someone, actually. We’re actually, you know, quite serious. Engaged. We’re engaged.”
It was a lie. It was a great big, disastrous lie and it was going to end poorly for her.
But in that moment, it was worth it just to see the shock on her father’s face at the total ruination of his plan.
Chapter 10
––––––––
“Y ou told them what?” Ram almost dropped his wrench on his head, a great spurt of oil spraying down over his shoulder.
He worked in Buddy’s Mechanic Shop any day that he wasn’t running jobs with the Wrecking Crew.
Most of the guys in the Crew had some sort of day job, usually in manual labor, trucking, or the like. Only a few, like Ace, were a hundred percent illegal, earning all their income from drug deals or gun sales or their protection runs.
When June told him the news, he was underneath her car, trying to strip its innards so that he could start the work on repairs and replacements. Ram might have been a bastard killer, a thief, and a criminal, but he was a man of his word.
It was late in the morning, and though the shop was not empty, the two were relatively alone. On the other side of the shop, another mechanic worked at rotating the tires of an old Chevy.
“I had to tell them something ,” she said. “And they wouldn’t believe I was just dating a guy. They would want me to go out on the date still with Paxton.”
“And so you told them you were engaged?”
Sliding out from underneath her car, his anger began to flare, but with anger came the rest of his passion. And looking at June, there was plenty of passion in him to spread around. She was a beauty, pure and simple, and the long kiss he’d shared with her yesterday had not left him feeling cold.
Quite the opposite. If he ever bothered to jerk off, he would have had plenty of fuel for it yesterday, but Ram had waited. There was too much easy pussy in his life for him to consider jerking off most of the time, and besides, he wanted to save up his desire for June.
Because pretend relationship or not, he was going to fuck her rotten.
She wore a tight pair of pants that looked made for ripping from her body. He wanted to trace the lines of her hips with his tongue. And her blouse, red and loose, had just enough buttons undone so he could see directly down her shirt. He'd always liked being tall—it gave him a great view of lots of girls along his way, and made a lot of girls come after him.
But seeing her sumptuous cleavage, small beads of sweat forming there from the heat outside, made him come close to thanking god for his height.
“They don’t run my life, all right?” She crossed her arms. Her hair was tied up in a pony tail that stretched down to one side, and it bounced angrily. “And besides, think about it. You’ve been telling people I’m your old lady now, right? What happens if one of them sees Paxton and me out together? Word will get back to your people, and then you’re screwed.”
Ram frowned. She was right, though he didn’t like to admit it. Marlowe was a small town, and everybody knew everybody.
It would be a bad scene if some other little shit was out with his “old lady.”
And wasn't that something all by itself—calling this Paxton guy, who he didn't know from Adam, a little shit. But his jealousy was there, it was real; he wanted June for himself, even though it was more and more apparent that he couldn't have her in any way that was real.
The smallness of Marlowe's social circles had begged the question why he didn’t know June. That had bugged him up until the point when she told him yesterday who her family was—the Colts.
Of course they were the Colts. Probably he should have put it together from the second she told him her last name, but he'd been too wrapped up in how gorgeous she was to notice. He didn’t know any of them except as the antagonists of his life. That was the way Howitzer had always wanted it.
The only good cop is a dead cop .
Words he lived