Page 33 of Caught Up

“It’s notherI was worried about,” Ryan argued before the door clicked shut behind them, stifling Taylor’s rebuttal.

My shoulders shook as I laughed. Leave it to them to both ruin a moment and somehow make it even better.

“Your roommates, huh?” Junior said as we untangled ourselves from each other and stood.

“Yup,” I said. “Best friends and protectors a girl could ask for.”

I turned to him to say more, warn him not to fuck with me or he’d have them to answer to, but his mask was pushed on top of his head, giving me an unobstructed view of his face. The words died on my tongue. Damn him for being sogood-looking. It softened me to him even as I tried to resist, made me think of serial killers like Bundy and the Ken Doll Killer, men who’d gotten away with their crimes for so long because “No one thatgood-lookingcould do such terrible things.” Not that Junior was as bad as them. Or at least I hoped he wasn’t.

His eyes snared mine as he lifted the fingers that had just been inside me and slipped them into his mouth. I shivered at the look of hunger that swept over his face as he licked them clean. He’d openly confessed to framing a young woman and attacking a man. I should be pissed, terrified, but all I could think about was getting those fingers back inside my body as soon as possible.

“Here,” he said, undoing his shirt. “The front of your dress got dirty from the wall.”

I glanced down to see dark streaks smeared across the fabric over my breasts. “Tonight won’t be the first time I walk out of Velvet a little worse for wear.”

Junior’s expression darkened. “I want their names and addresses.”

“Ha ha,” I said.

His face remainedstone-cold, and his stupid dry sense of humor made it impossible to tell if he was joking or truly the psycho I’d accused him of being.

I opened my mouth to tell him to relax, but of course that’s when he decided to shrug out of his shirt. Instead of a snarky remark, my mouth immediately turned drier than the Atacama, and all that came out of it was a dehydrated wheeze. Beneath thebutton-down, Junior wore a muscle top, andgoddamn, he looked good in it. The white fabric made the dark tattoos sleeving his arms pop, and the way it was pulled taut across his broad chest had me wondering how much ink was hid—

“Are youbleeding?” I asked, staring at the red spot staining his side.

“It’s nothing,” he said.

I highly doubted that, but I held my response in check because I didn’t want to seem like I cared by pressing the issue, nor did I really want to know what had happened to him, because I worried it might implicate me after the fact in one of his crimes.

He lifted a hand, offering his shirt to me. Part of me wanted to say no, to put somemuch-neededspace back between us. Another part of me wanted to wrap myself up in his scent and live out my high school fantasies of Junior publicly claiming me with clothing like a quarterback giving out his letterman jacket. Yet another, larger part of me was fricking freezing, so I took the damn shirt and tried to tell myself I was just being practical.

“Thank you,” I said, sliding my arms into the sleeves.

He settled it around my shoulders, and yup, this was a mistake. Because it was warm from his body heat and smelled divine, like his sinful cologne and a hint of masculine musk I’d always found oddly alluring.

I lifted the collar to my nose and took a deep breath. “Is that brimstone I detect?”

Instead of looking amused or firing something back at me, Junior hooked a finger beneath my chin and tilted my face up. Our gazes caught and held while a long, silent moment passed between us. I could see the thoughts swirling behind his eyes, but when he spoke, it was only to say, “Enjoy the rest of your night, Lo.”

“What do you mean, he’s raising the rent again?” Taylor asked.

She, Ryan, and I stood together amongst six other people in Sylvia’sthird-flooroffice. Antique sconces lit the room, casting the space in warm light. A plush rug was spread beneath our feet, and while the velvet couches and chairs dotting it were soft and inviting, none of us were sitting.

“Just what I said,” Sylvia replied, the black fabric of her bodycon dress pulling tight as she paced on the other side of her desk. “The bastard knows we have nowhere else to go and is trying to milk us for all we’re worth.”

Behind her, the curtains were tied open to reveal the lights of the city. Their glow backlit her, casting her Brown skin in neon blues and fluorescent whites. I knew she was truly stressed, because she lifted a hand and rubbed it over her buzzed hair, a habit she’d picked up when she first cut her curls off and was still trying to break.

“How much does he want this time?” someone else asked.

Sylvia stopped pacing and turned to face us, bracing her knuckles on the desk. “He wants fifty dollars per square foot per year.”

I did some quick math in my head.

“We can’t afford that,” Ryan said. “Can we?”

Sylvia shook her head.

“I can cover us the first month at least,” I said.

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