Finn
It was sometime early in the morning, or really late at night, and Finn wasn’t entirely sure which it was…or which he wanted it to be. The sun wasn’t quite out yet, but the first rays of it were beginning to turn the sky a softer shade of black in the very farthest reaches of the sky. He could see it through the window.
His entire body was one great big ache, and he didn’t think his legs were capable of doing anything but lying there and taking up space. The bed sheets were a mess around their bodies, and half of them had ended up on the floor at some point during the wild sexual Olympics. He wasn’t sure who got first place and who was walking home with the silver, but he was pretty sure everyone was a winner tonight.
It had been hours, and good God they had been perfect. Finn didn’t normally give into the notion of losing himself in a woman. Good beer, good friends, even a good fight. All of those things could keep a guy from getting overwhelmed. But Cora…well…she was nothing but overwhelming, and he loved it. The entire apartment complex could have been going up in smoke and he would still have been enjoying that wild woman in that bed.
He took a deep breath and swung his legs over the edge of the mattress, which seemed to have moved a few inches to the left. He felt the shift as she rolled over.
“You leaving?” She didn’t sound like she was pleading him to stay. They both knew she wouldn’t. Cora was willing to do a great many things, but she wouldn’t beg him for anything. Not even great sex.
No, he thought, it wasn’t just great sex. Great sex would have been forty minutes of craziness followed by a midnight meal and a cold beer. This was…something else. They hadn’t just pounded the daylights out of one another; they had talked, they had explored…It had been insane.
He shook his head, trying to get rid of those thoughts. He had things to do today, and if he kept thinking about the way she grabbed him and hauled him to her, he’d never get out of this room in one piece.
“Yeah,” he said, reaching for his jeans. “But I’ll be back tonight.”
She sat up and he turned to look at the way the fading moon shone on her pale skin. She didn’t drag the sheet up to hide her nudity. She rested in the middle of their sexual battleground, and he suddenly found himself thinking of nymphs. She looked like she was crafted out of magic with all that rich auburn hair in a tumble around that elegant face of hers and skin that glowed like silver-speckled porcelain.
“You cooking dinner again?”
“I was planning on it.”
She paused and then rolled over, tugging a small fold of bills out of her nightstand. Why she kept money there, he didn’t know. He also didn’t think he liked the idea of her tossing green at him after doing all the things they had just done. He narrowed his eyes at her. “What’s this for?”
“I don’t want you paying for all the food.”
“I don’t mind,” he said, looking down at the hundred-dollar bill that was looking up at him. Was that cheap or expensive for a whore? He didn’t know. He hadn’t really done much in the way of buying women. “I make good money.”
“Don’t do that,” she said flatly, pulling the blanket up over her breasts. It bothered him that she suddenly felt the need to cover up.
“Do what?”
Her eyes were like flecks of ice in a storm when she looked at him. There was magic there, too, though. “Don’t make this some stupid macho thing where you get bent out of shape because a woman offered to buy. I thought you weren’t like that.”
He didn’t think he was. He had no problems with a woman independently earning her share of the wealth. Hell, he was fine with a woman earning the most of it. His own mom had been a strong damn woman who did what she could to make ends meet. He tugged his jeans into place and sighed. “It’s not that,” he said, jerking a hand through his messed-up hair. “I just don’t want you thinking…that…you know…I can’t help out.”
She raised her brow at him. Her next words were winter cool. “Not only do you own an auto-repair place, you happen to be part of a lucrative organization that doesn’t always stay within the boundaries of the law. I’m well aware that you are fiscally capable.”
He frowned at her. There was something about the cool, flat way she used her words that had his hackles going up. “You just called me a criminal again.”
“I did. Does that bother you?”
He zipped his pants up and wondered where the hell his shirt had gone. “My mom always said it’s not really what you say, it’s how you are saying it. You say criminal the way other people say disease.”
She sighed and held up her hand. “I don’t like that aspect of you, Finn. I don’t like it at all. I’ve never made a secret of it, and one night together isn’t going to change my mind on the subject.”
“Do you know what we do?” he demanded, whirling on her.
“You break the law.”
“Yeah, but do you know what we do?”
She tugged the blanket closer. “Are you going to tell me?”
“Most of our money is made stealing cars and selling guns. We steal cars because that shit is insured, and it hurts no one but the insurance company to pay out for it. We sell guns because we believe in a person’s right to keep themselves safe. We don’t do drugs.”
“Hookers?” she asked pointedly.
“From time to time,” he admitted. “But it’s not like you think it is. Marcy, the Old Lady to our boss, runs that. She has a house she uses and she makes sure the girls, and guys if you really want to know, involved are safe, happy, and clean. She firmly believes there is nothing wrong with paying for a little love so long as the person who’s providing the service is all right doing it.”
She paused. “There are boy whores, too?”
He laughed. “Marcy is a good businesswoman, just like you. She provides anything and everything so long as everyone is of age and willing.”
He watched as she puzzled out her emotions. Finn was used to that response when he talked frankly about the business with people. He let her have her moment while he continued trying to set his hair straight. It wasn’t that he cared so much what it looked like, but it kept him from yanking away the blanket that she was still holding to herself like armor.
“Why not drugs?”
“Drugs make a whole town go sick, even if it’s just one person doing them. It’s not just someone smoking some weed. It’s a person injecting poison into their body, or snorting it up their nose. Yeah, I’m all about doing what you want with your own damn body or whatever, but the fact is that people throw themselves and their families away for a hit…People don’t do that with other things.”
“I don’t know that I agree with you on that part. A gun can hurt someone just as much as drugs.”
“Sure, but no one ever kept anyone safe injecting dirty shit between their toes.”
She pulled her knees to her chest in contemplation. He let her think about it. She was a smart woman, and she had more than proved she could think for her own damn self. He’d said his part.
“I’m not a bad person, Cora. And since we are being so honest…I am damn close to loving you.”
Her lips parted in an O of surprise. “I what?”
“Did you go suddenly deaf?”
“Well…no, I just…”
It wasn’t the reaction he wanted, but at least she didn’t sink underneath the covers and tell him to leave. The coldness of her eyes had thawed a little, too, so he went on. “Yeah, I’m pretty damn surprised by it too, but there you go. I like your snippy nature and take-no-bullshit attitude. I like that you give a damn about people so much that you have to unwind for hours after the end of the evening just to get to sleep. I like that you dropped everything to come take care of a brother you hadn’t seen in years. I like that you know exactly who and what you are. If that’s not a cocktail for a woman to love, I don’t know what is.”
She blinked rapidly, as if trying to keep tears he couldn’t see at bay. “I don’t…I didn’t—”
“Don’t respond. I didn’t say it so you would give me some kind of answer. I said it because it was true and because I thought you ought to know.”
He walked around the bed and put his hand on her cheek. It was soft as velvet under his callused palm. She didn’t lean into it like he secretly wished she would, but she didn’t pull away either. He’d take that. She wasn’t just any woman, willing to get lost in the romance of the moment. She was Cora, and she had her own shit to handle. He could see the tears now, glittering in the very corners of her eyes like wet diamonds. He wanted to believe those tears were from happiness, and maybe that’s why it took him a moment to see that she was mad.
“Damn it, Finn, why did you have to go and ruin it?”
Her words were so softly said that he didn’t understand their meaning at first. They could have meant “that was nice of you to say” or even “maybe I’m falling for you, too,” but they didn’t. The words were soft as satin and cut through him like a dagger.
“What? I didn’t ruin anything.”
“This was a great night,” she said, jerking away from his hand as the tears started to run down her face. “I’m sorry but it can’t happen again.”
“Why not?” he demanded, trying to keep the little punch of anger from showing.
She whipped her gaze on him, and it was filled with so much raw pain that he wanted to hug her. What had happened to cause this passionate woman so much pain? He wanted to know, to help, to alleviate some of it.
“Because it can’t, damn it. I get that you believe in what you do, and you’ll have to reconcile yourself with that. But I know better. I’ve seen what it can do to a person, to the people around you. This was…this was fun, but no. No more.”
He dragged his hands through his hair, ruining what little style he had given it. “Man, you are seriously one of the dumbest smart people that I have ever met.”
“I beg your pardon?”
He shook his head and reached back to work his hair into a braid. “You think you know everything. You think you have it all figured out. Well, here’s a great big surprise for you, Ms. Business. You don’t.”
“That makes no sense. I—”
“Stop,” he snapped. “Just fucking stop.”
Her eyes went cold and flat as ice cubes on a polar cap. “Don’t you dare tell me what to do.”
“We were both telling each other what to do just a little while ago, Cora.” He slammed a hand in the general direction of the bed. “Don’t pretend like we didn’t fully enjoy ourselves.”
“Sex doesn’t equal a relationship.” She crossed her arms and lifted her chin in cool defiance.
“If you think what happened here was just sex, you are fooling yourself. I’ve had sex before, Cora Anderson, and this wasn’t it.”
Fuck the shirt, he decided. She could keep it. Maybe she’d even like having it when she came back to her senses. He picked up his wallet from the ground and deliberately left the hundred-dollar bill on the stand next to her.
“Finn—”
He shook his head. He didn’t want to hear anything else from her right now. If she said anything else he couldn’t handle, he’d walk out and never look back. He didn’t want to do that. “I’m going to go. I have shit to do, and so do you. I’ll be back tonight.”
“Still?”
“Cora, I’m not just here for you.”
With that, he walked out of the room and out of the apartment.