Jet (Marked Men, #2)(64)

“Bar it is.”



Two things became apparent as soon as I pried my eyes open the next morning.

The first was that I didn’t have any pants on, and the second was that trying to drink an entire bottle of whiskey in order to forget a girl with whiskey-colored eyes was a terrible idea. I groaned and tried to turn my head, only to have pain and a starburst of bad ideas explode in every direction. Luckily, I could feel the leather material of the couch sticking to my bare legs, so I didn’t have to shove out an exploratory hand to make sure I was alone. I was all for drowning my sorrows, but going home with someone else just for spite didn’t seem right or fair to the other party. I was grateful that while he hadn’t seemed to care that I wanted to punish my liver, Rowdy had seemed to keep my hurt feelings out of my pants, wherever those might be at the moment.

It took me a solid five minutes to roll over and another ten to work up the courage to open my eyes. When I did, all I could do was groan and swear that I was never going to drink like that again. As usual, it was a vow I ended up breaking as fast as I could.

I heard Rowdy moving around the kitchen and I heard the tinkle of female laughter, so I made the Herculean effort to sit up and try to find my pants. I was in no state to be nice to whoever he had brought home from the bar with him, and I most assuredly was in no shape to do that in just my boxer-briefs. A groan escaped me and a herd of hippos started to river-dance behind my eyes when I swung my legs over the edge of the couch. I heard him and his friend walking toward me, but there was nothing on earth that was going to make me move any faster.

I gratefully took the mug of coffee Rowdy handed me over the back of the couch, and tried not to grimace as I tossed back the handful of painkillers he dropped in my hand. I tried to avoid the curious gaze of the blonde walking to the door. She was good-looking, at least I thought she was from what I could see through the haze of my hangover, and I vaguely remembered her and a friend joining us at some point in the night. She gave me a smile that I didn’t have the faculties to return and looked over at Rowdy, who had propped a hip on the back of the couch and was outright laughing at my sorry state.

“Too bad he was such a bummer. Heather would have loved to get her hands all over that.”

Considering I was mostly naked, I just closed my eyes and fell back against the couch cushions and prayed for the morning-after gods to swallow me up. I heard Rowdy chuckle and the front door open and close. None of us were strangers to the one-night stand, and this one had made less of a scene than some of them were prone to. It sucked that I was the one feeling like I had been caught doing the walk of shame, and I hadn’t even slept with her.

“What the hell happened last night?”

Rowdy moved off the back of the couch and plopped his big frame in the recliner across the room. His eyes were serious and he didn’t look amused, so I wondered if maybe he had had to work a little harder to get the blonde to come home with him, considering what a train wreck I had been.

“You never told me you were in love with Ayden.”

I blinked in surprise, which made my head throb. I would have frowned but something told me that was going to kill me, so I just tilted my head a little to the side and watched him cautiously.

“What are you talking about? I told you I was all jacked up over her.”

He shook his head and pointed a finger at my face. “Jacked up is not the same thing as being in love. Why in the hell did you just let her walk away yesterday?”

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about.” That was a lie, but I didn’t know where he was getting his information from, so I wasn’t ready to admit defeat just yet.

“Jet.” He sighed so deeply I could practically feel his exasperation through the floorboards. “You drank your weight in whiskey last night. For most dudes, that would mean you spent the night puking in the john or passed out in a yard somewhere. You, my friend, spent the night telling anyone who would listen about a girl with whiskey-colored eyes who just broke your heart. When that wasn’t enough, you told a very nice, very pretty girl who happened to think it was sweet and romantic that you were acting like a lovesick fool, that you were never having sex again because you weren’t a stud for hire, and that if it took a sweater vest to make her love you, then you would just argyle it up.

“Said hottie was still willing to come home with you, and, in fact, had her hand almost down the front of your pants, when you called her Ayden, not once, not twice, but three freaking times. Then she just thought you were sad. You were a mess, still are, and I don’t get why, if you feel that way about a girl who obviously has some pretty intense feelings for you as well, you’re just letting her slip away.”

I was in no mood for this kind of heart-to-heart. In fact, I was in no mood to think about Ayden or anything that had happened yesterday at all, but Rowdy wasn’t going anywhere and it wasn’t like I was in a hurry to go back to the house and face either her or Cora.

“She’s always running away. She tells me over and over again that I really don’t know her and she made it pretty clear, even as far back as last winter, that all she wanted was a quick hook-up. I don’t have it in me to be someone’s mistake. Look what that did to my mom.

“I’m going to go on this tour. I’m going to write an entire album of songs about how shitty it feels to get your heart two-stepped on by a chick with mile-long legs and cowboy boots, and then maybe when I get drunk enough, I’m going to take a hot Spanish girl to bed and let her whisper all kinds of things I don’t understand in my ear.”