Take Your Time (Boston Love #4)(11)
Chapter Three
I don’t do threesomes. If I wanted to simultaneously disappoint two people, I’d go out to dinner with my parents.
Delilah Sinclair, defending her monogamous sexual preferences.
“Just use a little Vaseline. Does the trick every time.”
My nose wrinkles. “Really?”
“Oh, yeah.” Destiny nods sagely, her pink-streaked hair glowing in the lemon cast of the overhead lights. “I’ve even used a grapefruit, in a pinch.”
My mouth gapes. “A grapefruit? Seriously?”
“Girl, would I lie to you?”
I blink stupidly. Would she lie to me? Hard to say for sure, considering we’ve just met about twenty minutes ago, but I have a feeling she’s not the most trustworthy character of all time as we’re currently occupying the same holding cell. Then again, she did share her last stick of gum — and some sincerely unsolicited sex tips — so who am I to judge?
I’m sitting on nothing even closely resembling a high horse, here. (In fact, if we’re being literal, I’m sitting on a cold concrete bench that’s slowly making my asscheeks go numb.) My point is, I’m not exactly in any position to look down my nose at Destiny for whatever choices led her here. Not when, for the past few days… weeks… okay, fine, months… my life has pretty much been a train wreck. We’re talking jump-the-tracks, total derailment, no survivors.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again — it’s not my fault.
I blame my brother Duncan for most of what’s happened. After all, I’m not the one who drained his trust fund and made a series of tremendously flawed judgment calls that landed the family in these dire financial straits. If he’d only bother to pull his head out of his ass and affix it firmly between his shoulders, where it belongs, perhaps I wouldn’t have spent my evening letting the boys in blue take my fingerprints along with a series of unflattering mugshots of me dressed in something more akin to a slutty Halloween outfit than an actual work uniform. (Frankly the sallow yellow lighting in this precinct is even less flattering than an accidental front-camera selfie snapped by a smartphone.)
If not for Duncan’s idiocy, I wouldn’t have been forced to sell off my favorite Prada clutch purse for rent money, or be facing eviction from my chic apartment in Beacon Hill, or have taken on the ridiculous job that got me arrested wearing this damn getup in the first place.
Alas, there’s nothing I can do about that now.
No use crying over spilled milk.
What’s done is done.
Que sera sera.
I’m out of pithy anecdotes, but you get the idea.
Jail is the least of my problems. Somehow, the fact that I don’t know how to do my own laundry and am about to run out of clean underwear seems far more dire than a criminal record. Add to that my roommate problems — as in, I need to find one to split rent with by yesterday if I don’t want to end up living on the streets — plus my relationship problems — ones stemming almost entirely from the man en route to rescue me — and Destiny starts looking so put together, a Stepford wife would be jealous.
Speaking of Destiny, she’s still giving a very visual play-by-play of her favorite BJ techniques. Thankfully, before I’m forced to fathom a reasonable response about her rather unorthodox use of certain citrus fruits, Officer McDreamy clanks his baton against the bars of our cell, startling me.
“Sinclair, you made bail. Move it.”
I jolt to my feet, casting a guilty look at my cellmate. I have a feeling she’s going to be here a while.
“Don’t you worry about me, girl.” Destiny winks and crosses one leg over the other, making her micro-short pleather skirt ride up to scandalous heights. Her plastic platform pumps swing cheerily over the concrete floor. “I’ll be just fine.”
“It was nice meeting you,” I say weakly.
“Give the grapefruit a try, you won’t regret it.” Her sultry gaze slides to Officer McSexMachine. “Maybe he can be your first test subject.”
The officer coughs roughly. I follow Destiny’s stare and can’t help but notice that, while his expression is disapproving as ever, there’s a hint of red creeping up his collar as he unlocks the cell door and holds it open for me.
“Sinclair, I mean it — let’s move. Unless you’d rather stay here all night.”
I suppress a grin as I make my way out into the hall, waving goodbye to Destiny before she disappears from view. The smile falls straight off my lips when I follow the officer around a corner into the waiting room, and find myself face to face with Luca.
Damn, he looks good.
Even at 3AM.
Maybe especially at 3AM.
Bad Lila! Down, girl.
With a day’s worth of stubble covering his chiseled jaw and a nose that’s been broken too many times to count, he lends new meaning to the phrase ruggedly handsome. Which, frankly, is not the type of man who typically revs my engines, if you catch my drift. In the past, I’ve always gone for the guys in tailored suits, preppy and perfectly styled, their hair as immaculate as the pressed corner squares in their jacket pockets.
Corporate dream boats, I once christened them.
Corporate control freaks, Phoebe amended with an eye roll.