Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 121755 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121755 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
“Shit, bitch, Richard Gere would have driven right by La Julia to get to you,” Shanti praised with a wide grin on her face.
Joey hitched a rounded hip. “I try.”
A knock came at the door.
“Well, Duane isn’t fucking around,” Raye murmured as she looked out the peephole. She turned back to us. “It isn’t Duane, it’s Jinx.”
She then opened the door and Jinx surged through.
We all surged back to give her space because she gave us no choice.
Raye closed the door and asked, “Is everything all right?”
“Gringas!” Jinx exclaimed.
Then said nothing.
We all waited.
She again said nothing, but she did it going to the bed, turning her back to it and collapsing on it.
Since this was not normal Jinx behavior (as far as I knew), we all approached cautiously.
“We’re in the middle of a mission, and you’re freaking out, so you need to talk fast, Jinx,” Raye demanded.
“He wants me to quit the life and move in with him,” Jinx said to the ceiling.
The room went wired.
It did because we knew what this was about.
Jinx had a regular. He was an accountant. We’d seen him. He looked like Clark Kent, suit, glasses, tall, built, dazzling, the whole shebang.
On their “dates,” he brought her gifts, flowers, and according to Jinx, tipped well.
All of that was why Raye asked, “Is this about Clark?”
Jinx lifted her head. “Clark? His name is Noah.”
“Great name,” Shanti said.
Shanti barely got that out before Jinx jumped up from the bed and started pacing.
No, not pacing. It wasn’t in a line.
She was so agitated, she was prowling every inch of the room.
And she did this blathering.
“He says he’ll take care of me. I said I don’t need no hombre to take care of me. He says if that’s the case, I can get a job. I can contribute to our household.” She threw up her hands, still prowling, and shouted, “Our household!”
I thought that was sweet.
Apparently, Jinx didn’t.
She stopped shouting, but she didn’t stop prowling.
“I said I couldn’t afford to contribute much to whatever household he might have because I know he’s loaded. And he knows I’m not. He says he doesn’t care. Whatever I feel I need to do, I can do. I said I wasn’t gonna change my whole life for some güey who’d eventually kick my ho ass out when he got tired of me. He said I wasn’t a ho. I said, you think I’d suck your cock for free?”
The four other women in the room emitted various versions of pained, girl-you-so-fucked-up-with-that moans.
She stopped pacing and looked among us.
“What? Am I wrong?” she demanded.
Not a one of us was going there.
But Shanti asked, “What’d he do after you said that?”
“That’s when he got mad, threw money at me, and I hadn’t even fucked him yet, and he stormed out,” Jinx answered. “The fuck of that was, I’ve never seen the man mad, and it was hot as infierno, and he’s generally hot as infierno when he’s doing his mild-mannered shit, so him mad was actually hot-ter than infierno.”
I was pressing my lips together.
Shanti was now studying her booties.
Joey was chewing the side of her thumbnail and looking anywhere but at Jinx.
So it was Raye who had to wade in.
“Um…Jinx, this isn’t the first time we’ve tried to get it through to you that this guy is totally into you. And this proves it. He wants to take your relationship to the next level.”
“He’s a client,” Jinx spat.
“He’s in love with you, babe,” Raye said gently.
For a beat, Jinx glared at her.
Then her face started crumbling.
Shanti was closest so she caught Jinx in her arms when Jinx lost it.
None of us had time to freak out that hard-as-nails Jinx was sobbing, because there was another knock on the door.
“Shit,” Raye muttered, went to it, looked through the peephole, then opened it.
Duane scuttled in.
His eyes went straight to Jinx.
“The fight,” he said.
“You heard it?” Raye asked while closing the door.
“Saw him take off after he wasn’t in her room for more than fifteen minutes,” Duane said. “He never just takes off. He always leaves like he doesn’t want to go.”
On that morsel, Jinx wailed.
I pushed the bag into Duane’s hands and said, “Here. Shut up and eat one of those.”
His face got what I suspected was Duane Darin Poole’s version of happy (which was to say, moderately less skeevy) when he queried, “More cupcakes?”
“Yeah,” I confirmed.
“Are they filled like the last ones?”
Yeesh.
“No, I had to make them quick.”
He scowled.
“There’s vanilla bean paste in the frosting,” I told him.
He scurried to open the bag.
Duane handled for now, I turned back to Jinx who was sitting on the couch, still in Shanti’s arms.
“He missed his last regular night,” she sobbed into Shanti’s neck.
“He’ll come back,” Shanti soothed.
Jinx pulled away, crying, “No he won’t! I reminded him I was a whore! Now that he remembers I’m a whore, he’s at home in his mansion with its big pool and view of the mountains wondering why he asked me to live with him in his big mansion with its pool and view of the mountains!”