Beauty from Pain (Beauty, #1)(97)

“What’s going on?” I had temporarily forgotten about the girl in my bed. I swore softly under my breath and tugged a black t-shirt that looked reasonably clean over my head.

“I have to go.”

“What?”





I frowned at her as she lifted herself up in the bed and clutched the sheet to her chest. She was pretty and had a nice body from what I could see. I wondered what kind of game I had thrown at her in order to get her to come home with me. She was one I didn’t mind waking up to this morning.


“I have somewhere I need to be so that means you need to get up and get going.

Normally my roommate would be around so you could hangout for a minute, but he had to go to work, so that means you need to get that fine ass in gear and get out.”





She sputtered a little at me. “Are you kidding me?”


I looked over my shoulder as I dug my boots out from under a pile of laundry and shoved my feet into them. “No.”


“What kind of * does that? Not even a thanks for last night, you were great how about lunch? Just get the f*ck out?” She threw the sheet aside and I noticed she had a nice tattoo scrawling along her ribs. That was probably what attracted me to her in my drunken stupor in the first place. “You’re a real piece of work, you know that?”





I was a whole lot more than just a piece of work, but this chick, that was just one of oh so many, didn’t need to know that. I silently cursed Nash. My roommate was the shit, we had been best friends since elementary school and I could normally rely on him to run interference for me on Sunday mornings when I had to bail but I forgot about the piece he was supposed to be finishing up today.

That meant I was on my own when it came to hustling last night’s tail out the door and getting a move on it before the brat left without me, which was a bigger headache than I needed in my current state.




“Hey, what’s your name anyway?” If she wasn’t pissed before, she was downright infuriated now. She climbed back into a super short black skirt and a barely there tank top. She fluffed up her mound of dyed, blond hair and glared at me out of eyes now smudged with old mascara.

“Lucy, you don’t remember?” I slimed some crap in my hair to make it stand up in a bunch of different directions and sprayed on cologne to help mask the scent of sex and booze that I was sure still clung to my skin. I shrugged a shoulder at her and waited while she walked in front of me, hopping on one foot to put on a pair of heels that just screamed dirty sex.

“I’m Rule.” I would have offered to shake her hand but that seemed silly so I just pointed to the front door of the apartment and stepped in the bathroom to brush the stale taste of whiskey out of my mouth.

“There’s coffee in the kitchen, maybe you should write your number down and I can give you a call another time. Sunday’s aren’t a good day for me.” She would never know how true that statement was.





She glared at me and tapped the toe of one of those awesome shoes. “You really have no idea who I am, do you?”


This time, even against my throbbing brain’s wishes, my eyebrow went up and I looked at her with a mouth full of toothpaste foam. I just stared at her until she screeched at me and pointed at her side. “You have to at least remember this!”


No wonder I liked her ink so much, it was one of mine. I spit the toothpaste in the sink and gave myself a once over in the mirror. I looked like hell. My eyes were watery and rimmed in red, my skin looked gray and there was a hickey the size of Rhode Island on the side of my neck. Mom was just going to love that, just like she was going to fall all over herself about the current state of my hair. Normally thick and dark, I had shaved the sides of it off and dyed the front a nice, bright purple, so it now stuck up straight and looked kind of like a weed-whacker had been used to cut it. Both my folks already had an issue with the scrolling ink that wound around both my arms and up the sides of my neck, so the hair was just going to be icing on the cake. There was nothing I could do to fix the current shit show looking back at me in the mirror so I prowled out of the bathroom and unceremoniously grabbed the girl by the elbow and towed her to the front door. I needed to learn to go home with them instead of letting them come home with me; it was so much easier that way.


“Look, I have somewhere I have to be and I don’t particularly love that I have to go, but you freaking out and making a scene is not going to do anything other than piss me off. I hope you had a good time last night and you can leave your number, but we both know the chances of me calling you are slim to none. If you don’t want to be treated like crap maybe you should stop going home with drunken dudes you don’t know. Trust me we’re really only after one thing and the next morning all we really want is for you to go quietly away. I have a headache and I feel like I’m going to hurl, plus I have to spend the next hour in a car with someone that will be silently loathing me and joyously plotting my death, so really, can we just save the histrionics and get a move on it?”

By now I had maneuvered her to the entryway of the building and I saw her in the BMW idling in the spot next to my truck. She was impatient and would take off if I wasted anymore time. I gave Lucy a half grin and shrugged a shoulder, after all it wasn’t her fault I was an * and even I knew she deserved better than such a callous brush off.