Snowbound Ink Read online

  Snowbound Ink

  Snowbound Series Book Eleven

  By

  Veronica Tower

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Snowbound Ink by Veronica Tower

  Red Rose™ Publishing

  Publishing with a touch of Class! ™

  The symbol of the Red Rose and Red Rose is a trademark of Red Rose™ Publishing

  Red Rose™ Publishing

  Copyright© 2012 Veronica Tower

  ISBN: 978-1-4543-0188-2

  Cover Artist: Shirley Burnett

  Editor: Pam

  Line Editor: Zena Gainer

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews. Due to copyright laws you cannot trade, sell or give any ebooks away.

  This is a work of fiction. All references to real places, people, or events are coincidental, and if not coincidental, are used fictitiously. All trademarks, service marks, registered trademarks, and registered service marks are the property of their respective owners and are used herein for identification purposes only.

  Red Rose™ Publishing

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  Snowbound Ink

  By

  Veronica Tower

  Chapter One

  The Tattoo Parlor

  Kara

  Kara Brennan hesitated despite the cold outside the door of Mad Inks. The sidewalk beneath her had been shoveled, but there were still traces of snow everywhere and the weather felt frigid enough to support more.

  “Not having second thoughts, are you?” her sister Liz asked.

  “What? No, of course not,” Kara lied. She twisted about to look at Liz and their cousin, Thea. They were both attractive black women in their mid to late thirties—a few years younger than Kara was herself. “You don’t think I should be, do you?”

  Liz expelled an unladylike snort of laughter. “Hell no! In fact, I’m pretty certain I’m going to take advantage of our little trip here to get my first tattoo. So I’m certainly not going to warn you off from getting a little piercing.”

  Liz had always been the wildest member of the Brennan family, but even so her words surprised Kara. “You are not!” she protested, even as their cousin squealed, “You too? I thought I was the only one.”

  Liz turned around to face Thea, her already wide smile broadening further. “Really?” she asked. “That’s awesome. Does Nick like tattoos? I didn’t notice that he had any when we all met at his bar two weeks ago.”

  Thea shrugged. “He doesn’t have any,” she admitted, “but he likes art, and I figure if I can pick one that’s special enough he’ll go crazy over it.”

  Liz’s grin told Kara that her younger sister had the same basic hope, only in relation to her boyfriend Travis, of course.

  A really large man opened the door to Mad Inks and escorted a white girl half his size and age out onto the sidewalk. Her cheek glistened with some sort of ointment, which covered an apparently fresh tattoo of three stars. The coloring looked more brownish than the blue tone Kara normally associated with tattoos.

  Kara stepped out of the way to let the two pass, but the man stopped and politely held the door for them.

  “No, thank you,” Kara told him. “We haven’t quite made up our minds yet.”

  “Oh, get one,” the white woman said. “Do you see my stars? I’m so excited about them!”

  “They’re very attractive,” Kara agreed. To be polite she didn’t add that there was no way she’d ever put permanent ink on her face.

  “Did it hurt very much?” Thea asked her.

  The woman shrugged. “Hardly at all.” But then she qualified her statement by saying, “but then I already have a bunch of tattoos so I knew what I was getting into.”

  She unzipped her coat to show Thea her cleavage, which Kara could see was adorned with more stars. Maybe the woman was an astronomer.

  “Very nice,” Thea told her. “I’m thinking of getting something a little lower,” she made a gesture toward her groin. “Do you think it will—”

  “You’re getting one on your pussy?” Liz asked. Her eyes were bright with wonder. “Wow, Thea, you really are adventurous. I wasn’t thinking of doing anything near that exciting.”

  “It’s not going to hurt that bad,” the woman assured her. “I have stars down here too,” she said, touching the place where her blue jeans concealed her mons veneris. “It’s a bit of a nuisance keeping it moist after you get it—your panties will keep wiping off the A&D ointment—but heck, I think of that as an excuse to go naked for a couple of weeks. You didn’t mind me running around without any clothes, did you, Lou?”

  “Not at all!” Lou agreed.

  Kara found it easy to believe that he’d enjoyed his younger girlfriend’s nudity. Whether she enjoyed his quite as much…

  She broke off that train of thought when she remembered that she too was significantly older than her boyfriend. Of course, she was in better shape than Lou appeared to be, but it still seemed hypocritical to hold the age difference between the two against him.

  “So what tattoo are you planning to get?” Liz asked Thea.

  Their cousin squirmed a bit as she considered her answer. “I’m not completely certain,” she said. “I want it to be special…intimate, but…”

  “Just don’t do his name,” Liz advised. “Bad enough to get his name on your arm or your ankle, but can you imagine if you break up and your next lover’s going down on you and finds the name Nick right above your clit?”

  Thea drew back in embarrassment, her eyes glancing at Lou and his younger girlfriend.

  “She’s right, you know,” Lou told her. “No matter how perfect you think things are now, you never really know what’s down the road.”

  His girlfriend elbowed him in the stomach. “You wouldn’t get my name tattooed on you?”

  “Nope!” he said. “And I wouldn’t let you put mine on you either. It’s like jinxing our relationship. I’ve just heard too many bad stories.”

  Even though Kara agreed with Lou’s advice, she thought he would have been wiser to keep it to himself. His girlfriend really looked pissed off at him over it.

  “But I thought you wanted us to be together forever!” she told him.

  “I do, I do,” he told her. “Who wouldn’t want to snuggle up to your sweet body?”

  It was instantly obvious that that had been the wrong thing to say. “Is that all I am to you?” the younger woman asked. She wasn’t shouting yet, but it wouldn’t be long before she was.

  “Now Maryanne,” the guy said.

  “Is that all I am, a good fuck?”

  “Of course not, pumpkin,” he assured her but Maryanne wasn’t waiting around to listen. She was already off down the sidewalk and Lou had to half run to catch up with her.

  “Pumpkin,” he pleaded.

  “What do you bet he’s back here tomorrow getting her name tattooed on his body to prove his love?” Thea asked.

  “And that she breaks up with him right after he does it,” Liz added.

  The three women stopped talking for a moment as they appraised each other’s resolve.

  Kara was the first to break the silence. “Are we ready to do this?” she asked.

  Liz nodded.

  “I wonder if they’ll have any
female artists,” Thea said. “I’d hate to have some strange guy working on me down there.”

  “Hey!” Liz objected. “If he’s cute that will be half the fun.”

  At least the interior of the shop was clean.

  It made sense to Kara that it would be clean. There were probably health codes that the owner had to follow. They were dealing with a kind of minor cosmetic surgery, after all. But somehow in her imagination the shop was a dingy place with marijuana smoke hanging in the air and illicit drug deals being done in dark corners. Skanky artists in unwashed t-shirts would be sitting around with cigarettes or worse dangling from their lips while they waited for the opportunity to take advantage of innocent women who stumbled into their shops. That was part of the reason Kara had convinced Liz and Thea to come with her this evening. Not that she had intellectually believed it would be that bad, but in her gut she had feared it would be.

  What she found instead was a brightly lit, fastidiously clean, ultra modern looking establishment. The walls were covered with stenciled images from relatively simple drawings of hearts and daggers to far more complex and beautiful scenes of a fantastic or religious nature. In one a dragon reared up over his treasure hoard, flames erupting from his mouth. While in another the Virgin Mary prayed over a gathered group of children. There were also bands of thorns, Irish leprechauns, flowers, skeletons, guitars, race cars, karma symbols, letters and symbols in multiple fonts and writing systems, snowmen, mermaids, cats, dogs, half-naked men and women, totally naked men and women, the engine of an old fashioned train, motorcycles, trees, diamonds, and the list went on and on and on.

  An interesting gentleman who appeared to Kara to be a mixture of her dark fears and her modern expectations approached them. He looked to be a couple of years shy of fifty; clean shaven with long, graying brown hair pulled neatly back behind him in a ponytail. His t-shirt said Harley Davidson but it had obviously been clean this morning when he put it on. His smile was both kind and professional. His arms were covered in very impressive artwork—a skeleton rode a motorcycle up one forearm while wielding a flaming sword. On the other, a Viking wielded a massive axe in his two muscular hands. “Good evening ladies, I’m Tony Benson, owner of Mad Inks. How can I help you tonight?”

  Confronted with the reality of having to tell a strange man what she wanted, Kara found she was not up to the challenge. She opened her mouth to speak, but her cowardly voice had evidently fled back out to the street.

  Liz, Kara’s brash lawyer sister was never at a loss of words, however. She stepped up and explained their situation, offering the owner her hand. “Hi Tony, I’m Liz and this is my sister, Kara, and my cousin, Thea. Kara’s boyfriend gave her a stud she’d like to wear in her labia-”

  Kara hung her head, absolutely mortified that Liz had said this out loud to the stranger.

  Liz didn’t break stride at all as she completed her sentence. “And Thea and I are both considering getting tattoos. Do you think you can help us?”

  Tony smiled, a completely professional expression, no trace of lasciviousness or any other unprofessional emotion on his face. “Tattoos and piercings are what we do.” Then he added to Kara, clearly trying to make her more comfortable. “I do a couple of these a day. You’d be shocked how many women out there have them. It’s quick and not really painful at all. Just one sharp pinch and then a bit of soreness for a few days while your flesh heals.”

  “How much does it cost?” Thea asked.

  “That depends on the size and complexity of the tattoo you want,” Tony told them, “but we start at two hundred dollars and it goes up from there.”

  “Thea’s thinking of getting one under her pussy hair,” Liz announced.

  Kara was pleased to see by Thea’s reaction that she wasn’t the only one finding this whole situation uncomfortable.

  Tony absorbed this information without any apparent surprise or change in his demeanor. “Well, we’d have to shave her, of course.”

  “I did that this morning,” Thea volunteered.

  “I’ll check you out before we do the tattoo,” Tony said. “It’s important the flesh be smooth when we do the artwork. Do you know what image you’d like?”

  “I’m thinking of a couple of different things,” Thea said, “but I’d like something that has to do with…acting.”

  Thea’s choice of subject really surprised Kara. “Acting?” she asked. “I didn’t know you liked the theater.”

  Liz laughed and Thea glanced at the floor again.

  “What?” Kara asked.

  “She doesn’t mean that kind of acting,” Liz said. “She’s talking about role playing.”

  “I don’t understand,” Kara told her. But then her eyes widened as she did suddenly comprehend what Liz was talking about.

  Her sister laughed louder. “Wow, Kara, you really are sheltered still. I thought Ron was opening you up to a wider world.”

  Tony watched this exchange with interest, but did not in any way contribute to the conversation. He waited for the talk to die down and then said to Thea, “I have a couple of books of stencils that might interest you.”

  He looked back over his shoulder. “John, get the theater books and come assist this woman.”

  A younger man appeared from a back room. He too looked professionally clean, yet gave the appearance that he’d have been just as happy in the grungy parlor of Kara’s darker expectations. His forearms were covered in intricate geometrical designs that fascinated the eye into trying to trace the patterns.

  He came over, got introduced to Thea, and led her across the front room to a pile of books.

  “So what about you?” Tony said to Liz. “Any idea what tattoo you’d like to get?”

  “That depends,” Liz said. “Are you going to do the work yourself or farm me off to one of your apprentices?”

  This time Tony smiled for real. It wasn’t a professional look, but neither was it sleazy or inappropriate. It showed a genuine sense of humor that clearly understood Liz’s quirky personality. “I assure you,” he said, “that all of my artists are fully capable, but if it would make you more comfortable, I’d be happy to create your tattoo myself.”

  “If I’m going to get work done on my bod, I’d like to have an experienced hand at the helm,” Liz told him. “Especially if the work is done down there.”

  She glanced down at her own groin and Tony’s eyes moved with her, studying her pussy for a couple of moments.

  “So you’d like to get your tattoo on your mons veneris too?” he asked.

  Liz shrugged with her mouth, a strange sort of gesture where the left half of her face twisted up but the right half stayed pretty much the same. It made her look uncertain as to what she should ultimately try.

  “I wasn’t planning to when I agreed to come tonight,” she explained, “but Thea’s idea has got me thinking. It would be much better down there then on the side of my cleavage like I was originally thinking.”

  “You were going to get a tattoo on your cleavage?” Kara asked. “Where Mama could see it? Are you trying to make her have a stroke or to get her thrown in prison for attempted murder?”

  Liz only laughed. “That’s why I’m thinking it would be better down below,” she told Kara.

  She returned her attention to Tony. “The problem is that I wasn’t expecting to do that, so while I’ve showered, I’m not shaved. It’s a little embarrassing.”

  Kara completely agreed with her sister on this point. She had trimmed herself in expectation of tonight, because it was obvious that whoever pierced her labia was going to have to see her pussy. Even though they wouldn’t be doing anything like Liz and Thea were talking about, it just wouldn’t look good to have stubble or a too thick, tangled bush.

  “Shaving you won’t be a problem,” Tony assured Liz. “What image are you considering?”

  Liz smiled again. Impossible as it seemed to Kara, Liz appeared to be enjoying herself. But then she always had liked being the center of attention. “C
ould you do me a honeybee?” Liz asked.

  “A honeybee?” Kara repeated. “Why on earth would you want a honeybee? Do you even eat honey?”

  “I’m pretty sure I have a honeybee stencil somewhere,” Tony said. “If not, I’d be happy to create one for you.”

  Liz looked very pleased with herself. “Let’s take a look.”

  Before doing that, Tony shifted his attention to Kara. “And do you want a tattoo too, or do you only want the piercing?”

  Kara didn’t enjoy the sudden shift in attention. “I…”

  “Oh why don’t you get a tattoo too, Kara?” Liz asked her. “Live a little!”

  Kara really didn’t appreciate being put on the spot like this. Her mouth went dry and she began to fidget, nervously shifting her weight back and forth on her feet. “I don’t know,” she said. “What would Mama say?”

  Liz laughed. “You know exactly what she’d say.” Liz looked toward the ceiling and lifted her hands beseechingly. “What, Lord?” she asked in a pretty good imitation of their mother’s voice. “What have I done to make you punish me this way?”

  Liz met Kara’s eyes again. “Of course she’s only going to do that if she sees the tattoo. If you get it down beside your bush like Thea and I are going to do, she’ll never know you have it.”

  “At least not until you let it slip the next time the family gets together,” Kara told her.

  Liz shrugged, in no way denying Kara’s prediction. “Then you can tell her about mine and we can both get shouted at. It’s not like it’s going to be worse than when I tell her about your new piercing.”

  “You would, wouldn’t you?” Kara said.

  “Of course,” Liz laughed again. “But the great thing is, Mama probably won’t believe me. Despite your year long fling with a younger white man, she’d never believe you got a tattoo or a pussy piercing.”

  Thea rejoined them with John carrying one of the books. “And I can’t see Aunt Margaret asking you to show her either,” Thea added. “I think you’re pretty safe from teasing and blackmail.”