Wrong For You (Before You Series Book 3) (2 page)

Chapter Three

Holy crap.
She needed to get her thoughts under control. Alec Reed was bad news. She knew it. He didn’t need to hammer home that point with her. His appearance screamed it loud enough to be heard from a mile away. Black messy hair, way too many dark, disturbing tattoos, a little lip ring highlighting his dangerously sinful lips, and good god, those arms. What the hell did that man do to create those muscles that rippled and bulged with every movement? And she hadn’t even got to his mysterious, heavy-lidded blue eyes practically pleading with her to take a dance on the dark side of hell.

Closing the door to her office, she pushed her hair away from her face.
Take a deep breath. Get over it
, she instructed herself. Alec didn’t have any interest in her and she certainly couldn’t foster any delusional thoughts about him. Guys like him didn’t go for women like her…and that’s a good thing. The dark and dangerous thing didn’t appeal to her, especially when she had to deal with his type, albeit much younger, on a daily basis. She liked nice, solid, upstanding banker, lawyer types who wanted a calm, predictable life. She was all about predictability, planning, and forethought.

Flinging open her ancient file cabinet, she pulled out a volunteer application. Alec thought he wanted to volunteer at the Foundation, and despite her better judgment, she would take anything he could give. She couldn’t be choosy, not when the Foundation didn’t have any money and even fewer resources.

As she walked out the door of her office, she snatched a pen off her desk, chuckling when she noticed it was her favorite purple pen. She loved purple. With a name like Violet, it was to be expected. As a kid, people made fun of her name. In no uncertain terms, her mother told her to suck it up and embrace it. She did. It became her signature color.

“Mr. Reed,” she called out as she walked back into the gym, her heels clicking rhythmically over the worn hardwood floor. The gym had seen better days just like everything else in the building.

His ear to the phone, Alec shook his head and held up a finger before turning his back to her.

“Yeah, I’ll make it back in time.” His free hand delved into his hair, lightly tugging at the roots. Her fingers wiggled of their own volition, desperately wanting to feel the texture of his thick dark hair. Men shouldn't have hair like that—thick, full of body, shine and pleading to be touched. It wasn’t fair. “Got it. Just fax what I need and I’ll take care of the rest," he barked into the phone.

“Violet,” Alec said, pivoting toward her. “What’s the fax number here?”

“It’s on the top,” she said, handing him the application.

His eyes scanned the application and then he turned his face away from her again as he read the number to the person on the phone. “And don’t tell anyone where I am. I don’t want Taylor to find out and feel like she needs to come here and be my sidekick. She doesn’t need to run into Cecilia.” He paused, tapping his fingers on the inside of his leg to an imaginary beat. “Or anyone else for that matter.”

After he disconnected the call, he stood up and slipped his phone into his front pocket.

“The references should be here within the next hour.”

She didn’t say anything for a few moments as she took in his conversation. Who was he hiding from and why? “Who’s Taylor?” she asked before she could stop herself. Almost involuntarily, her eyes drifted to his left hand, scanning it for a wedding ring. Regrettably, it didn’t offer any answers. Every single one of his long fingers had a thick, chunky ring.

When she glanced at him, he raised one dark brow in amusement and his lips curved up ever so slightly, so that if she hadn’t been watching him closely, she would’ve missed it. “Is that an official or unofficial question?”

Heat climbed up her neck to her cheeks blatantly, announcing her embarrassment just as efficiently as if she had screamed it through a megaphone. It was one of the things she hated about her fair skin and fair hair. Her eyes vaulted around the room as her mind scrambled for something to say. “I just don’t like volunteers bringing their personal life to work with them and if you’re hiding from your wife…or something like that, it could cause some problems and we have enough drama at the Foundation without adding yours to it.”

His lips twitched as if he were valiantly trying to hold back a smile. “No wife, no girlfriend.” He rubbed his hands together, his rings making a loud clanging sound as she witnessed his eyes cloud over and become completely unreadable. “I’m not the commitment type.”

Warning accepted, not that she needed it. She wasn’t attracted to this man. No way, and even if she were, she didn’t need a relationship right now. She barely had time to pee much less date. As evidenced by her recent breakup with Eric, all of her attempts at dating failed and she accepted all of the blame without hesitation. “Good to know.” She didn’t want to be another one of his conquests and she’d bet her paltry bank account that he had already racked up more than his fair share in his short life. She cleared her throat. “Well, I have to make some phone calls this morning.”

“Can you recommend a hotel nearby?”

“Are you planning to stay in a hotel for the entire month?” That had to be expensive, not that she knew what he could afford. Despite the tattoos and his ripped jeans, she didn’t get the impression that he was destitute.

“Do you have any other suggestions?”

“I have a basement apartment at my house.” He started shaking his head. “It has a separate locked entrance. It’s vacant now.”

“I don’t know.”

Now that she mentioned it, she realized it was a great idea. Better than great, it was absolutely brilliant. It would alleviate her cash flow issues for the month and she’d actually be able to afford groceries or groceries that included something other than bread and peanut butter. “Look, as long as you can pay me some rent, you’d be doing me a favor.”

He sucked his lip ring into his mouth again and she wished he’d stop doing it. It was really distracting. “How much do you want?”

She mentally calculated four weeks of groceries, a couple miscellaneous bills she’d been juggling for the past three months or so. “How about eight hundred dollars?”

He didn’t respond immediately and she thought she might have overreached. The apartment was worth it. She had rented it for a thousand dollars the last time she advertised it, but that tenant had driven her crazy with late night parties and visitors. The day after someone overdosed in the apartment at some crazy party, she posted an eviction notice on the door and she hadn’t tried to rent it again. For some reason, she could only find college students interested in the place and even though she wasn’t much older than them, she felt like a grandma in comparison. She’d never taken advantage of college life the way most kids did. She was too focused on the end goal of helping troubled teens to have an active social life. Sadly, that still hadn’t changed.

“It’s fully furnished. You won’t need to buy anything but food.”

“Okay.”

“Really?”

“Yep.” He slipped his wallet out of his back pocket, pulled out several crisp one hundred dollar bills and held them out to her.

Wow. She wouldn’t have expected him to carry that much cash in his wallet. He was driving a brand new black truck, but a new car didn’t mean he had money. She had plenty of friends who spent their life juggling credit cards, mortgage payments, and car payments, but they didn’t have much left to do anything else. She took the cash out of his hand. “Don’t you want to see it first?”

“Nah, I trust you.”

“Okay. Let me give you the address and the lockbox code.”

“Do you have a pen?”

She handed him her bright purple pen and he twisted it between his thumb and his index finger inspecting it. “Cute,” he said popping off the cap. “Violet for Violet.”

She laughed. “Ahh…you caught that.”

Sitting down, he balanced the volunteer application on his thigh and the purple pen rested against his lips as he scanned the application. Okay. Even though she had every intention of keeping her distance from Alec, she had no intention of allowing him to keep that pen. She enjoyed the view of it rolling along his firm lips too much to let him keep it. It would be a good memory on the days that she was knee deep in the life of an underfunded charitable organization.

“Address?” he finally said, looking up at her through his dark, long lashes, bringing an unwanted and abrupt halt to her inappropriate thoughts.

“Right. 42 Mountain View Rd. It’s a small white bungalow not far from the University. The lockbox is on the south side of the house, hanging from the iron railing leading to the basement apartment. The combination is VVV.”

He frowned after he finished scribbling notes at the top of the application and even his frown was appealing in a dangerous, heart-stopping way. “You might want to come up with a safer combination.”

She shrugged. “I haven’t had any problems yet. I don’t have much to steal and this is a small town.”

For some reason, he didn’t like that answer and his frown morphed from mild disapproval to downright threatening. He cocked his head to the side, not saying anything for a few excruciating seconds. His silence was killing her. “Trust me, Little Violet, you have plenty to steal.” Without bothering to explain his comment, he folded the application twice and stuffed it into his back pocket along with her purple pen. “See you around lunchtime.”

With her eyes trained on his ever so tempting backside, he walked out the front door of the Foundation without a backward glance.

She shook her head, forcing her mind out of the gutter and back into reality. Drooling over the dark and mysterious Alec Reed needed to end immediately, but she had to admit today was looking much better than yesterday. Admiring him kept her mind off the Foundation’s endless problems, and now she had one volunteer to help around the center for the next month. But most importantly, she had a temporary tenant, which translated into additional income for her broke ass, and as long as he kept to himself and didn’t have any crazy parties, she’d be happy. Those three things would go a long way toward maintaining her sanity until she could retreat to her parents’ ranch for two weeks and re-evaluate her plans for the future.

Chapter Four

Alec opened the door to Violet’s basement apartment, pausing at the entrance to take in the space. Though clean and uncluttered, the space wasn’t up to the standards of his new life—the life of luxury and excess he had lived since Chasing Ruin exploded onto the music scene. He didn’t mind, though. It definitely beat the crap he lived in after he left Montana and his childhood home, where it was a daily occurrence for him to trip over empty liquor bottles and drug paraphernalia.

The apartment consisted of one large room that included a small kitchen with a single wall of cabinets, a small circular kitchen table, a double bed pushed in the corner, and an old tan sofa with a low coffee table.

He tossed his overnight bag on the bed and texted his manager the address of his temporary apartment. He needed more clothes if he actually intended to spend the entire month here. Two pairs of jeans and two t-shirts wouldn’t cut it, particularly when the apartment clearly didn’t include a washing machine, unless it was tucked into one of the closets or the bathroom.

His phone rang. Marcus. Well, about time. Nobody had heard from him since he stepped off the tour bus a month ago. He wasn’t worried. Disappearing was Marcus’ thing. He’d been doing it since he met him years ago. The one time he bothered to ask Marcus where he went, Marcus responded with stone cold silence. He hadn’t asked him since. He had secrets too and he understood the rules.

“Hey,” Alec said.

“Hey. Where are you? I’ve been calling you for two days.”

“On vacation.”

Marcus chuckled. “No really. Where are you?”

Alec blew out a long exaggerated breath. “In Montana taking care of some shit.”

“Your mom?”

“Haven’t seen her. I plan to keep it that way.” He didn’t expect Marcus to comment or pry. That was one of the things he liked about Marcus. Even though Marcus acted carefree, Alec knew he had as many dark and fucked up secrets as him. As different as they looked on the outside, on the inside they were a mirror reflection of each other.

“I had some shit come up. I don’t know if I can make it back in time for the recording session in a month.”

“Hm…I talked to Rick this morning and I don’t think that’s going to fly.”

“Oh, come on. If you say you can’t make it back in time too, they’ll have no choice but to agree.”

“I don’t know.” Alec sat down on the low tan sofa, stretching his legs out diagonally in front of him to avoid the coffee table.

“Look, I never ask for favors and right now I need one. I’m living in a nightmare and I can’t walk away until I sort this shit out.” Marcus’ voice was low and pleading and deathly serious. Marcus was never serious and that alone persuaded Alec to agree.

“I’ll do my best.” Alec replied, pulling the purple pen out of his back pocket along with the hopelessly crumpled volunteer application. He didn’t really have much to put on his application except being a drummer in various bands over the last ten years, but somehow he suspected Little Violet wouldn’t care too much as long as his references checked out, and they would because Rick would make sure of it.

“Thanks, man. Call me if you hear anything.”

Alec hung up his phone and tossed it on the coffee table. After driving for two days straight and sleeping in his car, he could barely keep his eyes open. He’d call Rick in a couple days to discuss moving the studio time back a week or two, not that he wanted to stay in Montana any longer than a month, but because Marcus really needed the time.

***

Three hours later Alec strolled into the center with two bags of food. He hoped Violet liked burgers because he’d bought her one, too. He figured he owed it to her for hooking him up with her basement apartment. If he checked into a hotel, it would only be a matter of days before people put two and two together and realized he was Alec Reed of Chasing Ruin, and then he wouldn’t be able to do much of anything in town, including volunteering at the Foundation. That would really suck because he needed to do this more than anything. If he donated his time to the program that helped him when he was a seriously fucked up teenager, it’d go a long way toward filling the void rotting inside of him, or at least that’s what he convinced himself before he fell asleep in the Foundation parking lot last night.

As he turned the corner to leave the gym in the direction of the offices, he stopped short. Little Violet stood at the top of a wobbly wooden ladder that must have been older than her in the middle of the hallway changing a light bulb. Shit, she was five seconds from falling on her ass. Didn’t the maintenance crew do that crap?

As much as he enjoyed the view of Violet barefoot with her skirt riding up her too-long-to-be-real legs, he didn’t want to watch her fall. He dropped two white paper bags of food on the floor and he stepped up behind her, wrapping his hands around the top of her thighs. “You’re going to fall on your face.”

“Huh?” she said, glancing at him over her shoulder.

“I said you’re going to fall.”

“I’ll be fine. I do this all the time.”

He shook his head. “Well, you shouldn’t. You need to buy a new ladder or better yet, have the maintenance crew do it.” He practically growled.

She finished twisting the light bulb into the socket. “Mr. Reed,” Violet said, sounding unfazed by his sudden outburst. “The Foundation can barely pay its rent most months, much less afford a new ladder or a regular maintenance crew.”

“Alec. Call me Alec,” he demanded, not liking the formal tone of her voice.

“All right, Alec. Can you please stop digging your hands into my legs so I can step down now?”

“Sorry.” He loosened his grip around her thighs and smoothed his hands down her legs, letting his hands linger on her delicate ankles for a second too long before moving away. Legs were his thing, and not the long shapeless kind. He liked the toned kind with plenty of definition and a nice small ankle. Violet’s legs were nearly perfect in his opinion, and as much as he’d enjoy getting up close and personal with her legs, he wouldn’t do it. Girls like Violet were made to have a white picket fence and 2.5 kids with a suit and tie, nine to five husband. He’d never be that guy.

“Your references checked out. Did you bring your application back with you?” Violet walked toward an office at the end of the hall.

“Wait,” he said, slipping the wrinkled application out of his pocket.

“Yes,” she said without turning around.

“What did you mean when you said the Foundation doesn’t have any money?”

Sighing, she turned around. “It’s broke.”

“How broke?”

She tilted her head to the side. “Let me put it this way…if I don’t take a paycheck the rest of the summer, I might be able to keep the doors open through August.”

“What about the donors?”

“Our biggest donor died last year, and I haven’t been able to find a benefactor to replace him. He basically kept the Foundation doors open for the last two decades. He even owned the building, so the Foundation only paid a nominal amount of rent. When the lease came up for renewal six months ago, his kids changed the lease agreement to reflect the fair market value.” She shrugged. “The Foundation relied heavily upon him, to its detriment.” She started walking toward her office again.

“How much do you need?”

She laughed as she tapped her finger on her sassy, pink lips. “Two hundred fifty thousand should do it—at least for a year. Are you offering to cover the shortfall?”

His eyebrows climbed his forehead. Damn, the Foundation was broke—really fucking broke. When he frequented the place as a teen, it always had ample resources to feed the kids, plenty of employees, and relatively new equipment in the music room. Initially, he wanted to spend his time teaching the kids music, but now he thought his time could be better spent elsewhere.

“The application,” she said, holding out her hand and breaking the silence that ensued after the financial bomb she dropped on him.

When he handed it to her, she scanned the limited information he provided, which included a fabricated work history. Earlier he’d been concerned about his lack of relevant work experience, but now that he had a clear picture of the Foundation’s financial situation, she couldn’t turn him away. She needed him, and as fucked up as it was, he liked that Little Violet needed something from him. Not many people did. Oh, they wanted stuff from him…like attention, money, and the power a connection to him and Chasing Ruin offered, but that was superficial.

“With all this experience in the music industry, you probably wanted to work in the music room.”

His application wasn’t entirely accurate. He wrote that he worked in the music industry at his agent’s company. He wanted to keep his identity secret as long as possible, partially because he didn’t know shit about Violet. For all he knew, she might sell him out to the first tabloid that answered her phone call. But also because he liked the idea of spending a month just being himself without any of the fanfare of being the drummer of Chasing Ruin nipping at his ass.

“Initially, I thought it’d be a great idea, but now I think I’d like to spend my time raising money to keep the Foundation going.” If she’d go for his idea, it’d be ideal because he could stay behind the scenes and there wouldn’t be much chance of one of the kids recognizing him. Between living in her basement and being holed up in an office at the Foundation, he could maintain a low profile for the entire month and no one except his agent would know his location. This whole idea sounded better and better the more he thought about it.

She started shaking her head. “I don’t think—”

“Just hear me out,” he interrupted. “I work for a fairly well-known talent agency in LA. I have plenty of contacts I can extort money from. You’d be stupid to turn me down. Two hundred fifty thousand dollars is nothing in the music world. I’ll have that and more by the end of the month.”

Violet slipped her feet into the nude colored heels that she had abandoned next to the ladder. “I don’t know. I would need to train you and give you more background on the foundation.”

“Trust me, all I need is access to your computer so I can generate the receipts and a short but sweet letter about all the great things the Foundation does for underprivileged teens in Missoula.”

“It couldn’t hurt,” she finally answered after few long moments.

A smile spread across his face. “Great. Let me know where to start.”

She motioned toward the office at the end of the hall. “This way.”

Alec picked up the bags of food from the floor and followed her down the hall. The office didn’t look any better than the rest of the building. The computer on the desk looked like a relic from the early 90’s and the desk with its chipped veneer looked even older. Violet slipped into the chair behind the desk and tapped at the keyboard for a few minutes. “Okay, everything you need is up.” She stood up. “I’m going to grab some lunch before the kids start showing up after summer school or whatever else they're doing this summer.”

“No need. I brought you lunch.” He held out one bag of food for her. “Well, as long as you’re okay with burgers and fries.” Now that he thought about it, most women he knew would rather die than let a burger or a fry cross their lips. Her stomach grumbled and he chuckled. “I guess that’s a yes.”

She sucked her lower lip into her mouth and cheeks flushed tellingly. “My stomach doesn’t lie. I’ve been living on peanut butter sandwiches for a couple days. I’d take anything at this point.”

“What the hell?” he blurted out before he could stop himself.

She lifted one shoulder nonchalantly. “It’s not a big deal. I’m just trying to make the Foundation’s money last a little longer and I cut my salary. It’s only temporary.”

Even though he didn’t know much about Violet, he didn’t like the idea of her struggling to feed herself. “What about your family?”

She laughed, her eyes lighting up. “I’m not going to beg them for money, and even if I did, they wouldn’t help. I’d be playing right into their tough love strategy to get me to do what they want.”

“And what’s that?” Alec asked, watching her unfold the wrapper around her burger and lift it to her mouth.

“Mm,” she moaned as chewed her first bite. Watching her eat was one of the sexiest things he’d witnessed in a long time. Women in skimpy dresses didn’t have a thing on seeing Violet make love to her burger as though it were the best thing to pass her lips in years.

“Law school,” she answered, dabbing her lips with a brown napkin. “I come from a long line of small town lawyers. My parents want me to join their practice and be the third Emerson.”

“Huh?”

“Right now their firm is called Emerson and Emerson after my mom and dad. If I went to law school and joined their practice, they promised to change the name to Emerson, Emerson and Emerson.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

She shook her head. “Nope. I’m serious.”

His lips shaking, he nibbled on his lip ring.

She tossed a french fry at him. “Go ahead and laugh. I know it’s a silly name.”