any of it?” Reid resisted the urge to jump up and drag the guy over the table.

“It wouldn’t fix anything if I was. I’ve got four more years to serve in Illinois, and I’m guessing because of that, they’ll throw the book at me here. Sorry or not, I’m in prison for at least another decade, and no amount of apology will solve that.”

“Would it help if I apologized?” Reid startled himself with the sentence. In truth he couldn’t see what heavenly purpose it would serve any of them, but at least in his own mind he could say he’d tried to make some kind of recompense.

“What the fuck do you have to apologize for?”

“That night, the party. It was me who introduced you to coke. If I hadn’t done that, you might not be here.”

Nathan laughed, a deep belly laugh that reverberated around the room. “Are you fucking shitting me? You’re even more of a fucking pussy than I remembered.”

“Go fuck yourself. This was a bad idea,” Reid said, standing.

“I don’t even remember the night you’re talking about, but I’d been doing it for about six months before you got on board the party train. Then you hopped the fuck off before it got interesting.”

Reid felt sick to his stomach. All this time he’d been carrying around guilt for something that hadn’t even been his fault. Anger started to rise, acid creeping its way up his gut. He needed to leave, but he’d come to ask one question, and he needed to push aside everything else he was feeling to do it.

“Nathan, I don’t know if our friendship counted for anything, but your dad, he’s harassing us. Please, for everyone’s sake, can you make it stop?”

“Why would I? It’s not like you’re going to do anything for me.”

It was true, he wouldn’t. More than that, he couldn’t. There was absolutely nothing he could do, but at least he’d tried.

“Never mind. You were right. We’ve got shit to say to each other. I have to go. Good-bye, Nathan.”

“Wait, it was just getting interesting. If you begged I might consider it.”

Reid shook his head and walked toward the door.

“What, no polite chitchat, you pussy?”

He kept walking.

“Okay, bye,” Nathan called as he reached the exit.

“Cool it, Bell,” he heard somebody shout. Likely one of the wardens dotted around the room.

“Tell your sister that I’m thinking about her, especially at night when I . . .”

He didn’t finish the sentence, and Reid resisted the temptation to turn back and kill the fucker.

Filled with rage, he made his way out of the prison as quickly as he could. When he finally reached fresh air, he rested his butt against the wall and leaned forward, dry heaves consuming him. He felt dirty and needed a shower. There was no deal to be made with the devil.

A couple of armed guards stood over to his right. “Are you okay?” one of them called out.