Page 17 of Ruthless Sinner
Jewel, however, was pointedly not looking me in the face and was instead examining my tattoos.
Generally, women tended to talk about how hot they were and then just move on, but Jewel had a more critical eye. She seemed to have a more critical eye in general and I kind of liked it. It made me want to… challenge myself, rise up to her expectations.
“Most of these look like they were done by the same artist.”
“They are. When you find an artist you really like… why go to someone else? Just to mix it up? If I wanted a really different style, maybe, but Jax is the best.”
Jewel traced one of the tattoos—the one on my chest, of a racing wolf. “This one suits you.”
“Oh?”
“You’ve always given me the impression of a wolf.” She shrugged, taking me back to the conversation we’d had the first night in The Swan Room, while providing a few new adjectives. “Deadly, powerful, a little feral… misunderstood.”
That last word was unexpected, and hit me like a gut punch. “I’m hardly the brooding protagonist of a teen drama.”
“No. But you’re not who you like to make people think you are, either?” Jewel tilted her head and finally looked me in the eye again.
Her gaze was dark, assessing, in a way that I’d never really seen from anyone. The gazes of people like my father’s enemies or business associates was a whole different ballgame. This felt… different. More intimate.
I wondered what she was seeing when she looked at me. I hoped it was something good enough.
I’d never quite been good enough, and Dad had Vincent for all that and Dante for the simultaneous overachieving and disappointing the family, so I could kind of just do as I pleased. Why bother trying to get approval when it wouldn’t beme? Why compete for attention that way?
But now, for the first time in years, I found myself wanting to be… good enough. For this woman.
I was sitting down in the hot tub but I felt like I was standing on the railing of my balcony, dizzy, full of vertigo, ready to fall off.
“Are you?” I asked, turning the conversation around on her. “You’re a stripper. Are you exactly who you portray yourself to be on stage?”
Jewel gave a small smile. “No. Fair point.” She ran her finger along the outside of the wolf before tapping the rainbow flames on my right shoulder. “What’s this?”
“That was a tough one. Not any line art, literally filling in color on my skin so it took forever and stung something horrible. But it was worth it.” I grinned at her. “I’m really good with fire. It’s one of my specialties. If something needs to be burned down, I’m usually the one to do it. But the reason I’m so good with it is I started out as a punk teenager with a rebellious streak. One time we were at the family lake house for the summer and I got a little too enthusiastic with this fire-eating trick I was trying. The shed caught fire. Which would’ve been bad enough, but we were down at the lake house for the Fourth of July.”
Jewel clapped a hand over her mouth. “Ohno.”
“Oh yeah.” I nodded, still grinning. “Ten thousand dollars’ worth of fireworks, up in flames, firing everywhere in every color imaginable. I thought my dad was gonna kill me.”
Jewel laughed. “You were just a little troublemaker all your life, huh?”
“More like someone who didn’t think about the possible consequences before he acted.”
Jewel gave me an odd look and I wondered if I’d let too much slip, revealed too much behind the carefree mask I always wore. Then she tapped the family crest tattoo on my other arm. “I’m going to take a wild guess that this has something to do with your ancestry.”
I nodded. “It’s our ancestral crest from our family back in Italy.”
“Why the thorns?”
I shrugged. “My family feelings are… complicated. I love them, I love my family, but they’re also a pain in my ass. So… thorns. But also vines, twisting… you can’t escape your family.”
“I don’t really have family,” she admitted quietly. “I don’t know if it’s better or worse or just different.”
“You could do a lot better than mine,” I warned her.
“Oh, yes, I could do a lot better than a rich and powerful family, mmhhmm,” Jewel deadpanned.
I chuckled. “Look my family’s nuts, okay? Vincent’s the most snobbish anal retentive jerk, and Dante’s just looking for the first opportunity to get out, as if he’s somehow better than any of us, as if being a lawyer doesn’t mean compromises and dealing with shitty situations the way our world does. Dad is convinced I’m going to disappoint him. Yeah, you could do a lot better.”
This was a lot more than I’d admitted to a lot of people. In fact I couldn’t remember the last time I’d talked about any of this. It was hard for my friends, my fellow soldiers, to understand how I could complain when I was rich and taken care of, or why if my family annoyed me so much I didn’t find some way to get rid of them and assume control myself.
