I am. I also plan to remove skin from the most sensitive parts of my body and rub salt into the open wounds.
Because isn’t that what the holidays are all about—letting your family make you wish you were an orphan?
Dez shook off her sister’s clear attempt to make her miserable. How could she be miserable when she had grand plans of making Missy Llewellyn cry? Missy, who seemed to love nothing more than to make the MacDermot sisters’ lives hell. Apparently, it wasn’t enough that all three of them had earned the right to be at the exclusive Cathedral School of Manhattan by earning top-level scholarships. Or that their parents worked damn hard to get their daughters the best they could afford. No, to Missy and the other Llewellyn sisters, none of that meant shit. They only cared about one thing—the fact the MacDermots were poor, Puerto Rican–Irish girls from the Bronx. And they wanted to make sure they never forgot it.
Maybe God would decide to smile down on her and she’d be able to piss off Missy so much the woman would do something stupid. Oh, if Missy would only hit her. Then Dez could handcuff the bitch and dump her butt in a holding cell for a few hours. Maybe the hookers would make her cry. Like she made Dez cry all those years ago on that muggy late-August day.
“You’ll never be good enough for him.”
That’s what they told her as all four sisters circled her like a pack of wolves. She never forgot those brutal words, but she never let them hold her back either. Far from it. She probably should thank Missy. Without her inherently evil nature, Dez may not have had the guts to become a cop. She decided then and there to prove Missy Llewellyn wrong, and as far as she could tell, she had. Dez realized now these people, with all their money and connections, weren’t nearly good enough for her.
Desperately fighting the smile that threatened to spread across her entire face, she suddenly realized all her fantasies seemed to be coming true at one time. The thought of putting Missy in a squad car actually made her nipples hard.
Nope. This was quietly turning into the best day ever. Like someone hit her in the head with her Christmas gift five days early. It almost brought a tear of happiness to her eye. Nothing would ever beat this. Absolutely nothing.
“So where the hell have you been?”
Dez shuddered. Man, that voice sounded familiar. She only knew of one person with a voice like that. A freaky little kid who had to be the smallest fourteen-year-old she’d ever remembered seeing with the lowest voice she’d ever heard. She spun on her heel…only to be faced with a god, if she did say so herself. Big. Like some kind of beautiful linebacker. A shaved head with a serious five o’clock shadow issue, and gold-colored eyes. Eyes that, at the moment, were staring at her like a slab of prime rib. No. This couldn’t be Mace Llewellyn. Her heart dropped. True, this man was pretty, but she saw pretty every day. The Mace she remembered wasn’t pretty, but he always knew how to make her smile. She learned over the years that was a hell of a lot more important than looks.
“Well…answer me.”
Uh-oh. Nutcase alert. How come all the good-looking ones were insane? “I’m…uh…sorry. Do I know you?”
He crossed big arms over a big chest and smirked at her. “Take a minute. Let it come to you.”
She blinked and tried to remember all the exits out of the room in case the gorgeous nutcase went postal.
“Still waiting.”
It hit her. Like a slap to the forehead. But…no. It couldn’t be. It wasn’t humanly possible. But that superior tone. That haughty expression. That damn smirk. That killer voice that had deliciously matured with age. All together, they really could only belong to one person. The one person she’d been waiting more than twenty years to see again.
What happened to the boy she remembered? Apparently, this…this…man replaced him. Oh, and what a man!
But no matter how different he looked, she still knew. Maybe those freaky gold eyes gave him away. Or those gorgeous full lips that, even at fourteen, she hadn’t been immune to.
Or maybe the way he stared at her. Like he spent every waking moment imagining her naked.
Only one person ever looked at her like that. Well, only one person ever looked at her like that where she didn’t have the overwhelming desire to rip eyes from sockets.
“Oh my God—Mace?”
Time had done wonders for her. Some women never looked as good as they did in high school, especially at thirty-six. But she did. Better. She still had those killer eyes. Gray with flecks of green. He used to stare into those eyes during biology class as they faked their way through the experiments. Of course, that’s when he wasn’t staring at that beautiful face with that cute, little pug nose or that incredibly hot body. She’d been an early bloomer, wearing a healthy C cup while the other girls were just moving from training bras. All of that didn’t matter, though. Not to Mace. That was just the cherry on top.
For him, it had been more than her big tits and luscious mouth. Dez actually liked him back then. Just the way he was. Ninety pounds soaking wet, barely five foot three, a head of hair he couldn’t control, and the attitude of a giant. Most people didn’t like Mace. Dez, however, found him funny and smart. Even his sisters never saw him that way. To a fourteen-year-old, that meant everything to him.
Then she left him. Walked out of his life and never came back. At the moment, Mace was completely ready to push her up against the wall and demand she tell him how she could leave him like she did.
For years, a part of him kept expecting to see her again. Although he always wished he could forget about her. Lose himself in some of the other women he had met since he last saw her saddle shoes walking down the school hall and out of his life. But he never could. No matter how hard he tried, he could never forget about her. Hell, he still dreamed about her. She was older in his dreams, thank God, but his dreams didn’t do justice to the woman now standing in front of him, an NYPD badge hanging on a chain around her neck.
“Mace Llewellyn? Is that you?”
So, she did remember him. Good. Now he could tell her what a bitch she’d been for leaving him. For breaking his fourteen-year-old heart into a million pieces and stomping on it with her saddle shoes. He geared himself to do it, too—until she smiled at him. A smile that practically knocked him on his ass.
After all these years, the woman leaped beyond perfect. Especially when she literally threw herself at him, her arms looping around his neck.
“Jesus, Mace! I can’t believe it!”
His eyes almost rolled to the back of his head when she pressed her curvaceous body against his. Without even thinking about it, he wrapped her in a bear hug and lifted her off her feet. She actually squealed, which sounded strange with that voice of hers.
“I don’t believe it, Mace!” He didn’t either. How did anyone smell this good? How was it humanly possible?
She laughed. “Stop sniffing my neck!” She pushed against his shoulders and leaned back, but he wouldn’t let her go. “I can’t believe you’re still doing that.”
“You smell good.”
She rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”
“So?”
“So,
