Damned Sinner, page 4
part #1 of Jayne Series
“What’s the matter, sweetheart? I thought this is what you wanted.”
She slapped me—hard—harder than I’d ever been slapped by a woman, and I’d been slapped plenty.
“You asshole!”
I chuckled, rubbing my palm over the tender skin of my jaw. “Don’t start something you can’t finish, Kelsey.”
Tears welled up in her eyes, and I pushed back the urge to comfort her—again. Instead, I turned and walked over to the bar, tugging my shirt over my shoulders and then threw it at her.
“Take off that whore’s dress and put that on.”
I grabbed a tumbler and poured myself a double. I could hear her behind me struggling with the dress, mumbling and complaining, but at least she was doing what I asked. My hands shook. My body was full of adrenaline and lust, and I was on the brink of losing my shit.
“A simple explanation would have been fine,” she snapped. “Trying to humiliate me isn’t going to work, Vince. I know you, better than you think I do. You have this issue with feelings and whatever, but that’s not going to stop me from feeling for you. You call me the baby, well, look in the mirror once in a while. Maybe one day you’ll find a man staring back at you.”
I jumped as the door slammed behind her, and went into action. I dropped the glass I was holding and darted toward the door. We were the only occupants on the floor, but I would be damned if she would go roaming around half-dressed.
I opened the door and watched as she stormed toward the second suite, arms thrown in the air, flailing and yelling as her legs stomped down the hall.
Fucking glorious.
As angry as I was, I couldn’t help but smile. I’d been right about her all along, and that thought wasn’t as settling as it sounded. Fuck, no. She was a little firecracker, and her ass was going to burn me like dried-up tinder.
“I’m putting Collins in front of your door, little girl,” I yelled. “You aren’t leaving that room until you go to work tomorrow—dressed. Fully fucking covered.”
“Eat. Shit!” she yelled before throwing herself inside the room and slamming the door hard enough to rattle the paintings on the wall.
I slid my phone out of my pocket and sent Collins a quick text, knowing he was probably lurking in a dark corner down the hall anyway.
Once I was sure she wasn’t going to come out again, I went back inside, leaving the door open so I could hear Collins, and took up at the bar. She was going to be the death of me, one way or another, and I laid the blame entirely on one tiny brunette with the balls of a giant and the brains of a gnat.
Chapter Five
With only a couple more days in town, I had no choice but to get up early to start the day. I had one more appointment with the federal agent helping with Sam’s case, and then I had to take care of business with the girls.
Most of them were unhappy about me shoving them off onto someone else, but I couldn’t let it get to me. Several of them I’d had around for years—they knew the drill. If they really wanted to, they could just take up on their own and move on. As it was, for the most part they all wanted to be secondary to the business. Girls like Jayne were rare. A lot of the girls were in the business because they had nowhere else to go. Even though Jayne liked to believe the same about herself, she did have another way to go. She just chose not to.
She had the beauty, the brains, and the spunk to do what she did, and to have done it as well as she had. The guilt snuck up on me sometimes, just a blip on my conscience, but it was there and probably always would be.
There was no stopping her. She always thought it was her beauty that made her special, and to an extent, that was true. She had a body like an old Hollywood bombshell, thick, shiny hair most women begged for, and big brown eyes that turned men into butter in their tracks. It was her wit and her zest that drew them in, though. It was her charisma that dazzled them, charmed them out of their money, and lured them into her grasp. But it was more than that—she was more than that. Her mind was as tactile and cunning as any soldier. For her to have survived the hand she’d been dealt in life, she had to be a warrior.
I called her my queen of hearts. It wasn’t the shake of her ass or the point of her cleavage that brought men to their knees; it was something else, something inside of her that only she possessed.
I pulled onto the road, gunning it as I left the casino. After the encounter with Kelsey, I was suffocating in the suite. I could smell her everywhere. I kept imagining her against the door exposed and vulnerable to my touch, and I’d ended up with a raging headache from lack of sleep. I told Collins to watch her for the day, and I couldn’t let myself feel guilty about putting him on babysitting duty. I needed to find out who she was hanging out with, and why. If she thought wearing a skanky dress was a good idea, then she’d found the wrong crowd.
I wasn’t having it.
Apprehension filled me up like a bad piece of meat. I’d changed my plans and decided to stay a couple more days so I could get to the bottom of it. Two days. In two days, I’d be gone, and she’d be there alone. Imagining the kind of things she’d do while I was out in the sticks made me sweat. She’d been right when she said I didn’t have the right to tell her what to do, but what she didn’t understand was I didn’t give a fuck. I didn’t have the right—or deserve it—but that didn’t matter. I would do and say whatever I wanted when it came to her.
I also didn’t want to acknowledge the other things she’d had to say. Those were things I’d ponder while I was alone and far away from Las Vegas.
The nondescript building that housed my old office was about thirty minutes out of town, and I’d managed to miss the weekend traffic. In a city that never seemed to quiet down, I found the early desert mornings to be peaceful.
Even that early there was a stir of tourists wandering from long nights of gambling, starving for sleep, and wincing at the sunlight and the scattered remnants of the plague of the nights, the plague I lived off—lived in.
The streets had been my home for a long time. Las Vegas had kept me fed and alive since I was seventeen years old. Making the move to Vegas had been both terrifying and exciting back then. I hadn’t known what to expect, and what I’d found when I got there was worse than I ever could have imagined.
At the time, anything was better than home, and soon, I carved out a spot in the native environment of my own. Not a very easy task for a kid straight off the bus, but I’d always had size and temper on my side, and that was about all I had at the time.
It also helped me push my way into poker games. No one batted an eyelash when I’d flash my fake ID to gain admittance to the smaller casinos. I’d been hustling people on the street for money by day, and at night, I’d double it up at the tables.
That’s when I met Evelyn, or her husband, actually. I’d weaseled my way into a game of high rollers—a feat not easily done by a scumbag street kid. It was my eighteenth birthday, and a guy I’d met at a club invited me to join. He was a rich kid, one of the hierarchies of the strip. His name was Flynn, a shiny piece of shit with a cocky attitude and an all-around disrespect for everything.
But, he’d gotten me into the game after I’d hustled him out of three grand in a stupid bet over some skanky girls at the bar. He’d been impressed—if not bitter that he’d lost—having already gained a little notoriety and reputation as gambler who never lost a hand. But we weren’t playing cards—we were playing people, and that was something I was much better at than he was.
That was a turning point in my life. Within a few weeks I was off the street, off the dope, and on my back. That was the night I became a gigolo.
For a young guy on the skids, it was ideal. Sex was sex, and Evelyn was a hot number in her early forties—nothing to kick rocks at. Her husband, a fat son of a bitch with too much money and too much time on his hands, devised the plan. After losing a game of cards—which I later realized was due to his cheating—I ended up owing him more than ten grand. I’d been keeping up with the big boys, but I got a little too confident.
At first, I thought he was taking pity on me, but after meeting Evelyn, I realized he was taking pity on her. He was an asshole; a real mean bastard with at least three pieces on the side. Basically it went down like this—my debt would be dissolved if I fucked his wife. I was all in.
Evelyn taught me a lot of things about women—it was priceless advice. She fucked my brains out, and then did it again, and the next morning set me up in an apartment, bought me new clothes, and filled a bank account in my name full of money. In turn, I fucked her regularly, and she taught me how to please a woman.
It only took about six months before I was running a full-on business. She paraded me around like a fancy dog, and at the time, I didn’t mind at all. I was wearing designer clothes, driving a brand new car, and could spend any time I wasn’t needed doing whatever I pleased, and I did. During those years, I pleased myself a lot.
In all that parading, I’d met a lot of women like Evelyn. Rich, lonely, and hormonal. I was never short on company, but then things fell apart. Once Evelyn caught wind of the other women, she wasn’t happy. Evelyn had fallen in love with me, and it fucked everything up.
I found myself back on the streets, but luckily much better off than I’d been two years before. That’s when I met Sam King, and my life took yet another turn. He wasn’t the good guy, but he saw something in me that only a man like him could understand.
I was a survivor and a hustler, as good as, if not better than he was.
So, yeah, the grime of the strip was as familiar as the soft Egyptian sheets I slept on at The Maguire. There was a comfort there. It was the one place I knew where I stood.
It was quiet when I walked in, which was perfect. Cleaning house was private. I was walking away from years of blood, sweat, and tears, not to mention women I’d come to care about immensely. They were my girls, and always would be.
The most important thing to me was keeping them safe. There were a lot of sleazy motherfuckers in the game, and I wasn’t going to let any of my ladies fall into the hands of some strung-out loser.
Technically, I was considered a pimp, but the girls and I knew better. I was their protector, their business manager, and their friend. I always told them they were small business owners—their pussy, their business. I was the middle man, the bulldog in the deal. I made sure the dates were safe, that the customer checked out, and that they paid. In turn, the girls paid me to make sure they got in and out unscathed.
And they always did.
I shook my head, ridding myself of the guilt, and went to work. There wasn’t much to do—I had all my records locked up and secure—but I wanted the girls to have as much at their disposal as possible before I left. It was the least I could do.
There were a few I planned on asking to move on to the new business up north, and if they declined, I wouldn’t be insulted. Vegas was where the money was, no doubt. I also knew there was money to be made legally—and I hoped they’d see my business plan as a way toward a new life.
****
After a long day, all I wanted to do was go back to the room, shower, order a pizza, drink a beer, and fall the fuck asleep. I didn’t want to talk to or see another person for at least twenty-four hours. I was ragged, my temper was at an all time high, and I was exhausted.
Of course, that wasn’t the way my night was meant to go. I got off the elevator, only to bump into Collins as he paced the hallway like an angry lion.
“What’s going on, old man?”
He had a tendency to pout—and gripe. I still hadn’t figured out his story, but at that moment, it wasn’t high on things to do with my time.
He stopped, turned on his heels to face me, and scowled. “You know,” he started, holding up a bony finger. “I thought the little brown-haired one was a pain in the ass, but this one,” he hissed, shaking his head and pointing at my door. “This one is the most stubborn, pig-headed woman I’ve ever met. I don’t know why you bother—you with all the whores!”
I almost laughed, until I realized he was talking about Kelsey. “Are you talking about Kelsey?”
He jerked his head toward the door. “Flynn told me to give her access. She’s been in there all day.”
My eyes widened, and then narrowed into slits. Scowling at the door, I hoped he was full of shit. I pushed past him, ignoring his muttering, and went inside, ready to break her skinny little neck. Her immature bullshit had gone too far.
“Kelsey!” I bellowed into the room. “Where the fuck are you?”
I heard sounds coming from the kitchen, and then there she was, wiping her hands on a dishtowel and giving me a wary smile. “You don’t even have any food here. What do you eat?”
The guarded look made her look so innocent. Unfortunately, I knew better. As unsure and young as she looked—and pretty—she hardly resembled the little temptress ball-buster from the night before.
In a pair of knit pants and a t-shirt, she looked just like that girl I’d met a year or more before again. Sweet, soft, and tender.
The vision of her curbed my anger, but it also induced all those long-put-away desires I had for her. It also reminded me of the dick-disabling outfit she wore the night before, and the fact that I’d had to beat off three times in the shower to rid myself of the pain she’d caused.
But there she was with her ponytail and little purple socks. She was Kelsey... just Kelsey.
She sighed, obviously annoyed by my silence, and let her eyes fall closed, twisting the towel between her hands in front of her.
“We need to talk, I think. I was going to make you lunch, but you never came home. There’s no food anyway.”
I held up my hand to stop her. “Look Kels, let’s not do this, okay? I’ll apologize for the way I treated you, but I don’t regret it. I promised I’d protect you, and you do your damnedest to make that job as difficult as humanly fucking possible. I still think you coming back to Vegas was a huge fucking mistake. I think you need to go home.”
She huffed, shaking her head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s no more dangerous here than it is at home.”
I stared at her, confused. She was delusional. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She waved me off and grabbed her purse, dug around in it for a minute, grumbling and talking smack under her breath, and finally pulled out her phone.
“I’m calling for pizza. Pepperoni with olives, right?”
I took a deep breath and headed for the bar. I was quickly thinning out Flynn’s supply, but at that point I didn’t care. He was a dick for letting her come inside, knowing I was trying to keep my distance.
“Is that okay?” she asked.
I gulped down a shot and poured another. “Fine. Yeah.”
I heard her sigh, and then she finally walked back into the kitchen to make the call to the concierge for pizza.
Being alone with her wasn’t a great idea. In fact, it was a horrible idea. There was too much between us, too much unresolved and unsaid, and way too much tension.
What a fucking disaster.
Since there was no getting out of this pizza party, I kicked off my shoes and headed for the sofa. Shrugging out of my jacket, I threw it on the chair and laid back, stretching out so I could relax. A few minutes later, Kelsey came in, handed me a beer, and took a seat across from me on the floor.
She curled her legs up beneath her and pushed her hair back off her face. She had wispy little hairs that always went crazy—it was one of the things I loved about her when we spent time together. When she slept, they’d stick to her forehead. I’d spent a lot of time watching her sleep when I was hiding her from Doyle, and found myself pushing them out of her face several times a night.
“Why can’t you be nice to me at least?” she asked finally. “You were so kind to me when I stayed with you before. We used to have a good time. Talk. Laugh.” She shrugged one shoulder and looked down at her lap, afraid to look at me.
It chipped at my heart when she did shit like that, and especially when she talked about the way I hurt her.
“We’re friends, Kelsey, and I do care. A lot. That’s why I need you to understand that whatever you imagine is going on between us will never happen.”
She looked up at me, bright blue eyes flooding with tears. “Why? Because you’re older than I am? You’re not that old, and that’s completely stupid.”
The corner of my mouth lifted. “Glad you don’t think I’m an old man.”
She cocked her head, lifting an eyebrow. “You’re not—that’s what I’m trying to say. You act like I’m jailbait. I’m nineteen, almost twenty.”
I snorted. “It’s not just that, Kelsey, but it is part of it. I’m thirteen years older than you are.” I gave her a pointed look and took a long pull on my beer. “There’s more to it—a lot more, and you know it.”
She shook her head slowly. “So what is it? I deserve to know why you act like you can’t stand me. It hurts.”
I set the beer on the table and sat up, more frustrated than I’d been the night before. I was way too tired for a heart-to-heart, and unwilling to bare my soul to a lovesick girl.
I’d played games with women’s emotions, their hearts, and their bodies for a long time. I’d hurt many, used more, and had my own share of damage in the heart game. I never intended to hurt Kelsey, but she was tightening her own noose. I was willing to be her friend, to keep her safe, and be someone she could turn to when she needed me, and I’d made that clear the day I dropped her off on her parent’s doorstep.
That was all I could give her.
It broke my heart watching her go through the pain of her sister’s stupidity and greed. It softened the hard corners of my heart. I hated watching her hurt, suffer, and struggle. It was a dangerous time, and I wasn’t even sure any of us would survive it. All that uncertainty shook loose a sort of desperation inside of me that I’d never felt before. And then Kelsey came along and stuck her key in the vault where my heart had been hidden for so long, and I hadn’t been able to resist her. It was impossible.
