Stone: At Your Service (Carolina Bad Boys #1) Read online

  The author? Leelee Songchild.

  Holy fuck.

  I am a dead man.

  Chapter Four

  Wednesday: Ride It Out

  IN THE HOTEL ROOM, I flopped onto the bed and snagged a couple pillows behind my head. Ride, huh? Let’s see what Leelee’s got.

  Avery heard him through the cracked bedroom door.

  “Yeah, Ave. Like that, suck my balls.”

  Ave? She inhaled a shaky breath before pressing the door open. She and Jase had been roommates for approximately two months, and he’d never so much as given her a second glance. Or maybe she just hadn’t noticed, her nose was usually buried in a textbook. Apparently he’d been saving up any careful consideration of her for something that sounded hypnotically raunchy, entailing things she certainly didn’t do.

  Gorgeous Jase cultivated a bad boy image, but he always got up early to cook her breakfast, usually in a low-slung towel fresh from a shower.

  Peeking inside, Avery’s face turned hot. His head tilted back, the cords of his neck rigid, Jase sat completely naked in the leather armchair across from her. One fist slowly pumped his cock as the fingers of his other hand slid below to cup his balls.

  The door creaked, his muscles flexed, his head flew up. He caught her breathless and staring. Through the shaggy hair falling across his face, she made out his brown eyes, hooded by heavy eyelids.

  “Avery, darlin’. Was just thinking about you.”

  Happy reading? Was Leelee fucking kidding me? More like horny reading and instant hard-on aided by the fact sometimes shy, sometimes spitfire Leelee had written some seriously kinky shit. At this rate my cock was gonna have an embolism.

  “Really? Which head were you using?” She asked in a barely steady voice, her gaze straying low before boring a hole into the wall above his . . . head. The one on top of his shoulders, not the one glistening as it jutted against his belly.

  “Now, don’t bust my balls, gorgeous.” He hooked a finger at her. “Why don’t you come over here and suck ’em instead?”

  She shook her head, intending to back away, determined not to become another of Jase Everly’s needy little tarts. His flavor of the day. The boy was like Baskin Robbins . . . 31 flavors, one for every day of the month. “I don’t think so.”

  I started laughing. Even worse, Leelee tickled my funny bone, as well as my boner.

  “Too prissy to suck cock?”

  “Too discerning to blow yours, Jase,” she hissed.

  In a stern voice, he said, “I’m not gonna ask again. Come inside and close the damn door, Ave.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” she shot back, turning to leave.

  He was there before she could escape, slamming the door shut and spinning her against it. She smelled him—spicy, a little sweaty—and it made her dizzier than she let on, glaring up at him.

  Leaning to the side, he swept one hand up and down the skirt and blouse she wore. “I’m all for a little cat and mouse, but you’re not as mousy as you make yourself out to be. And what you’re hiding underneath all this? Really turns me on, Ave.” He skimmed his nose along her jaw then nipped the sensitive skin beneath her ear. Jase whispered in a velvety voice, “Maybe you just need a little spankin’ to loosen you up.”

  “Maybe you want me to hogtie your hand to your cock!”

  His warm, rough fingers sliding across her belly to her hip, he jerked her against him so she felt his hot length pressing against her thigh. “I don’t think you wanna do that. Nnh nnnh.” When he retreated, Avery’s body jolted with anger . . . with hunger.

  “No, you like this, don’t you?” He gripped himself again and made a slow show of thrusting his cock in and out of his fist, already so erect he was dark red, shiny, and swollen at the tip.

  She shook her head.

  I laid the book down and dragged my arm across my forehead. Bashful, beautiful, blazing Leelee, who blushed at the drop of a hat, wrote hardcore smut to rival my old collection of Penthouse Forum. This wasn’t good. I didn’t need another reason to think about her and sex in the same sentence.

  The steamy cover of Ride facing me made matters worse. My hand automatically reached to unbutton my jeans. Working one-handed, I plucked the buttons free, desperate for release before the built-up pressure in my cock caused irreversible injury. Freeing myself from the denim confines, I flipped the book over.

  Jase gave her a wicked grin and tilted his head. A throaty growl escaped him. “I’m gonna come soon. If you don’t want it in your mouth or on your body, you better go.”

  Willing her eyes away and her legs to move, she scrambled for the doorknob, listening as Jase strained to say, “See you at breakfast, Ave.”

  I’d just pushed my pants down my thighs when my damned iPhone blared the “Bohemian Rhapsody” ringtone.

  “Sonuvabitch!” If it wasn’t the maid service disguised as Leelee interrupting my session, it was Ma, instant mood killer.

  After shuffling my clothes back in order and slowing my heart rate, I answered. “Ma.”

  “Oh good gravy, what have ya done now? You’re all outta breath.”

  “Nothin’.” Yet. Unfortunately. Her telling-off tone of voice reminded me of every single time she’d caught me, and usually Nicky, up to some bound-for-reform-school hijinks. I’d hated her saying back then: I got eyes in the back of my head, sonny, so don’t you even think about it, but I planned on being the same way with the kid.

  “Mm hmm. Just make sure you keep it that way.” She quickly shifted subjects. “JJ just had his lunch. We went to the Bojangles and then I made him some of my strawberry shortcake with the fresh biscuits I like, not that store-bought sponge cake crap that’s no good for nothin’. He ate it right up.”

  “’Course he did, Ma. You just loaded him to the gills with fast food and sugar.” I rolled my eyes.

  “Well, that’s what ol’ Jamma’s for.” I could nearly see her preening her sharply cut, silvery-white bobbed hair. “He’s just about to go down for a nap, and he wanted you to sing to him. Then later we’re gettin’ in the pool—”

  I interrupted her. “Yeah, about the pool and letting him swim in the deep end—”

  “Shush it. You think I’d ever let anything happen to him? I gotta remind you I’ve got an extra set of eyes—”

  “In the back of your head, yeah, I know.” Just what I’d been thinking. “Is he there now?”

  “He’s wrestlin’ with Viper, that big old softie. Aren’t they a pair?” Ma made soft cooing noises. Anyone would think she was talking about JJ playing with a cute little kitten instead of an eighty-pound Rottie.

  It didn’t matter that the kid had Viper wrapped around his little finger, that shit flipped me right the fuck out. “Please go get him, Ma,” I gritted between clenched teeth.

  “JJ baby, Daddy’s on the phone. Don’t let Viper kiss you on the face, hon, she ain’t brushed her teeth today . . .”

  Not to mention that they were big killer teeth. Fuckin’ A. I was gonna have a heart attack during this trip, one way or the other.

  I let loose a big sigh of relief when I heard the kid’s breathless squeaky voice. “Hi, Daddy!”

  My heart walloped in my chest. I smiled through the need to wrap him in my arms, keeping him safe from everything and everyone . . . including Viper the big softie. “Winding down for a nap?”

  “Jamma says I gotta.”

  “Jamma says I have to.” I reminded him.

  “’S’what I said,” he complained with that teetering-on-the-edge whine.

  “That is not what you said.” I gentled my tone.

  “Daddy, why you talkin’ funny at me?”

  Oh well, we’d have to tackle grammar, sugar withdrawals, and dog avoidance behavior when I got home . . . after I hugged the almighty hell out of him. “I’ll just sing to you instead, huh?”

  “I like that best. And when you hug on me. And ice cream . . .” The sleepy ramble heralded an extra-long nap.

  “Me too, kid. Which song will
it be this time?”

  “Not the scary lady with the horns,” he muttered, taking his decision very seriously. He’d be frowning and pulling at the cowlick on the crown of his head.

  “Got it. No scary Maleficent.” I didn’t do the chick parts very well anyway.

  JJ hummed for about half a minute before shouting, “The Flynn one!”

  I grumbled. That Flynn Rider dude was nothing but an itinerant playboy. I preferred the horse or the chameleon. “You’re doing Rapunzel.”

  “Mm hmm.”

  This one was pure schmaltzy romance, and I tried not to laugh as the kid mumbled through half his turn of “I See The Light”. I’d sat through the movies on repeat so many times they almost played in the background of my head, which could become really disturbing.

  We finished on a warbled, half-out-of tune harmonization that definitely wasn’t our best work. I’d have to toss the Tangled DVD when the kid wasn’t looking.

  While I still had him half-awake, I rattled off the same list of dos and don’ts I had when Ma had picked him up Friday night. “Don’t forget to say please and thanks and ma’am.”

  “Uh huh.”

  I heard him fading so I rushed, “And be careful in the pool and around Viper.”

  “Aw, Daddy. Viper wuvs me. Not as much as you and Uncle Wicky and Jamma, but she do.”

  “She does.” I corrected him.

  “I know, ’s’what I said.”

  My life had become all about semantics.

  Ma came back on after the kid and I exchanged I love yous, which I managed to get through without my voice breaking. She yelled across the room, “Don’t let her lick your fingers, either!”

  “Dog cooties,” I murmured.

  “Whatsa-coochies?” She’d finished getting the kid’s fingers out of the mutt’s maw, presumably.

  My eyes lit on the Book of Torment beside me. “Hey, Ma, you read romance stuff, right?”

  “Sure, and any lady who tells you she doesn’t is a damn liar.” She had a little book club that was known to get rowdy at times, what with the mimosas on tap and the bawdy books they read.

  “You ever read anything by a Leelee Songchild?”

  “Why? Is she good? Should I?”

  “No!” I jumped off the bed and started pacing.

  “I’m writin’ it down, how do you spell her name, Joshy? Is that with four e’s and two l’s? Did you meet her at that convention? You know how I like my autographs, Nicky’s done spoiled us.” She clucked her tongue, and I heard her fumble for the pen she kept looped on a chain around her neck.

  I rubbed my forehead in defeat. “I’ll try to get something signed for you.”

  Her voice softened. “Now, reading these romances sometimes gets me to thinkin’ about your dad.”

  Suddenly it felt like I’d taken a crowbar to the stomach. “I know, Ma.”

  “I miss him. I sure do wish he was around to watch your baby boy grow up.”

  The dryness in my throat made it almost impossible to speak. “I think about that every day. He would’ve been a great grandpa.”

  We were both silent for a while, swimming in our own wishes for what should’ve been.

  “You okay, Ma?” I rubbed my eyes, my fingers coming away damp.

  “Yep. So long as I got you and JJ and those boys at Stone’s, all those families, I’ll be all right. Y’all don’t need to worry about me, son.”

  “I love you, you know?”

  “Oh sugar, save that for the ladies.”

  After we hung up, I fell back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. It would be nine years this November since James Stone had died. The pain had dimmed from the initial shock and disbelief to months of bewilderment. Even now it sometimes felt like my dad should still be in charge and large at the garage on those solitary mornings when I drove to Stone’s. Sometimes I’d sit in my Bronco, cradling my coffee cup, remembering his long lope across the parking lot. The keys had always jingled from his belt loops. I held the mirage of him inside my mind those days when I couldn’t shake the loss.

  The biggest regret, the hardest sadness to swallow was he’d never met JJ.

  So they’d always be close in one way or another, I kept a picture of Dad and me on my dresser alongside the first photograph I’d taken of JJ when he’d come out squalling his lungs off. With a wrinkly red face and unfocused eyes, he’d been a little shrimp I was too scared to handle in the beginning. But when he’d latched tiny fingers around my thumb and immediately stopped crying like he knew I was his daddy, I figured out pretty damn fast being a father was going to change my entire life. He was and always would be the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

  The photo of Dad and me was taken outside of Stone’s when I’d joined the team straight from high school. I was a healthy six-foot-three and broad-shouldered, but Dad—who used to call himself the old goat—never failed to rag on me about the extra two inches he had over me. Handsome, rugged, and an old crooner of Chet Baker songs when he got his sauce on, he’d been Ma’s silver fox.

  She used to work the desk at Stone’s back in the day, swishing around the place like it was Buckingham Palace and she the queen. Hell, she still did on Tuesday and Thursday mornings when the kid was at preschool. And she’d always had the smackdown ready for any dame making eyes at Dad—not that he had a tune for anyone but her.

  I rolled over and shut my eyes. Behind them, I saw the dresser with his picture, him and me standing side-by-side, arms slung around each other. That photo was right next to where I dropped my wallet, keys, and grease rag so I’d make sure I said goodnight to him each and every night, no matter how much it hurt.

  There were other framed photographs around the house, too. Mom and Dad’s wedding picture, every milestone moment and then some of the kid, shit and shenanigans at Stone’s . . . It was a good house, a good home I’d made for JJ. I’d bought it ten years ago as a bachelor during the bust, thinking of it as an investment. Later it became a place for my own family as it grew quickly with Claire and the kid. The two-story Victorian wasn’t a spread by any means, but it was a prime piece of real estate in the middle of the Old Village, which I’d bought for a penny compared to what it would cost now.

  I’d restored it that first year with Dad. Aside from the loose toilet handle in my bathroom, it was perfect. Neat as a tick just like the garage, the house was pretty as a picture from the white picket fence outside to the glossy finished floorboards inside. And it was nowhere any chick would expect to find Josh bad boy Stone. I intended to keep it that way.

  But that jiggly toilet flush—we went way back, all the way to November 2, 2004, the day Dad and I were finally going to fix it together. The day he died. He went hunting that morning before our noon fixer-upper date. I’d been waiting for him to show when I got the call. It had been a hunting accident. That was the day the project stopped, that time stopped, and a piece of my heart broke away.

  I could fix that damned toilet handle if I wanted to. Could’ve done it years ago. But I didn’t because doing so would mean truly letting Dad go, and I wasn’t ready.

  That was why we’d named JJ Joshua James. And that’s why I usually called him the kid, because most days I couldn’t stomach the thought of Dad’s early death.

  I wiped my eyes then blinked them open at the same sterile hotel room ceiling. Yeah, it was time to get out of my head.

  ****

  In the hotel gym half an hour later, I was in full work-it-out mode the old-fashioned way. I grunted, groaned, and cursed my way through a circuit on the weight machines complemented with CrossFit training designed to make me keel over. At least then I could stop thinking.

  Having to pretend I was into Nicky while ignoring the fact I was one hundred percent attracted to Leelee was gonna make me mentally unstable. Not to mention her last relationship broke off because Patrick was bi and lied to her about it. I didn’t stand a chance with Leelee even if I was on the up and up with her, not with her history and my Rom-Con con. Shit, her
bad break-up story more than rivaled my own.

  So my plan of the moment was sweating it—her—out of my system PD-fuckin’-Q. If that failed, I was going to masturbate over every single sex scene in her book until my dick was raw, even if I had to bust my nut in the shower with Nicky in the next room. Maybe then my bastard cock would learn to stand down in her presence.

  Right then, as luck would have it in some form of twisted fate or some other writerly term—like foreboding or foreshadowing or whatever—the door swung open . . . and Leelee swished inside. Wearing exercise gear: hip-huggin’, boob cuppin’, ass-lovin’ Lycra.

  Her life might be worse than a bad romance novel, but mine was beginning to resemble a har har fucking har romantic comedy, minus the romance part.

  Trying to ignore her so I could get my workout done and get the hell out of Dodge, I continued to torture my body. Sweat dripped like bullets down my bare chest and into the low waistband of my nylon shorts. My muscles huge and heaving, I rolled up to a squat from another set of sit-ups and came face-to-tit with Leelee.

  When I rose to my full height, topping her by a good nine inches now that she wore sneakers instead of fuck-me heels, my gaze fell to her face. Her pouty bottom lip was tucked half between her teeth, and I wanted to use my mouth to tease it out. Her eyes were brighter than ever, her hair pulled into a high braid, all the better to wrap around my fist and draw her up for a long, deep kiss.

  And the room just got a whole lot hotter.

  I rolled my neck, bouncing on my feet while I reached for my discarded tank top to mop up my face. Pushing the neck of my tank top into the waistband of my shorts, I was well aware the extra weight dragged my shorts even lower over the cut muscles of my pelvis, almost to the point where my pubes peeked out.

  I grinned when Leelee peeked too. “So, what brings you here?”

  She took a seat on one of the blue mats, averting her eyes. “The gym’s a great place to hide. I only started workin’ out when I began coming to these things. You know, me and crowds.”