Shelly Laurenston: The Mane Event

He came around the corner, slowly moving into the secretary’s office. One more door and he’d reach Missy’s office or, as he liked to call it, “Destination: Hell.” He could hear his sister dressing down someone behind the closed office door and he didn’t envy the man, but he had something much more important right in front of him. He had her.

She stood in front of the window overlooking Columbus Circle with her back to him. She didn’t seem moved at all by the yelling coming from Missy’s office. She radiated calm. Her energy centered. Her arms folded in front of her chest. Not nearly as tall as the women in his family, she stood no more than five foot eight or so. But curvy. Ripe. A brick house. She’d filled out in all the right places. She’d cut her auburn hair so it brushed thick against the collar of her leather jacket. As he glanced down the length of her sumptuous body, he could see the woman armed herself better than most SEALs. A gun holster bulged large behind her leather jacket, and a smaller ankle holster on her right leg under her black slacks. It also looked like her left leg sported a holster with a small blade, which he seriously doubted any other cop in the state would consider legal.

Her phone vibrated against her hip. She easily slipped the small device out of its holster, glanced at the caller ID, and answered. At that point, he almost dropped to his knees and crawled to her. That voice. That goddamn, fucking voice. Like ten miles of bad road in the hot desert, but she’d somehow tamed that brutal Bronx accent. A bit of a disappointment, though. He loved that accent on her. She used to wear it like an old leather jacket. Now she kept it muted, controlled. Kind of like her. He smiled and wondered what it would take to get back that Bronx girl he knew and still loved. Thankfully, though, there was nothing she could do about that voice. He closed his eyes for a brief moment and let her voice roll over him like a rough wave.

“I thought you’d never call me back. You won’t believe where I am.” She laughed and his balls tightened. “Missy Llewellyn’s house…no, I’m not lying. How could I make that up?”

She scratched her long neck. The desire to lick the same spot nearly strangling him. “Jesus Christ, don’t you read the papers? One of her people was killed in Battery Park. A couple of joggers found him. What? Nah. So, any message you want me to give her?” Her body began to shake as she stifled a laugh. “Well, I don’t think I’ll give her that message. Geez. And you said I hold a grudge.”

After a few more moments, her body stiffened. “No. I can’t. I’m working, that’s why. Yes. Even on Christmas day. Besides, I hate Christmas. I have moral issues with celebrating it.” He frowned to keep from laughing. She had “moral issues with” celebrating Christmas? The crap she could come up with still amazed him.

“Look, I gotta go. No, I’m not arguing about this.” She closed the phone and slipped it back into its holster.

Dear God, the woman was still beautiful. After all these years. All this time. And he bet he could have her pants off and be inside her in…he glanced at his watch. Thirty seconds. Yeah. That would work.

Desiree MacDermot stared out the windows of the secretary’s office and waited. Well, waited and fumed. Leave it to her oldest sister to ruin her moment in the sun. Here she stood in their archenemy’s house, moments away from throwing the rich heifer’s ass in the back of a squad car, and what does her sister say? “Are you coming to Mom and Dad’s for Christmas dinner?”

Why of course I am. I also plan to remove skin from the most sensitive parts of my body and rub salt into the open wounds.

Because isn’t that what the holidays are all about—letting your family make you wish you were an orphan?

Dez shook off her sister’s clear attempt to make her miserable. How could she be miserable when she had grand plans of making Missy Llewellyn cry? Missy, who seemed to love nothing more than to make the MacDermot sisters’ lives hell. Apparently, it wasn’t enough that all three of them had earned the right to be at the exclusive Cathedral School of Manhattan by earning top-level scholarships. Or that their parents worked damn hard to get their daughters the best they could afford. No, to Missy and the other Llewellyn sisters, none of that meant shit. They only cared about one thing—the fact the MacDermots were poor, Puerto Rican–Irish girls from the Bronx. And they wanted to make sure they never forgot it.

Maybe God would decide to smile down on her and she’d be able to piss off Missy so much the woman would do something stupid. Oh, if Missy would only hit her. Then Dez could handcuff the bitch and dump her butt in a holding cell for a few hours. Maybe the hookers would make her cry. Like she made Dez cry all those years ago on that muggy late-August day.

“You’ll never be good enough for him.”

That’s what they told her as all four sisters circled her like a pack of wolves. She never forgot those brutal words, but she never let them hold her back either. Far from it. She probably should thank Missy. Without her inherently evil nature, Dez may not have had the guts to become a cop. She decided then and there to prove Missy Llewellyn wrong, and as far as she could tell, she had. Dez realized now these people, with all their money and connections, weren’t nearly good enough for her.

Desperately fighting the smile that threatened to spread across her entire face, she suddenly realized all her fantasies seemed to be coming true at one time. The thought of putting Missy in a squad car actually made her nipples hard.

Nope. This was quietly turning into the best day ever. Like someone hit her in the head with her Christmas gift five days early. It almost brought a tear of happiness to her eye. Nothing would ever beat this. Absolutely nothing.

“So where the hell have you been?”

Dez shuddered. Man, that voice sounded familiar. She only knew of one person with a voice like that. A freaky little kid who had to be the smallest fourteen-year-old she’d ever remembered seeing with the lowest voice she’d ever heard. She spun on her heel…only to be faced with a god, if she did say so herself. Big. Like some kind of beautiful linebacker. A shaved head with a serious five o’clock shadow issue, and gold-colored eyes. Eyes that, at the moment, were staring at her like a slab of prime rib. No. This couldn’t be Mace Llewellyn. Her heart dropped. True, this man was pretty, but she saw pretty every day. The Mace she remembered wasn’t pretty, but he always knew how to make her smile. She learned over the years that was a hell of a lot more important than looks.

“Well…answer me.”

Uh-oh. Nutcase alert. How come all the good-looking ones were insane? “I’m…uh…sorry. Do I know you?”

He crossed big arms over a big chest and smirked at her. “Take a minute. Let it come to you.”

She blinked and tried to remember all the exits out of the room in case the gorgeous nutcase went postal.

“Still waiting.”

It hit her. Like a slap to the forehead. But…no. It couldn’t be. It wasn’t humanly possible. But that superior tone. That haughty expression. That damn smirk. That killer voice that had deliciously matured with age. All together, they really could only belong to one person. The one person she’d been waiting more than twenty years to see again.

What happened to the boy she remembered? Apparently, this…this… man replaced him. Oh, and what a man!

But no matter how different he looked, she still knew. Maybe those freaky gold eyes gave him away. Or those gorgeous full lips that, even at fourteen, she hadn’t been immune to.