Chapter 12

The problem with trouble is that sometimes they’re good kissers.

-Kayla’s secret thoughts

Kayla

“No,” I shook my head. “I refuse.”

“Come on,” Janie said. “Please? They love you!”

I shook my head in the negative. “They’re god awful. And tomorrow is Saturday. I refuse. They’ll wake me up, and tomorrow is literally the only day that I have that I can sleep in. I’m not doing it.”

I was lonely, though.

Really, really lonely.

After Parker had admitted what he’d done, and who he’d done it to, I’d got up and left.

I mean, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Janie had told me of her suspicions, of course. She’d let me know that Parker was a scary person, and he’d done some really bad things. But I hadn’t believed her.

I believed her now.

Loki had been in my life since I was a young child. And, even more recently, he’d been quite a mentor to me as I looked for my path in life.

Hell, I’d babysat his children for him once with all the other rugrats of the Dixie Wardens MC.

What it all boiled down to was that I had a loyalty to Loki, and I didn’t to Parker.

Meaning I hadn’t talked to Parker in well over three days.

Though, I hadn’t fallen asleep once without thinking about him. And, at some point during the night, he’d gone out of his way to wake me up from my nightmares, despite me walking out on him.

I was still processing what I’d learned, and I wasn’t sure if I could ever be okay with what he’d done.

But, I was trying.

I was also getting nowhere, and I was going crazy over it.

Which had to be why I agreed to the lunacy Janie proposed.

***

I looked at the dogs as I got ready for bed. Then fed first one a rawhide, then the other one.

“Now listen,” I said to them both. “Y’all are going to go to bed. Y’all won’t cry. Y’all won’t wake me up early in the morning. And you won’t do anything that’ll make me hate you. Do you understand?”

The dogs blinked innocently at me, and I could’ve sworn I heard laughing through the wall.

I didn’t need confirmation. I knew exactly what Parker was doing. “Fuck off.”

The laughing got louder, but also sounded more muffled.

I turned around and glared at the drywall, wood, and lack of insulation separating me from that man.

“I know you’re not laughing at me,” I growled.

The laughing turned to guffaws.

“They’re dogs,” he gasped out from between laughing breaths. “How bad can they be?

Obviously, he didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to say stuff like that.

Because my “how bad can it be” turned into “how much worse can it get?” And I had my fucking Roomba to thank for it.

I thought I was hot shit ordering that bitch on Black Friday for a hundred bucks. Seeing as I hated freakin’ anything that had to do with cleaning, I thought I won the lottery. The moment I’d gotten home last week I’d set it up to go off every single night at three o’clock in the morning. And seeing as I slept like the dead most of the time, I didn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t do it then. It wouldn’t wake me up, that was for sure.

It all started out fairly normal. We went to bed, the dogs on the floor, and everything was great. I fell asleep to the dogs chewing their rawhides.

I woke up to a living hell.

At first, I wasn’t too sure what it was that woke me, but it didn’t take long for me to recognize the problem.

Poop.

Dog poop.

And lots of it if the smell was anything to go by.

Fuck!

I sat up in bed, flipped on the light, and started looking.

At first, I didn’t see anything.

I mean, honestly, I only had a one-bedroom apartment. And I could see the entire living room and three-quarters of the kitchen.

I had dark brown wood floors.

My eyes swept over my Roomba, then continued to search.

The longer I looked, the more the sleep cleared from my eyes until suddenly, I saw it.

The floor was covered in it. And my Roomba was slowly tracking it all over the floor as it covered every single available inch of my eight-hundred-square-foot apartment.

Horror struck my brain at the same time I shrieked.

The dogs, who both looked at me innocently, sat up at my yell.

“What the fuck?” Parker called through the wall. “What are you fucking screaming about at three o’clock in the morning?”

I felt my anger rise.

Blindly I reached for my phone, but something on the cord caught my eye. Poop. On my iPhone cord.

I unplugged it, laid it gently back to where it wasn’t touching my bed, and called Janie.

She answered sleepily.

“Hello?”

“You have exactly twenty minutes to get over here and clean this up, or I will never speak to you again,” I said irately into the phone.

“Clean what up?” she asked, sounding sleepy still.

“You know how I have my Roomba set to go off at three in the morning?” I asked calmly.

“Yes…”

“One of your dogs decided to shit on my floor last night,” I said carefully. “And my Roomba decided to run it over. And then track it all over my goddamn bedroom—and that’s not even including my living room and kitchen.”

The man next door started to guffaw, and I glared at the wall.

“Oh, shit,” she said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“You have twenty minutes,” I said.

“Kayla, but…”

“You don’t leave for the airport for another freakin’ two hours. You have time.”

Then I hung up.

I would not be dealing with this shit. Literally.

I sat back on my bed and glared at the dogs.

“Which one of you was it?” I accused them both.

The dogs’ ears tilted at my low tone.

Neither one of them confessed, the bastards.

I idly started to flip through Facebook on my phone while trying really hard not to get nauseous from the smell.

Which, I might add, I wasn’t very successful at.

I was very susceptible to smells.

Unfortunately.

The first video I clicked on was a cat called the Cat Excavator. It was of one of those sphynx cats—the hairless ones—that was opening his jaws as wide as he could manage each time he took a bite.

I grinned.

Then moved on to another cat—this one a Maine Coon.

The next video was of a windshield cover that allowed your window to be ice/snow free when you came out in the mornings.

“I need me one of these,” I said as I watched.

Then, without even thinking, I forwarded the video to Parker.

I heard his phone ding on the other side of the wall, then his snort following shortly after.

“It doesn’t snow here, Kayla. It frosts, but if you start your car and let the heater run for five minutes, you’ll be golden.”

“But with this, all I would have to do is take it off and it’s good,” I countered.

“It takes five minutes to put it on and a couple of minutes to take it off. Then put it away. And by that time, you might as well have just started the car,” he pointed out.

I hated when he used common sense on me.

“Whatever,” I muttered, then smiled at the next video I saw.

A snowman—a rather ripped one at that—with a large carrot in place of the snowman’s dick.

I forwarded that one to him, too. But I didn’t get the same result from him.

“Gross.”

I grinned and continued to scroll. “Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Atch,” I answered.

“Atch who?”

“Bless you.”

I grinned when he groaned.

The next video was of a gun that looked really pretty. So I sent that one, too. “Do you think this is stupid to have?”

“Honestly?” he asked. “I’ll never own a pink or blue gun. It just strikes me as riding a thin line. I know that kids should know better than to touch your firearms—and most of them do—but there are those kids who are curious. I wouldn’t want that extra temptation of pretty colors enticing them just in case.”

I actually kind of agreed with him.

Surprise.

“I’ll remember that,” I told him. “But, right now, I only own a taser.”

“Is it pink?”

I grinned. “Yeah.”

He sighed. “Why does that not surprise me?”

Someone knocked at my door, but I didn’t get up to answer it.

Instead, I texted Janie to ‘come in.’

She did, and immediately stopped right inside the threshold.

Her husband was right on her heels, and the moment the smell hit them both, they winced.

“Oh, God. It’s worse than I thought,” she moaned.

I agreed, but I also hadn’t gotten up to look because I didn’t want to know how bad it was. I just wanted to have it all cleaned up and go back to bed.

This had been the first night that I hadn’t woken up with a nightmare of a headache or Parker banging on my walls.

My eyes were heavy, and honestly, I could use the sleep.

Especially now that Parker wasn’t there to help me sleep.

“Janie?” Janie looked up and stared at me thoughtfully. “I don’t care if you don’t want to do it. You will, and when you finish, my house will be as good as new…oh, and that Roomba is yours. You’ll buy me a new one.”

I then stood up in my bed, uncaring that I was only in my t-shirt and panties and took a running leap toward my balcony door.

I landed on a clean patch—thank God—and slipped out onto the balcony.

“Where are you going?”

“Over to a friend’s.” I paused and looked over my shoulder. “Make sure you lock up. Oh, and ask someone else to watch your dogs. I might be mad at them for a couple of days.”

I closed the door well behind me, and then looked around the covered balcony of mine.

I hadn’t been out here much.

Maybe a handful of times.

But only because I disliked how close my balcony was to the one next door—Parker’s. There was another apartment on my opposite side, but that apartment had remained vacant for a while—I didn’t really know why.

Tonight, I was happy that my balcony was so close to Parker’s, because that meant all I had to do to get over to his side was climb over the waist-high railing.

Or, I would have had Parker not met me halfway and lifted me over using two really huge hands on my hips.

The moment that I was on his side of the balcony, I pushed past him, stepped through the door and around Carmen, then dove for his bed.

It smelled like him.

All yummy and rawr.

I was sure those two things should be bottled up and then made into a candle. Someone would make a million dollars just off of me, because I wouldn’t be able to resist the smell or the candle.

Parker didn’t say another word as I made myself comfortable on his bed—the warm side just like he liked to do in mine. Or I would have had he not followed me into the bed, flipped off the light, then bodily lifted me up and planted me on the other side of him.

But, it didn’t matter.

Mostly because I was still pressed up to his side—and no part of my body in any way, shape, or form was even remotely cold.

Not at all.

I heard Janie and Rafe expressing their apparent horror, but I didn’t stay awake long enough to laugh at their plight.

Nope.

I think it was physically impossible to do much of anything when you’re curled around a man much bigger than yourself. One who I was quickly coming to have feelings for. One who, in the three days since he told me his worst misdeed in life, I still couldn’t stop thinking about him.

I still didn’t know what I would do.

Frankly, I didn’t really want to think about it.

But I knew that it felt right when I was in Parker’s arms.

I also knew that, when the time came, I’d figure it out. Until then, I’d bask in the blissful ignorance and pretend that it wasn’t anywhere near as serious as it was.