“Too late,” I replied. “I’m already deep in regret that I wasted twenty-two years on you when you weren’t worth a minute.” I delivered that, peering around Mickey’s arm to do it.
“You’re done,” Mickey stated right after I was done speaking and right when Conrad opened his mouth to retort.
Conrad’s eyes jerked to Mickey.
Then he jerked them right back to me. “You share any of the dirt you dug up on me with our children—”
“I could bang my chest and drag you to your truck by your throat,” Mickey suggested and Conrad’s eyes flew back to him. “That way, you might get me.”
“You touch me, I press charges,” he warned.
Mickey looked down at me. “I feel some grunts comin’ on. You wanna go get my club?”
I started giggling.
“Fuck you,” Conrad spat.
Mickey looked to him and lifted his brows. “Now who’s cursing?”
Conrad looked ready to explode but he had no choice but to scowl, turn and stomp away.
Mickey backed up and with our proximity he took me with him. He shut the door and locked it.
He then turned and again looked down at me.
“Babe. Seriously. You’re a fun date.”
I burst out laughing.
While I kept doing it, Mickey’s arms stole around me.
I put my hands to his chest, slid them up and curled them around the sides of his neck.
However, when I sobered, I saw Mickey didn’t find anything funny.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yep,” I answered.
He studied me closely.
I snuggled into him and assured, “I’m fine, Mickey.”
“He’s not a dick, Amy. He’s a motherfucking dick.”
“Yep,” I repeated.
He looked to the door and back to me. “You gonna get any blowback from that?”
I shrugged. “I have no idea. If I do, I’ll deal. He’s already done his worst, I survived and now I’m standing in my fabulous house in a magnificent man’s arms. He no longer has any weapons that could harm me.”
His arms convulsed on “magnificent man,” but when I was done talking, he warned, “Watch your shit with that guy. He’s a man with a little dick but he still likes to swing it.”
I hadn’t really thought about it but having a man as endowed as Mickey, it occurred to me this was quite accurate.
“I’ll watch my shit,” I promised.
“Good,” he muttered then asked, “We done with that?”
“Yeah, Mickey.”
He was back to muttering. “Excellent.” He let me go, grabbed my hand and tugged me across the landing, announcing, “You owe me a hard fuck on that weird couch by your fireplace, baby.”
I absolutely did.
“It’s a daybed,” I informed him.
“Whatever. It’s sturdy.”
I thought it was fabulously stylish but Mickey wasn’t wrong.
It was sturdy.
I knew this already but Mickey and I put it to the test.
It passed.
Chapter Twenty
Comparing Dicks
The next day, feeling proud of myself, I walked out of Bertram’s Electronics Store phoning Mickey.
“Hey, baby,” he answered.
“Hey, guess what?” I replied.
“Don’t know but I hope whatever it is is good.”
I grinned as I beeped the locks on my Rover. “It isn’t good. It’s fantastic.”
“Right, then lay it on me,” he said with a smile in his voice.
“Tomorrow, someone in the firehouse needs to be available to accept delivery on a new microwave.”
Mickey didn’t say anything so I was open to give him the grand finale.
“And a sixty inch flat screen TV!” I cried, pulling open the door to my SUV.
“Don’t know what to say,” he muttered, not sounding nearly as happy as I expected him to be.
I hauled myself up into the driver’s seat and closed the door, suggesting, “You could say, ‘That’s awesome, Amy!’”
“That’s awesome, Amy,” he repeated after me, doing it by rote.
“Um…did you hear the part about the TV being sixty inches?” I asked, confused by his reaction.
“I did. And I hesitate to get into this with my heiress, but I gotta ask. The folks at Bertram’s donate that shit?”
I stared at my windshield.
“Amy?” he called.
“I didn’t buy it, Mickey,” I told him. “You asked me not to.”
“Just bein’ sure,” he told me.
“They donated it,” I confirmed, feeling deflated.
He heard the deflation and explained, “It just seems too easy, baby. You get a wild hair, go to a store and, just like that, they donate an expensive TV?”
“Well, not just like that,” I replied. “They did remember me from when I came in months ago and bought a bunch of stuff. Your firefighters on duty will also need to stand in front of the TV and shake hands with the delivery guys so they can take a photo to put up in the front of their store. I also got them to donate one to Dove House and Dela and some of the residents have to do the same thing.”
“I hope you get I had to ask,” he said.
“I’m not sure why,” I returned. “You told me you didn’t want me purchasing it, I didn’t purchase it. You told me it’s okay to get it donated, I got it donated.”
“Been played before, babe,” he said, his tone moving from careful to irritated.
“So you’ve dated another heiress who rained goodness on your firehouse?” I asked sarcastically. “Sorry, I didn’t see the evidence of that when I was there. Or did she purchase the rig?”
“In this conversation there’s no call for you to be a smartass, Amelia. You know real fuckin’ well I had a wife who descended into a bottle, and shit like that happens, games are played. She took cash outta our bank account so she could buy wine without me seein’ the credit card receipts when I did the reconciliations. She fed me bullshit about where she was and what she was doin’—”
I interrupted him to declare, “You’re not Conrad and I’m not Rhiannon.”
“Asked a simple question, Amelia.”
“A question that was offensive, Michael.”
“Right, that picture gets taken I know I can trust you and I won’t have to ask again.”
I gritted my teeth, which meant my next sounded forced.