Gen had no idea what to do with Keith. He obviously wasn’t intending to leave until he was ready, but it made no sense to tuck her in and then make her get up to let him out of the house.
He kept promising nothing would happen tonight though, so she chose to trust him. Her gun was in a hidden alcove of the nightstand, easy to get to. However, she knew there was no way she’d shoot him for just refusing to leave. As long as he didn’t hurt her, anyway.
She brushed her teeth, washed her face, and pulled on yoga pants and a matching tee. No nightgown while Keith was in the house. She could change after he left, but he apparently wanted to see what she slept in, so the yoga pants would have to work.
She was in bed, covers up to her chin, when he returned. He offered the water and ibuprofen, but Gen only accepted the water, saying, “I don’t get headaches from dark liquor, only light. I stuck with rum tonight so I should be okay.”
He nodded, put them on the table, and walked to the seating area of her bedroom. He took off his vest, draped it over the chair, and then walked to the other side of her bed.
Gen’s mouth fell open as he removed a gun from an underarm holster, another from a holster in his pants, and settled them both on the side table. She’d felt the one at his hip while he carried her through the bar, but hadn’t known about the one under his arm. He put two extra magazines, a knife, and his cellphone on the table with the guns, and then walked back to his jacket, where he proceeded to take off his shirt in the sexiest way she’d ever seen — he reached his right arm over his right shoulder, grabbed the back of the neck of the shirt, and yanked it over his head.
His back was muscled, smooth, and sexy. Gen’s entire body was like a lit fuse, just needing to blast off, and she was afraid if he kissed her again she might attack him. She’d never been on top, even though a few guys had asked, but something in her wanted to climb on Keith and… no. Something was wrong with her. Too much rum. Too much something.
Or, maybe it was those two kisses.
She was starting to see Keith as Duke now. He was the same person she’d known as Keith, but a different man.
He stood with his back to her as he unbuckled his belt and took off his jeans to show sexy boxer briefs, and then casually turned and walked to the bed, lifted the covers and sheets, and slid in. As if he’d been in her bed before. As if he was invited. As if he belonged there.
“I bought a new bed and new mattress, after Mike.” Gen’s face went hot and her heart stopped as she realized what she was saying and once again castigated herself for drinking so much rum tonight.
“Go to sleep now, Beautiful.” He stayed on his back, but pulled her into his side and held her. Gen lay frozen, not sure what to do, but he only stroked her hair, almost absentmindedly, until she relaxed and fell asleep.
* * * *
Gen awoke as the sky was just beginning to light outside her window. The master bedroom gave her beautiful sunsets, but no sunrises, which was fine because she wasn’t a morning person. She looked around, trying to figure out why she was awake, and her gaze landed on Duke beside her, his eyes open.
“You seem more like Duke this morning than Keith.”
He gave a lazy half-smile and asked, “How you figure, Beautiful?”
“I don’t know. Somehow in my drunken logic last night, I realized you’re the same person but a different man. Duke fits you better than Keith, now.”
“You know how I got the nickname?”
“I can guess. Probably because you fought a lot?”
He nodded. “Yeah, good with my fists, prone to wanting to duke it out rather than talk it out.”
“This isn’t right, Duke. It’s too intimate, waking up together. Too soon.”
He reached towards her, his movements slow, and he pushed a few strands of hair away from her face before bringing his hand back to himself, no longer touching her. Gen’s heart beat faster at his touch, and then beat even faster as she realized she wanted him to keep touching her once he withdrew his hand.
“My beautiful Gen, I’ve decided I’m gonna have to prove to you I can be trusted. And when I say you can trust me, I mean in all ways. Trust me to take care of you, to protect you, to be careful with you, and to follow through on my promises. Now, you want breakfast? If you have the ingredients I need, I make killer pancakes.”
“Is fixing me pancakes part of taking care of me?”
“Yes, Beautiful. Also, I’m starving, so it’s me taking care of myself. I’m hoping you have bacon or sausage or steaks down there, too.”
“There’s half a beef in the freezer in the pantry. I pulled a steak out yesterday and put it in the fridge. Your choice of using the already thawed steak, or getting something from the freezer and nuking it. My microwave has a good defrost setting, scales are in the drawer under the microwave; just tell the microwave how much it weighs.”
“You have plans today?”
Gen nodded. “I’m meeting a couple at one, will probably take the better part of the afternoon. They have a little over a mil, and can’t decide whether to buy land and build, or buy something already available. They’d prefer the latter, but will deal with the former if I can’t find them something they like.”
“I want to take you to dinner tonight. What time works for you?”
“If we’re going to make this work, you’re going to have to understand I can’t always give times. I may show them one house, they fall in love with it, we make an offer, and I’m done for the day. Or, I may show them houses until five, and then feed them as we discuss what they liked and didn’t, and figure out our next step.”
“Fair enough, Beautiful. If you’re done with them before five, text me when you’re done. If not, text me somewhere around five and let me know how you think the rest of the day will go. I won’t hold you to it, but it’ll give me an idea. That work?”
Gen smiled in relief. “Yes, that works. Give me a thirty minute window, as I prefer to handle texting when I can step away to give them privacy to talk, so it’s about them and not about me.”
Duke caressed her cheek and said, “Not a lot of ways to live in a three-quarter of a million dollar house when you’re twenty-nine, and most of those involve going to the dark side. You found a way to do it and keep your innocence. Your purity.”
She shook her head. “My competition won’t agree with you. I play dirty, Duke. I hire people to do research for me, I know everything about a client and their people before I make the first phone call, and I learn even more before the second. When I walk into a meeting, I’ve stacked the deck in my favor ahead of time. Sometimes I even buy the land through one of my umbrella corporations, but no one in the room knows, which isn’t technically against the law, but goes against the code of ethics. I may not do anything outright illegal, but I’ve skirted the edges more than once, and I’ve done a lot that isn’t exactly moral.”
The look in his eyes wasn’t disgust, it was… appreciation. Respect. Gen shook her head and laughed. “You aren’t supposed to be impressed by that.”
“Genesis, I told you up front I’m an outlaw. I have my own moral code, and I handle things my way, the law be damned. Breaking the dude’s hand was the right way to keep him from coming back to my club and pawing it all over another woman. My code. My way. We don’t tolerate drugs, not because they’re illegal but because they fuck up families. I’ll tell you a lot more about the way we operate in the coming days and weeks, and I want you to understand through it all, it’s about our own moral compass, not the one the rest of the world uses.”
“But I just told you I’ve gone places that weren’t moral, though I stayed in the law. In some ways, that makes me worse than you. You keep it moral, even if others don’t agree with your definition.”
She sat up, realized she didn’t have a bra on under her light yellow tee, and pulled the pillow to her front nonchalantly, as if she wanted to lean into it as she talked.
His eyes narrowed. “You went against your own morals, or someone else’s?”
Gen opened her mouth to say she went against her own morals, but realized that wasn’t exactly right. She closed her mouth, thought a few seconds, and said, “It’s complicated.”
“Tell me.”
She shook her head.
“Gen, this is about trust. You know I wore a gun while drinking at Sticky Fingers. You know I broke a man’s hand last night. I’m not gonna hide what I do from you, I don’t want you hiding, either.”
“Okay, but it’s a long story. Maybe I can tell it while we cook?”
Duke didn’t let Gen help, he sat her on the counter where she was close, and where he could stop and give her the occasional kiss on the cheek, or nose, or forehead. He touched her almost every time he walked by, and by the time he put the pancakes with a side of eggs and steak on two plates, she was getting used to his touch. She’d put a robe on before they went downstairs, but she still felt exposed, sitting on the counter without a bra. Duke had made her feel comfortable, though.
He caressed, stroked, kissed, and occasionally fondled, but it was caring with an undertone of sex. He wasn’t trying to get in her pants, but Gen thought some of his touches were more intimate than sex. He handled her as if he’d claimed her, as if he had a right to, and she couldn’t find the motivation to correct his thinking.
She had to work her way around the story, which she could have told him in a few sentences, but needed him to understand her motivations.
When she finished her twenty minute story, he looked at her with a grin and summed it up. “So, you found out another Realtor was working with the bank to fast-track foreclosures on the easiest to sell property, you hired a hacker to find out what properties the bank had in the pipeline, close to being able to foreclose on, and you went in and worked deals with the homeowners for you to either list the property and sell it fast, or for you to buy it from them and then sell it, in which case you split the profits with them? And when the Realtor and banker approached you and threatened you, the CEO of the bank received documentation showing what they’d been doing, but in a way that kept you out of it?”
“Yeah. Since I got the info from the hacker and could approach the homeowners before the bank started the process of foreclosure, before there was an official paper trail, no one could tie me into what they were doing.”
“You considered how to do this and keep yourself out of trouble, and how to cover your ass should they figure you out? You planned it all from the start?”
She nodded, and he pulled the pan off the eye as he threw his head back and laughed, and then leaned forward and kept laughing. When he finally stopped and went back to cooking, she said, “It’s not a funny story, Duke.”
He cut his eyes to her and said, “One of the biggest issues local law enforcement has with us is what they call vigilante justice. The area around our compound is clean, with no drugs because we beat the hell out of any drug dealers in our territory, take all their cash, destroy any drugs they have on them, and give them a message to take back to their organization. You may not have used your fists, but that was vigilante justice. You followed your own moral code, and you helped people who needed help. Doesn’t matter you found a way to make a profit, because those homeowners were way better off with you looking out for them than they would’ve been on their own.”
He flipped a pancake and added, “Something tells me, you and Brain strategizing together might be downright scary. He thinks in numbers and legal terms, and he’s also a hacker, so if you need any more hacking in the future, bring it to us, yeah? Want to make sure you stay safe.”