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“We need another drink for this.”
The echoed words bounced through Gracen’s aching head as her eyes peeled open to the darkness of a strange space. The second she was awake, blinking away the dream that was replaying the events of the night before, she was able to hear the real reason that she’d been pulled from a rum-soaked slumber. It was then that Gracen knew she had screwed up.
Just a little.
She remembered exactly how she found herself snuggled in a quilt with Malachi on a ratty couch that had seen better days, and how she’d ended the late hours of the morning burying fits of alcohol-induced giggles into Malachi’s muscled chest. The rum hadn’t been a bad idea after Gracen finally convinced Malachi to climb inside the back of his friend’s car to use one of the only things that looked brand new inside the shell of a car other than the leather-wrapped steering wheel. He all out refused to tell her how much the two items, taken from a wreck at a junkyard down the highway, cost his friend.
In the end, it wasn’t that important when the only thing they had planned for the mint condition seat would do nothing to help the value. At least, they put Malachi’s shirt down. She’d let him get her totally naked for that; the bench seat deserved a proper christening, even if it wasn’t hers to do.
Who would tell?
She could still feel the red leather of the back seat acting as a cushion for her knees as the memory of Malachi’s intent gaze slammed back into Gracen’s head while she replayed through the night before and what lead her to this moment.
All things considered, she should have said no to a drink with forty-proof liquor when she was a notorious lightweight, but rum was her weakness. Blame it on the fact her Mimi—the grandmother who took Gracen in—loved a splash or more of rum in her tea at night, and it was the only available liquor readily available just a locked cabinet away for her rebellious teenaged self.
Nearly a half hour or more since her last drink, she figured the rum and coke wouldn’t be that bad. It took half the glass, and easy conversation that they took inside the apartment while they cleaned up, for her to realize how hard the liquor hit.
And when it did?
Whoa.
“My roommate hears everything,” a slightly buzzed Gracen had told Malachi the night before. It was just her luck that she also happened to be a loud, clumsy drunk. As soon as the liquor hit, she tended to lose things as much as she became acquainted with walls and furniture. Her sense of coordination had never proved great when she got tipsy.
His friend whose name was on the apartment lease wouldn’t be home until the next night, so he offered the couch, if she could stand to sleep with a partner. The liquor, and maybe the man making the offer, had been able to make it hard on Gracen to say no.
Their sweat-slicked skin peeled apart while she breathed in the unmoving air inside the apartment, and cold air rushed inside their warm cocoon when she sat up on the couch at the sound of her alarm ringing somewhere in front of Gracen. The open concept of the layout meant she sat up to face a small flatscreen sitting on a handmade wooden TV stand, and the island where she’d sat her hoodie and phone the night before. Her sudden movement earned her a grunt from the warm, hard body moving at her back.
Gracen blinked a couple more times.
Maybe she hadn’t been all the way awake until then because her vision cleared to say the curtains behind the couch weren’t thick enough to keep the morning light out entirely. The tiny apartment wasn’t as dark as she first thought it was.
“Crap,” she mumbled.
“Hey, hey,” came the sleepy call grumbled against her lower back.
She could feel every scratch of his unshaven jaw moving against the dimples he’d praised and kissed as he’d stripped her clothes one piece at a time.
It was hard to stay in the present when her mind would much rather drift back to the night before when she’d dared to take a few hours to step outside of the very confining box she called her life. Gracen couldn’t mentally afford to be one hundred percent, one hundred percent of the time, but the way she chose to express and release that frustration didn’t have to be fodder for opinion and gossip by the rest of the people in her life.
It would be kind of tough to hide a night like she just had when she was already so late to wake up on a workday with morning appointments that her phone was beeping with the alarm meant to be a notification for her daily birth control pill—that she took at ten. It wasn’t the same chime-like tune that should have woken her up quite a while ago like it did every other morning.
Long after the Haus should have opened.
Had she accidentally silenced her phone the night before?
It was a possibility. The only push notification her phone allowed in sleep mode was her damn birth control because that was a no-excuse task on the daily. For obvious reasons, even if she wasn’t having regular sex.
Last night proved why consistency mattered. Their second condom split after Malachi had finished. The couch hadn’t been used to simply sleep after the two snuggled in under the blanket and their quiet conversation around her bouts of giggles turned into a kiss with sinful intentions. One, and then another. Before Gracen knew it, she was guiding Malachi’s hands between her thighs under the heavy quilt to work her into an orgasm that she could still hear him begging her for in the darkness. His forgotten pile of clothes had been closer—with that fateful rubber.
Fuck.
“Are you going to give me another, angel? Come on, I want it.”
Gracen tried to blink away Malachi’s words. Now wasn’t the time, and she needed to focus on what should be important and where she should be.
She could smell him all around her.
Because he was still there. It aided the memory fighting to keep her happy and sleepy, wrapped in warmth and the smell of sex with Malachi on a couch, in an apartment that did not belong to her. This was not where she should wake up on a Monday morning.
More than Gracen could handle.
“Where you goin’?” he sleepily asked while his fingertips glided along Gracen’s bare thigh still covered with the quilt.
God.
She wanted him to keep touching her. To do what he had last night. Again and again. Desperately because maybe then she wouldn’t have to consider showing up to work late, apologizing to clients who showed up to find their stylist MIA, never mind the questions she would have to answer from Delaney and Margot.
Had Delaney been worried?
Called a million times?
Probably.
Shit.
How had Gracen silenced her phone? She couldn’t figure it out, but sitting there with gooseflesh prickled skin while her greatest temptation touched her wasn’t going to get Gracen any closer to fixing what was already fucked up.
“I’m late for work,” was all Gracen managed to stammer.
She studiously ignored the man who eyed her from the couch with one arm slung haphazardly across his face while she raced around the dimly lit room to find all her things. Or rather, what really mattered.
Sure enough, her phone was on silent mode. Correcting the setting after she’d pulled on her yoga shorts and hoodie—fuck the sports bra she couldn’t spot upon an easy survey of the kitchen and living quarters; she didn’t have time to check the bathroom and garage—her phone immediately lit up with every missed call, text, and calendar notification she’d managed to miss over the last several hours.
“Fuck,” she whined under her breath, and stuffed the problem into her pocket where she could pretend like the phone didn’t exist for the moment.
“You good?” came a groggy croak.
Malachi didn’t sound drunk, or hungover. Hell, he’d ended up drinking less than her when he’d not even finished his one glass before hers was entirely gone.
Stupid, she chastised herself.
“I missed a color this morning,” she told him, heading for the door where she had toed her shoes off on a welcome mat just inside the door next to his combat boots.
“Oh?”
She didn’t need to check her calendar to know the appointment she was expected to show up to next, never mind the long-time customer Gracen would need to contact to apologize for her terrible morning.
“Yeah, and something in a half hour,” she muttered at the front door.
“Kay, I guess,” Malachi returned with a smack of his mouth, “but you could have kissed me goodbye.”
Really?
Gracen let out a stressed laugh as she pulled open the door. “Get real. Neither of us need to be kissing anything until we’ve had a shower. I’ve got no time to get ready as it is, and I’m already late, so—”
“I’m calling you later,” he called at her back as she walked out of the apartment. “You want a coffee, or something? I could bring it once I get around here.”
They were definitely doing this together again. His offer said so, no questions asked.
Jesus.
Why’d she shiver?
From head to toe, too.
Damn him.
“You better,” she returned before slamming the door closed.
*
“Are you seriously not going to tell me where you ended up last night? I almost called to report you missing!” Delaney hissed across the salon’s floor.
Squeezing the backrest of the swivel cutting chair at her station for all it was worth, Gracen wished she had taken just five extra minutes to grab something to shove in her face for food. Even if it had only been plain toast and a glass of milk. Anything to put a bit of weight in her terribly empty stomach that was still running on the night before. She never had problems with being faint or feeling nausea unless hunger came into play.
Then, her whole body revolted.
As if her day was trying to prove it could get worse, she was also out of the gum she kept in a drawer at work just to give her something to chew on.
Gracen should have gone home, and stayed the hell in bed.
“I will—” she tried to tell her friend.
Not that Delaney was hearing it.
“You’ve basically ignored me since you walked in the door!” Delaney returned. “Even after I told you the manor called because you didn’t return their message over the weekend, too!”
Slightly louder than before.
Gracen really needed to get in to visit her grandmother at the nursing home in the upper river valley before Mimi drove the staff crazy while they looked after her daily care. Just a few days of no contact with her gram could send Mimi into a panic about her granddaughter’s well-being.
“Everything okay down there?” came the gentle prod—or reminder, depending on how Delaney would see it—from the woman upstairs currently doing a constellation piercing on a client.
“Perfect,” Gracen called back.
All lies.
She didn’t even look great in the reflection of her station’s mirror which showcased how little time she spent on throwing up her hair into a ponytail that air-dried. She spent most of her twenty minutes at the house throwing on an acceptable outfit after taking a five-minute shower that felt like it only scrubbed the surface clean.
Gracen wanted a soak in the bath.
Why did her feet hurt?
Her back, too?
“Stupid couch,” she muttered.
“What couch?” Delaney questioned at Gracen’s back.
Apparently, she hadn’t said that quietly.
“I met up with a friend,” Gracen lied—sort of—easily, “and ended up staying the night. I’m sorry I didn’t call you back, I must have put my phone in silent mode when I was trying to set an extra alarm but I drank a—”
“You drank last night?”
Gracen swung around at the worry that pitched her friend’s voice slightly higher. Delaney stood halfway between her station and Gracen’s with her fists pressed to her hips like a worried mother ready to face a battle with her unruly teenager.
That was not happening.
“It wasn’t even that much,” Gracen said, rolling her eyes. “But I didn’t want to stumble home, wake you up when I figured you were already asleep, and then—”
“I wasn’t asleep. I was up until twelve when I first texted you.”
Yes.
By that time, Gracen was on the couch.
Getting off again with Malachi.
“Wait, a guy? Was the friend a guy?” Delaney asked out of the blue.
Christ.
Was it written on Gracen’s face?
I got fucked?
Her silence answered Delaney’s question who laughed in disbelief and stared at Gracen like she was suddenly seeing a whole new person standing in front of her.
“Who?” her friend asked.
Gracen let out a huff. “What does that even mat—”
“I mean, we’ve lived together since we graduated high school, you’ve only dated one guy, and the last one-night stand you had was so awkward you snuck out when he went to the bath—”
“Okay, okay,” Gracen cut in, waving a hand through the air to shut Delaney up. “We don’t need to make a whole list out of my sex life.”
“What list?” Delaney arched a brow. “Did the second guy even get it in?”
No.
But the one last night sure as hell did.
Gracen met Delaney’s stare, wanting her friend to just drop the conversation until it was a better time. “Listen, we don’t tell each other everything all of the time. I had a fun night, it might happen again, and I will fill you in if I need to. There’s nothing else to tell.”
Delaney blinked.
Twice.
“Are you?”
“What?” Gracen asked.
“Being safe?”
“Delaney, come on.”
“You weren’t home last night, and you won’t even tell me who you were with or where you are, but now I should believe you if you say, or won’t, that you’re safe? I don’t know,” Delaney muttered, turning away to return to her station.
Gracen hated how Delaney did that sometimes. Shut out her side of the conversation by walking away when clearly the two weren’t done.
“Malachi,” Gracen said before she could stop herself. “His name is Malachi; we’re not dating, so no, I’m not telling you more. I was thirty seconds away across the street all night in the apartment behind Checkered’s, Delaney. It’s not a big freaking deal.”
Delaney froze on her trek to the station across from Gracen’s, and then spun around on the spot to face her friend. “Excuse me?”
“Malachi Anders. He’s not been in town long. I met him up at the coffee shop last week. He’s—”
“Alora Beau’s older brother?”
Gracen had not heard Delaney properly.
Surely.
“Doesn’t she only have sisters?”
Sisters that were younger than her. Sisters Gracen had seen in pictures posted in the town’s local newspaper whenever the family had a piece included that focused on them. Sisters that were certainly not an older brother Gracen spent the night with.
Please, no.
“Alora’s mother only had girls with Frankie Beau,” Delaney confirmed, “but she had Alora and Malachi way before she met and married him. He only adopted Alora after they got married, though. I’ve never even met her brother,” her friend finished with a shrug. “He’s like twenty-seven, or something. I think he as quite a bit older than her when their mom married their stepdad. I think I heard someone say he’s not really family value friendly with the church, if you know what I mean.”
Yeah.
Sounded just like Malachi to Gracen.
Did that change things?
Gracen didn’t have time to think about it before the bell over the door chimed to say the appointment she had rushed to catch after waking up late finally arrived. Fifteen minutes after her appointment for a standard wash, cut, and set.
“Sorry, did you get my text?” the social worker asked as the salon’s front door swung closed behind her.
“I did,” Gracen assured.
Callie Smith smiled apologetically as she shed her bag on the one of the chairs next to the windows and pulled her long black hair out of the tight bun at the nape of her neck. “I just need something easy—wake up, wash, and go. It doesn’t have to be fancy.”
“We’re talking more about ...” Delaney wagged a finger at Gracen, adding, “You know what—later!”
She ignored her friend.
Or tried.
“Have you thought about something short?” Gracen asked her client when Callie finally found her way into the stylist’s chair.
“I just don’t have time,” the woman muttered. “I’m looking at a seventy-file caseload—when the max is supposed to be twelve—and I need to worry less about what my hair is doing in the morning.”
Damn.
“Seventy files, really?” Gracen asked.
That meant seventy kids, high-risk or at cause for concern, for social services to keep a file on. At the very least because a complaint had been made. The worst cases ... well, Gracen didn’t want to even think about that. In their small, rural counties? She couldn’t wrap her mind around it.
Callie only shook her head, her sad, tired gaze meeting Gracen’s in the mirror while her stylist prepped the standard black cape. “I swear I spend more time on the road trying to find these kids sometimes than I do actually sitting and talking with them.”
“You know, we see a lot of kids going in and out of here sometimes. Friends of friends,” Gracen explained. “If you’re trying to find someone specific, we might be able to help.”
The social worker nodded. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
Gracen moved the conversation back to Callie’s desire for a drastic change in appearance—it was always a big move for a woman to go from long locks to a shorter style. All the while, though, Gracen’s mind was on the parking lot in front of the Haus.
Hadn’t a certain someone promised coffee?
So, where was it?
