House of Payne: Styx Read online

  “I choose to do this job, Wesley,” Sydney said, while the effort to rein her anger in balled her hands into fists. “That alone relieves you of any and all responsibility regarding my welfare, do you understand? It’s my choice.”

  Wesley sighed and flapped a helpless hand her way. “It’s just that you’re so tiny.”

  Sydney hissed furiously. “Excuse me?”

  “What the hell, Wesley,” Jada put in, looking appalled. “She’s no smaller now than she was when you hired her for the job. What does her height have to do with anything?”

  “What happened yesterday has opened up my eyes to the fact that Sydney’s not…well, intimidating. If I were one of the bad guys you’re so good at nabbing around here,” he went on, turning his attention back to Sydney, “I would probably think twice about going after a big, burly person. But I wouldn’t hesitate in trying to curb-stomp you into submission. No one is better at your job than you, but let’s face facts. You’re the only secret shopper who’s been attacked like this, and the only reason I can think of is because, well… you don’t cut the most intimidating figure.”

  “You can’t say that,” Jada piped up before Sydney could fight her way through the rage to be coherent. “That right there was a sexist remark.”

  “Not sexist,” Wesley interjected, clearly horrified. “I said big, burly person. Like you, Jada. You’re not tiny at all.”

  “Okay, that’s enough.” Sydney hopped out her chair before her friend could zip across the small office to snap Wesley like a toothpick. “Wesley, I’m not quitting my job. If you want me out, you’re just going to have to fire me. But understand this—I will fight you every step of the way, even bringing a lawsuit which will probably lose you your job. I’d hate to do it,” she added fairly, “but I’d do it in a heartbeat. This is my choice to work this job, and no one is going to muscle me out of it. Not crazy thugs on I-90, and not you.”

  Wesley eyed her for a long moment over the rim of his glasses. “Really? This is the hill you want to die on?”

  “Bad choice of words, considering what I went through yesterday, but yes. No one pushes me around and gets away with it. Don’t ever doubt me on that.”

  He chewed on that for several seconds before giving a shrug. “Okay, if that’s how you want to play it, then I wash my hands of the whole thing. Whatever happens, happens. Just remember, I’ll be more than happy to find another position for you that’s less, uh, life-threatening, should anything else happen. There’s no shame in being scared into making a career change.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.” The only scary thing she had looming on her horizon now was Sunday dinner with Styx’s family. Somehow, she was going to have to find a way to convince them all that she and Styx—the two most mismatched people on earth—had hooked up.

  Clearly, it was going to be the performance of a lifetime.

  Chapter Six

  I’m outside.

  A battalion of butterflies launched in Sydney’s stomach the moment she read the text. Styx was right outside, as promised, and all at once the only thing she wanted was to see him again.

  “I’m just wrapping things up.” Quickly she thumbed the screen while shutting her locker with her foot. “See you in less than five. Time me.”

  A few seconds later, the emojis of a stopwatch and a runner showed up.

  Wow, was all she could think. Styx Hardwick was gorgeous, protective, had a killer job, and he spoke fluent emoji. If there was a place where she could have built her idea of the perfect man—like a Build-A-Bear Workshop, but for men—she couldn’t have done any better than the man waiting outside for her.

  “My ride’s here,” Sydney announced to Jada, who sat in front of her locker in the employee lounge. “Hopefully we’ll make it to my place in one piece. Are you on tomorrow morning?”

  “That’s the plan. Who’d you get to pick you up? Family? Friends?”

  “Um… a friend.” It wasn’t a lie, exactly. She and Styx were friendly.

  Jada’s brows went up. “A friend?”

  “Yep. The same friend who dropped me off this morning.”

  “Dropped you off late.”

  “We were having coffee.” When she realized how lame that sounded, she waved her phone at Jada. “I have to go. He’s waiting.”

  “He? I knew it.” With a surprisingly girlish giggle, her friend bounced off the bench, one shoe on her foot and one shoe in her hand. “You’ve been keeping secrets, little girl. Tell mama everything in thirty seconds or less. Ready? Go.”

  “I bumped into him while he was collecting his mail. His identical twin brother is the cop who’s investigating the road-rage thing I went through yesterday. He’s gorgeous and perfect in every way, and I have no idea what I’m doing.” She sucked in a deep breath and tried to find calm. “That was under thirty seconds, right?”

  “Wow.” A wide smile stretched across Jada’s face a moment before she practically tackle-hugged her. “No one knows what they’re doing when it comes to stuff like this, so don’t overthink every little thing, okay? Just relax and go with the flow. Enjoy the ride and see where it takes you.”

  “Right now that ride is taking me back to my place, so I’d better hustle. I don’t want to keep him waiting.” Sydney waved her farewells before zooming her way to the rear parking lot where Styx had dropped her off earlier. To her surprise, Wesley was waiting at the door, his monogrammed windbreaker already on and car keys in hand.

  “Thought I’d stick around to see if you needed a ride,” her boss offered with his usual no-teeth smile. It was like he’d never learned how to smile properly. Since Sydney suspected he’d been picked on most of his life, she doubted he’d ever had that much to smile about. “It’s not too far out of my way, and it’ll give us a nice chance to talk some more.”

  Ugh. “That’s very chivalrous of you, Wesley, but my ride is already here.”

  “Then I’ll walk you out. From now on, you get an escort the moment you’re outside of these walls.”

  She bit her lip to stop from commenting that he was about as intimidating as she was. “Thank you.”

  Sydney knew the exact moment Wesley spotted Styx leaning against his Corvette. The sun was setting, but there was still ample light for them to see Styx in all his glory, from his sleeved-out, muscle-sculpted arms, fitted T-shirt clinging to his torso like an avid lover, and long, lanky body that radiated a delicious kind of danger that rivaled the heat of the setting sun.

  Maybe Wesley didn’t feel that last part, but Sydney sure as hell did.

  “It’s okay.” Well aware that her boss had slowed down to a near-crawl at the sight of Styx leaning against his car, she patted her boss’s arm. “He’s with me.”

  “He’s your ride?”

  The disbelief in her boss’s tone set her teeth on edge. Was it really so impossible to believe? “Yes. Thank you for the escort, Wesley. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Her boss didn’t answer. He was too intent on staring at Styx.

  For his part, Styx pushed away from the car the moment he spotted her and closed in on them like a heat-seeking missile. That was when she discovered that simply watching a man walk could give a woman a full-on hot flash.

  Especially if that man was walking her way.

  “Hey, Syd.” In one smooth motion, Styx took her hand in his and pulled her gently from Wesley’s side to his. “You good?”

  “I’m good.” She hesitated, mainly because she didn’t know what the protocol was when she was pretending to be his girlfriend for the sake of his family, yet none of his family was anywhere to be seen. “So, uh, you’ll be happy to hear it was a thoroughly boring day. Only a couple shoplifters of the scared, I-dare-you-to-do-it teenage variety. Hopefully they’ve been scared so straight they’re destined to be this city’s future upstanding pillars of the community. I didn’t unearth one single, solitary theft ring, so we should be good to go.”

  “Glad you had a good day, but I’m not about to let my guard up.�
�� His gaze shifted to Wesley, his hand out. “Styx Hardwick. Thanks for getting Syd safely out to me, man. Much appreciated.”

  “Of course.” Her boss sounded like he’d swallowed a tennis ball as he tentatively shook hands. “Wesley W. Newburg. After what happened yesterday, I’m not convinced this job is safe for Sydney, so she’ll have an escort every day from this point on.”

  “She won’t need one tomorrow, because she’s not going to be here.”

  Sydney snapped her head around to gape at him. “I’m not?”

  He lifted a shoulder. “Come to find out, my work schedule tomorrow sucks. I can’t get you here or pick you up, and until you’re back behind the wheel yourself, I’m the only one who drives you.”

  “Don’t worry about it, I can take an Uber, or the L, now that I think—”

  “You’re not hearing me, Syd.” She was stunned when he turned her to face him fully, his arms coming around her so that she had no choice but to put her hands at his lean waist. “You don’t go anywhere without me. Barring that, you don’t go anywhere without a ride you can control yourself at a moment’s notice. You don’t get into a car with a driver you don’t know. You don’t wait all by yourself on a train platform where any assclown can get to you. From now until whenever Trey and his people get a bead on whoever fucked with you, that’s how it’s going to be. So Sydney won’t be in tomorrow,” he added, looking back at Wesley as if daring the other man to contradict him. “She shouldn’t have come in today, but she didn’t want to let you down. She’s like that.”

  “Yes she is,” Wesley said faintly, staring at them while Sydney tried not to squirm awkwardly in Styx’s arms. “Of course she should take some time off. Take the whole weekend, Sydney, and take that time to think things over. You don’t have to be back to work until Wednesday, all right? We can talk more then.”

  “What is it that you and your boss need to talk over?” Styx wanted to know once they were on the road and headed toward Old Town.

  “That I’m too delicate and useless to do my job, when in reality I’m the most successful undercover presence that company has ever had.” She tried to sound pissy about it—and she was—but she was distracted by the lingering sensation of Styx’s arms around her. “I understand I'm not intimidating to look at. Seriously, I get it. But that’s the actual point of having me out there on the floor in the first place. I don’t call attention to myself. I’m observant enough to spot a coordinated theft, I’m sharp enough to outsmart it, and I’m small enough to be invisible to everyone involved until it’s too late for them to escape. Put all that together, and you’ve got the perfect secret shopper, and that’s what my boss isn’t taking into account. I flat-out dared him to fire me, and I meant it, too. I’m not going to be scared off this job, or anything else that comes along in life. If I ever leave that position, it’ll be because I damn well want to.”

  “And I thought I was stubborn.” Slowing for a red light, he shot her a look that was so full of admiration she felt her face—and other parts of her—heat up. “I’ve got nothing on you, babe.”

  It was crazy, how much she loved the approval in his tone. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

  “’Course I do. That’s what makes you so damn interesting.”

  Since she didn’t know whether to squeal because he thought she was interesting, or die a little because he thought she was crazy, she decided to change subjects. “I don’t remember when we decided you were going to be my personal chauffeur until I get a car.”

  “Oh, yeah. That.” He seemed spectacularly unconcerned as the light turned green and he continued on with the flow of traffic. “It was a discussion I had in my head. Ultimately I agreed with myself that it was the best thing to do, so that’s pretty much how that happened. Any ETA on your car?”

  Holy crap. “Next time, I’d like the opportunity to be clued in on any other in-your-head conversations when it concerns me. And let’s not talk about my poor, departed Pokey. She was a good and faithful friend, and with her passing I now have to go through the fourth ring of hell, also known as car shopping.”

  “So your insurance company decided she was a total loss?”

  “Yep. The guy I spoke with told me he was shocked I was able to drive it as well as I did with all the damage that was done to the rear axle.”

  “Whoever was behind the wheel of the car that hit you wasn’t fucking around. When I saw how much the back was smashed in, I knew it was going to be a big fix.”

  “Bigger than Pokey was worth, apparently. As soon as my insurance pays out for a replacement vehicle, I’m just going to have to bite the proverbial bullet and hit the car lots. Personally, I’d rather have root canal.”

  “Car-shopping isn’t that bad. I’ll go with you.”

  “You will?” She shot him a quick look and saw that he was perfectly serious. Wow. Maybe chivalry wasn’t dead. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I told you, I love to hunt for just the right car. And besides, it’s not a bad thing, us spending time together. How else are we supposed to get to know each other?”

  Oh. “Right, the pretend boyfriend-girlfriend thing.”

  “If it makes you feel better, drop the word pretend and just roll with it.”

  “No, I’m fine with it.” And if she didn’t keep that word—pretend—at the forefront of her mind, she might lose all perspective, along with her heart and her sanity. “Speaking of getting to know each other, I’ve got a ton of questions for you that I’ve been compiling into a list. Actually, it’s becoming more of a questionnaire.”

  His snort was spectacular. “A what?”

  “A questionnaire.” Rummaging through her purse, she dragged out her phone and pulled up the notepad app. “These are easy questions, I promise. Ready?”

  “Holy shit, a questionnaire.” He darted a glance at her phone and gave a half-assed attempt at stifling a laugh. “Okay, shoot.”

  How lovely that he found her amusing. “What’s your favorite color?”

  “Can’t you tell? Orange.”

  Duh. The car should have been a dead giveaway. “Were you born in Chicago?”

  “Yep.”

  “Did you do all your schooling here?”

  “Yep.”

  “I know your mother pulled a Jedi mind trick to get you to graduate high school, so I can check that one off. Did you go to college?”

  “Two years at Truman, with a degree in Visual Arts.”

  Aw. His mother must have cried tears of joy. “You’re a tattoo artist at House Of Payne. They’re pretty famous, so was it difficult getting in with them?”

  He lifted a shoulder. “Yes and no. Payne approached me at an ink expo here in Chicago. I was working at another studio as a cover-up artist—I create art that covers up shitty tattoos,” he explained when she opened her mouth. “I’d invented a cover-up technique of digitally combining the old tattoo artwork with the proposed new artwork. I’d just wrapped up a workshop on how to do this new technique when Sebastian Payne approached me with a job offer. Or, to put it more accurately, an audition offer.”

  She blinked. “I didn’t think auditions worked that way.”

  A low chuckle rolled from him as he zipped through rush-hour traffic. “Payne’s very particular about who he lets into the House. He’s literally handpicked every single one of his tattooists. When he finds a unique talent, he puts us to the test. If we can take his bullshit, we’re in. Most peeps can’t handle the pressure of performing for Payne, so that means they could never handle the pressure of say, tattooing the Princess of Monaco, or the number-one tennis player in the world, or some super-spoiled international rock star. Those are the kind of people who walk through House Of Payne’s doors, and Payne knows it. That’s why he sets up nerve-racking auditions, to see if the artists who’ve caught his interest will crack under pressure.”

  “I take it you didn’t crack?”

  “Nope.” Another chuckle escaped him. “What I did was tell him to go fuck himself. I
was fucking amazing, and I had no problem letting him know it. If he thought I needed to audition while clearly being the magnificent artist I am, he could suck it. Then he was like, so you’re afraid? Next thing I know, I’m auditioning for the bastard.”

  “How fiendishly manipulative of him.” She couldn’t help but laugh along with him. “What was the audition?”

  “Payne had a tat just above his knee—something he did to himself while he was in his teens.”

  “Yikes.”

  “Yeah. Nobody starts out as a genius tattooist, Syd,” he added, glancing at her. “That’s what Payne is now—a genius tattooist, as well as a killer businessman. Thing is, you’ve got to put in a helluva lot of practice to get to that level, and Payne obviously practiced on himself a time or two before he got good.”

  “In other words, it was a mess?”

  “It was a fucking mess. It took three sessions to make it the way I wanted it, but in the end it was this beautiful Tree of Life concept, with a graceful network of roots going down over the kneecap to form the root ball. By the end of the second session, I had a job at House Of Payne, and the rest is history.”

  “I think they’re lucky to have you.” With a smile, she looked back down to her phone and tried to refocus. “What was the name of your first childhood pet?”

  “What?” A laugh burst out of him, and again he glanced at her. “You’re not going to ask me what the airspeed velocity of a laden sparrow is, are you?”

  “Ah, so you’re a Monty Python fan. Good, so am I. That was, uh…” Furiously she scrolled, thumbing her screen. “Ah, here it is. The Python question was part of the arts and entertainment section of my list. That was when I got into specific likes and dislikes on TV, movies and podcasts. Speaking of, what’s your view on TED talks?”

  “Syd, I’m not answering questions about childhood pets and TED talks.”

  By degrees, her smile trickled away. “But… Sorry, I don't understand. Aren’t we supposed to get to know each other?”