Read Online The Foster Family by Jaime Samms - Free Book Online

the number and address.”
    I sighed and dialed her number. I was right. She wanted nothing to do with me taking off with Malcolm.
    “Liss, just write the address down, okay? He’s insisting.”
    Malcolm took the phone from me. “You disapprove,” he said, and I sank down into the seat beside him. He listened for a long time, a patient smile on his face.
    “And if I give you my word not to touch him, will that appease you?”
    He listened more, nodding, and finally smiled. “Of course Charlie will be there. Charlie is always there.” Pause. “No.” He glanced at me and grinned. “He will return to you in the morning unmolested, I give you my word.”
    “What?” I glared at him, but he held up a hand to silence me. “I thought—”
    He clapped a hand over my mouth.
    My eyes probably bugged out, but he turned his head away to gaze out the window as he recited his address, his phone number, where he worked, his work number, and I was expecting him to rattle off his Social Security number but he only chuckled softly and said good-bye.
    “She is not my mother!” I said when he removed his hand.
    “But she cares a great deal about you. I have no issues with giving her reassurance that nothing untoward will happen to you while you’re in my care.”
    I swiped the back of my hand over my mouth. “You promised not to touch.” I mustered my best glare and shot it at him.
    He chuckled.
    It was the kind of thing that could easily piss me off, but he gazed at me until I squirmed in my seat.
    “While I drive,” he decided, “you will talk.”
    “Talk?”
    He nodded as he pulled the car out of the parking lot. “There is a story to you being passed out on the beach, robbed—if I’ve put the pieces together correctly—and kicked out of your home. I want to know what happened.”
    “And if I tell you it’s none of your business?”
    He shrugged. “You are entitled to say that. My assessment of how safe you are for my Charlie depends on this story. If you don’t want to tell it, don’t. You will still be our gardener. Just not our boy.”
    “Oh.” Their boy. When had that card even been put on the table? How had I missed it?
    It sucked that Lissa was so right about this. About me. I slouched down into the seat and stared out the window as he drove slowly through the traffic-clogged streets.
    Of course I told him—every last detail—and watched his face get darker and darker as the tale unfolded.
    “Who would do that to you?”
    “If I knew—”
    “It had to have been your roommate.”
    I shook my head. “No way. You didn’t see him. The guy was nearly in goddamn tears over that thesis paper. He’s royally fucked without it, and he doesn’t need my drama heaped on top of the rest, or worrying about how his rent’s gonna get paid.”
    Malcolm glanced at me, face like thunder, and pulled over to the side to the road. “Rule number one. Gardener or boy, enough swearing. If that’s the best vocabulary you can come up with, better you say nothing at all. Am I understood?”
    I glared right back at him, but he didn’t even blink. God, his eyes looked like fuckin’—like obsidian shards. He drew his eyebrows down in a sharp twist over them, and I found myself swallowing hard, mouth too dry to speak, so I nodded.
    He waited, gaze intense, expression stern.
    “Yes, sir,” I managed at last.
    He smiled. Fuck me, but he had a brilliant smile. He could have totally rolled me over and fucked me right there, in broad daylight, and I would have gladly let him. I wasn’t normally that slutty, but he did something to the pathways between my brain and my dick that the rest of me couldn’t counter.
    “What you need, Kerry…”
    Is a goddamned good fuck. I stared up at him, trapped in his gaze.
    “…is an afternoon of good, solid hard work.”
    “Oh yeah—wait. What?”
    “Your mind’s in the gutter,” Malcolm said with a wicked grin as he settled back square in his seat and consulted his rearview