Just Between Us (The Kings)

“So who are we creeping on?”

I startled and screamed in a high-pitched decibel that had no right exiting my body.

Then she screamed.

I locked eyes with Luna Gray, the piercer at my tattoo shop, and we both dissolved into fits of laughter.

I planted my hand across my chest as it heaved. “Shit. You scared me.”

Luna grinned and flipped a lock of bleached, white-blond hair over her shoulder. “You scream like a girl.” The diamond studs that served as her dimples winked under the fluorescent lighting of my tattoo parlor. “If you stop being the town Peeping Tom, I wouldn’t have to scare you.”

I frowned. “I’m not being a Peeping Tom. I’m observing.” I gestured toward the large storefront window with my chin. It was a bit too early for King Tattoo to be open, but my small coastal town of Outtatowner, Michigan, was already bustling with energy.

Shop owners were placing A-frame boards outside each storefront, and signs were turned to Open while tourists were lining up at the Sugar Bowl to get hot coffee and Western Michigan’s best pastries. Getting a tattoo at 7:00 a.m. was a rarity, so I typically used the quiet mornings to catch up on administrative work, deep clean, or sketch new designs.

But that morning I had a date with chaos.

Parked across the street on Main was Beckett Miller’s sleek new black Range Rover.

I noted the hue of Luna’s brown eyes was unnervingly dark given her pale complexion. Her skeptical gaze called my attention to Beckett’s car. I watched my employee as she scanned the streets of our small town.

Luna had been working with me for over a year now and had become an honorary little sister of sorts. On an unusually quiet Saturday night last year, Luna had come into the shop requesting a tattoo revision. She was heavily inked, so I wasn’t surprised when it seemed as though she’d be adding to her artwork. What shocked me was when she went into my booth, hiked up her skirt, and showed me her ass without an ounce of shame.

Scrawled in a Gothic font were the words Drake’s bitch. From a strictly artistic perspective, the line work was okay. The font was only an outline with some technically strong shading at the base. I’d learned early on there were all kinds of people in the world, and I never judged what people chose to tattoo on their bodies, so I didn’t give the choice of phrase a second thought.

Hell, I was covered from neck to knuckles and down my thighs with a variety of styles. Half of the tattoos were from artist friends I knew and trusted, and the other half were designs for which I used myself to practice.

Tattoos that people eventually regretted were common, though I didn’t have any of those myself.

At the time, Luna had flashed her ass and looked at me over her shoulder. “So can you fix it?”

In my rolling chair I had pulled myself closer to get a better look. “Covered?” I had asked, assuming she’d want a design to hide the entire thing.

A hearty laugh had burst from her throat. “No. I was hoping you could find a way to stick a little a in between the words.”

I had lowered her skirt and looked at her. “You want it to read Drake’s a bitch?”

Her grin had carried an evil glint. “Damn right.”

I had scoffed but gotten to work. It had been only after we’d finished up that she’d revealed her ex-boyfriend was also a tattoo artist and had inked the phrase without her consent. I had been fucking livid for her and had happily told her the simple revision was on the house.

As I looked at her now, she was sporting significantly more tackle and ink than the day we met. Her arms were nearly as covered as mine, and each ear was lined in silver hoops and diamond studs.

After the night I fixed her tattoo, she’d asked to stick around. I’d needed help answering phones, greeting customers as they came in, and managing my other artists’ schedules, so it all worked out in the end.

Come to think of it, I don’t recall if I ever actually hired her.

“So what are we waiting for?” Luna whispered.

I peered over her shoulder at the car. “Just delivering Beckett a little good morning breakfast.”

Luna’s eyebrows bunched in question.

“I paid some kids to egg his windshield. When he gets in and turns on the wipers, the egg smears all over. That shit is impossible to get off.” A childish giggle tickled the back of my throat.

“Is that why there are two kids hiding in the alley over there?” Luna pointed to the preteen boys I’d paid two hundred bucks to execute the prank.

I lifted a shoulder. “It’s a two-part plan.”

Luna sighed and shook her head. “I thought the Sullivan-King rivalry was all but dead?”

I straightened. “First of all, it’s the King-Sullivan rivalry.” I shrugged. “Just because my sister married Duke Sullivan doesn’t mean we can’t still have a little fun.”

Luna’s lips pursed. She knew my sister Sylvie and how I’d likely get an ass-chewing once she found out, but I didn’t care. At least not enough to stop me.

“Besides,” I continued, “Beckett Miller isn’t technically a Sullivan.” I stood, proudly crossing my arms and smiling to myself. Skirting the rules was an innate talent I prided myself on.

“He married Kate Sullivan. It counts,” Luna argued as we watched and waited.

I grumbled but let it go. I fucking hated it when my sisters were pissed at me, but the look on Beckett’s face when the prank was executed would definitely be worth it.

I checked my watch and felt the familiar buzz of impatience. Finding his car parked on Main Street was a stroke of luck, but he should have gotten his day started already.

“So it is true . . . ,” Luna said, and I glanced at her as she continued: “Men equate the size of their cars with the size of their dicks.” Her eyes scraped down my front and back up before she lifted a brow. “That lift kit get installed on your truck yet?”

“Fuck off.” I gestured toward myself. “I’m a tall guy.”

“Mm-hmm.” Luna rolled her shoulders and cracked her neck. “Funny . . . I don’t remember Beckett still having Illinois license plates.”

My body went rigid.

My eyes flicked down to the back bumper of the black Range Rover, confirming the car’s plates were, in fact, from Illinois. Beckett had lived in Outtatowner long enough to have registered his car with the state of Michigan.

Shit.

I watched with wide-eyed horror as a woman in heels, with impossibly long legs, approached the Range Rover. She paused by the vehicle, something catching her eye.

My gaze soaked up her long, smooth legs. She was wearing tall, shiny black heels and a matching skirt that hugged the luscious flare of her hips. Her cream blouse was loose and tucked into the high waist of her tight knee-length skirt.

Inky-black hair tumbled down her back in delicate waves. I was struck by how out of place her beauty was. Her look seemed better suited for an office or courtroom than the streets of our sleepy town as the morning yawned awake.

The woman stopped by the hood of her car, looking at what I assumed were the broken eggshells. Her dark eyebrows lowered as she lifted a shell with two fingers to examine it. With a frown, she flicked the egg to the ground and stomped it under her high heel.

“Oh . . . ,” Luna remarked, stifling a laugh. “You fucked up.”

Luna and I watched in slow-motion horror as the young boys sneaked out of their hiding place. To my horror, even though the young boys had been given explicit instructions to execute the harmless prank on Beckett, they forged ahead. I cringed as, from across the roadway, we could hear them shout, “Have some milk with those eggs!”

Without a second thought, the boys each tossed an opened carton of milk—which I had supplied from the general store, by the way—onto her chest.

I groaned. She gasped. They ran.

Several tourists stopped, their eyes round in stunned horror, fingertips pressed to their lips.

Okay, this was one hundred percent too far.

The errant thought danced across my conscience. It was supposed to be harmless. Funny. I wanted to dampen Beckett’s day and have a good laugh about it, not assault a gorgeous, unsuspecting stranger.

I’d really stepped in it this time. Guilt racked me and my stomach roiled.

From the Sugar Bowl next door to us, my sister Sylvie burst through the glass door with a white towel in her hand. She crossed the street with quick steps and immediately went to work helping the woman clean up. Tourists folded around them as my sister and the mystery woman fussed to get her shirt dry.

The woman’s creamy blouse was plastered to her chest, revealing the perfect shape of her tits and what appeared to be a colored bra beneath the now-soaked fabric. Sylvie eventually handed over her dish towel, and the woman patted her face dry.

The mystery woman’s gaze sliced through the crowd, her expression set on deadly revenge.

She. Was. Pissed.

In the chaos, I couldn’t make out my sister’s frantic words, but her eyes flashed with anger as her head whipped around, searching. Sylvie was smart enough to know one of her idiot brothers was likely behind the prank gone awry.

It didn’t take long for her death stare to pin me into place through my storefront window.

Feeling like a child, my feet rooted to the ground. My lips pressed together, and I offered a half-hearted, sheepish salute through the window.

With a sigh, I stepped toward the door, wholly unprepared but willing to face the angry women.

“No.” Luna stopped me. “I’ll go. You have an artist interview in ten minutes.” She pulled a King Tattoo T-shirt from the merchandise shelf and shook her head at me before rolling her eyes. “Men.”

I swallowed hard. I probably should have sucked it up, admitted that the prank was for Beckett and that I’d fucked up. I always seemed to get the blame, even if I was innocent.

Though, let’s be real, I was rarely innocent.

It would be unlikely Sylvie would want to hear my side of the story, so instead I opted to find solace in my work. Diving into new designs would help me forget that I’d managed to make things impossibly worse by forgetting to take stock of my surroundings before jumping into action . . . again.