“See?” I chirped, throwing my hand his way. “All good.” The two of them hesitated for a beat before slowly moving through the doorway toward the washers. “Sarah, I really love that top,” I offered, hoping to win a few brownie points with the compliment.
A derisive snort came from Jude’s direction, followed up with a mumbled, “Kiss ass.”
“For Christ’s sake!” I clapped back, unable to help myself. “Were you not hugged enough as a child or something?”
He looked at me with a triumphant grin, and I knew right then that I’d just taken the bait.
Jude Kingsley, the spawn you’d get if Charles Manson and the devil had a baby, had won this round. But I swore right then and there that I would win the next one.
Even if it killed me. Which it very well might.
2
Jude
It was an incredible fall day. The sun was shining and the leaves had turned from deep green to fiery shades of red and yellow. Deciding to take advantage of the crisp, clean air, I’d removed the doors and top from my Jeep so I could feel the mild temps whipping across my face as I drove.
The ride worked wonders to loosen the tension that had built up in my neck and shoulders from my earlier run-in with the pain-in-the-ass woman who lived right below me. She had a gift for driving me insane. It had been that way since day one.
It didn’t take any effort at all to get a read on her the very first time I saw her. Flawless makeup, hair styled to perfection, and nails painted blood red to match her swanky, expensive-as-hell Benz. A Benz that was packed to the brim with boxes. It was clear she was moving into the building, for Christ’s sake, and she still insisted on dolling herself up to haul a bunch of boxes? It was ridiculous.
I didn’t need to be a genius to figure out what kind of woman she was. I knew all too well what women like her were capable of. Then she gave me a smile that she’d probably been using on men most of her life in order to get what she wanted. All for a parking space that had been rightfully mine. And, odds were, it more than likely worked every damn time.
Unfortunately for her, I was immune. I’d seen that very same smile more than I cared to think about from a blood-sucking leech of a woman I’d wasted a significant portion of my life on.
My ex-fiancée was all about looking perfect at all times, having the best things in life, and getting whatever the hell she wanted whenever she wanted it. To say I harbored an instant dislike for the woman who looked like she’d taken a page right out of my ex’s playbook would have been putting it mildly. So fighting a hard-on every time the two of us went head to head was confusing as hell, to say the least.
The woman pissed me off to no end. She knew where all my buttons were and mashed at them incessantly. But every time she shot me a glare or a snarky word, my traitorous dick would twitch behind my fly. As childish as it seemed, I found myself doing shit just to get a rise out of her. I was loath to admit it, but she was a goddamn knockout all the time. However, when she was fighting mad she could take your fucking breath away. Seeing her spitting fire from those gorgeous gray eyes gave me a jolt of pleasure every damn time.
It didn’t help matters that she gave as good as she got. I didn’t have any way to prove she was the one stuffing my mailbox full of kinky porn, but I knew it had to be her, and damn if that wasn’t creative as hell.
The fact that I was physically drawn to a woman I couldn’t stand was a serious mind fuck. I found myself walking around in a perpetually bad mood, and it was all her fault.
Fuck me. Now I was hard again just from thinking about her, and the muscles in my back had, once again, tightened into knots, turning my mood dark on a beautiful day.
I tried to shake it off by the time I turned into the driveway of my grandmother’s place and killed the engine.
The stately Tudor sat in one of the oldest, most exclusive neighborhoods in Grapevine, a small town tucked into the mountains of Virginia. From the outside, the place screamed of money—of which my grandmother had a shitload—and refinement.
The inside was a different story. While my grandmother was rich as hell, she was so far from refined it was laughable. In fact, if you dared to call her that, she’d use her razor sharp tongue to slice you to shreds and get unlimited enjoyment out of it. Sure, the house was full of expensive shit, but it wasn’t about all of that. It was lived in. It was loved in. It felt like a home, not a showroom.
“Gram?” I called as I pushed through the front door into the grand foyer. “You ready?”
My question was met with a string of curses coming from the back of the house. I moved through to the library she had converted into her yoga and meditation room. The walls were still lined with books, but between the leather-bound classics were books on female empowerment and sex.
To say I’d stumbled across some literature in here that no boy should ever know his grandmother read would have been a serious understatement. During my teenage years, I’d avoided this room like the plague. Now I just pretended they didn’t exist. Denial was the safest route. Gram could be . . . a bit eccentric. It was what I loved most about her, and what made her, and me, the black sheep of our family.
“Ungrateful little shit-weasels,” Gram muttered as she flittered around the room, slapping Post-Its on the framed artwork on the walls and the expensive, hand-carved pieces of furniture. “You want senile? I’ll show you old and senile, you little turd-muffin.” She laughed to herself as she slapped a Post-It with my name on it against the shade of the Tiffany desk lamp. As a matter of fact, almost all of the slips of brightly colored paper had my name scrawled on them in Gram’s elegant cursive handwriting.
“What are you doing?”
She ripped off another paper square and slapped it on my grandfather’s old executive desk. “I’m teaching those walking hemorrhoids I call offspring a lesson. I’m marking everything in the house that will go to you when I finally croak. And as soon as I’m done with this, I’m going to my attorney and changing my will. See how those little shit-heels like it when they find out they aren’t getting a single red cent when I kick the bucket.” She looked off distantly, an evil smile pulling at her weathered, paper-thin cheeks. “I just wish I’d be able to see the looks on their Botoxed faces when they realize the handouts are over.”
I could only imagine what my good-for-nothing family had done this time. With the exception of my grandmother and myself, the Kingsley clan were notorious gold diggers. Every damn one of them. The money Gram had been born into had somehow turned them all into grubby, entitled vultures without a shred of common decency. If not for Gram, I would have thought a huge mistake had taken place at the hospital the day I was born, giving me to the wrong family: a family of vampires who wouldn’t hesitate to bleed you dry.
I couldn’t remember a time in my life where I’d fit in with any of them. I’d always been the odd one out, never really belonging. I didn’t care about the money or the status that came with it. I’d actually wanted to go to college to learn, not to get some meaningless diploma that would look good in a frame, hanging on the wall. I’d actually wanted to work for what I had, not live off a trust fund. When I proposed to my ex, it was because I’d stupidly thought she was the one, not because she was a trophy who would look good on my arm for photos.