Page 175 of Midnight Curfew

“I’m listening.”

He strolls up to me again, his friends flanking him.

“You play with our women,” he states. “Bring one for me.”

Excuse me? My brain shifts between knowing what he’s capable of after Liv and suspecting he’s not serious, considering his stepsister. What does he want a Bay girl for?

“Someone who can be patient with me,” he whispers.

And realization dawns. Someone who understands that he wants to look like he’s enjoying it.

“The one with the thighs.” He looks to Watson. “What’s her name?”

“Diaz,” Jerome says, zoning in on me.

Aracely?

Why her?

“And then if you both make it home,” Callum announces, “I’ll call off the curfew.”

So we’re upping the stakes. I give him the show he wants to put on in the Wolfe Room, and he’ll give us a chance.

His blue eyes play with me. “If you have the guts to bring her…”

“I won’t be able to stop her,” I tell him.

He has no idea what happens when anyone challenges Aracely Diaz to rise to the occasion.

Spinning around, I take off and head home, grinning damn near the whole way.

Until I remember that she’s for him tomorrow night. He won’t want her. He won’t like it.

But she might.

She’ll be kissing him, and it’ll be a look at what’s in store for him. Even a wife he isn’t attracted to will have a level of intimacy with him that someone he really loves won’t.

And Aracely is going to charge me for this. It won’t be money, but I guarantee I’ll have to fork over something I don’t want to give up. She loves to make Iron and me mad.

We weren’t the best boyfriends.

Heading into Mariette’s, I slip through the kitchen and stop at her office, where she manages everything to do with the restaurant and about a dozen other things my brother entrusts her with.

I lean on the doorframe. “So you know I’d do anything for you, right?”

She darts her eyes up, glowering.

26

Callum

Aracely Diaz sits in a unique position. Not only does she manage Mariette’s, a destination stop for any tourist visiting our coast with its famous key lime confections and its down-home seafood dumped right onto newspaper-lined tables, but she handles Macon Jaeger’s schedule, coordinates the community goings-on, knows everyone, keeps the family aware of any problems in the Bay, and stays abreast of every maid, cook, server, and laborer crossing into St. Carmen every day for work. In some sense, she has every single house in a ten-mile radius tapped. Wanna know what the Millers’ daughter gets for an allowance? Need to know what the Stevensons were fighting about last night? Aracely will know, and if she doesn’t, she knows who does.

When something happens in the Bay, people call her. She’ll tell Krisjen or Macon.

She’s also young, beautiful, and close with everyone in that family. She went from Iron’s bed to Dallas’s before I even left for college, and there’s no way they haven’t fallen into bed together again in the years since.

Dallas’s eyes hold mine as they both sit across from me in the car. The glow from the streetlamps coasts across his face as we drive.