The Buy-In (Graham Brothers #1)(46)

The drummers do some kind of elaborate finish, which isn’t quite synchronized, and then halt, all looking on with expectant, acne-dusted faces.

Suddenly, Ashlee’s words echo in my mind. I would be a better candidate for keeping Jo if I were married. If I had a stable, two-parent household. This feels like the worst kind of joke. I swallow thickly, my fingers trembling as I glance at Wolf. My stomach is doing more churning than a washer set to spin cycle.

“I’m sorry, Wolf. I can’t marry you.”

He stands, totally unbothered by my refusal. “My bunker is big enough for you and Jo. Plus, I heard one of your toilets is broken. I have three working bathrooms. Three.” He holds up three fingers, just to make this abundantly clear.

Three bathrooms is the best-sounding part of this proposal. Wolf slips a hand around my waist. “Come on, Lindy. Are you sure?”

Pat looks like he’s about to start foaming at the mouth. “She said no, buddy. Step away from the woman.”

Does it make me some kind of backwards, 15th century woman that his possessiveness makes me tremble?

Sorry, modern women. Sorry, feminism.

No, actually, I’m not at all sorry. Feminists should support my right to choose what I like, and I apparently like growly, overly possessive displays.

Wolf squeezes me, and I step out of his arms. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

He nods. “When I heard you needed to get married to help keep custody of Jo, I just wanted to offer. You know, to do my part.”

It’s such a cliché to say the world seems to stop spinning on its axis, but that is exactly how the moment feels. Add in the sound of a record screeching to a halt and we’ve got a pair of perfectly overused descriptions.

“You heard what?” The words come out of me as a hiss.

First, Tabitha knows about the custody hearing. And now, Wolf has heard rumors I need to find a husband?

Kim. It has to be Kim. I remember how she was hovering right outside Ashlee’s door. Kim must have been listening, and she told someone. Not Wolf, because they don’t run in the same circles at all. She hasn’t posted on Neighborly or Winnie would have removed it.

The point is: Kim told someone. And someone told Wolf.

I am standing inside a pressure cooker, and the lid’s about to blow off. I’m not the only one, I realize. The visible tension in Pat’s body matches what I’m feeling inside. His brothers seem like they’re barely holding him in check.

One of the drummers—because yes, there’s still a whole drumline of high school students witnessing this fiasco—drops a drumstick.

Chevy takes a shuffling step closer, as though he senses the rising tension.

“Who told you that?” I ask Wolf. I am deadly, deceptively calm, which fools him into thinking I am casual about this.

“Sorry, hon.” Wolf winks. “I don’t kiss and tell.”

He couldn’t have chosen a worse phrase to use.

It acts like a starter’s pistol for Pat, who surges toward Wolf with a roar. Chevy steps between them saying, “Whoa, now, fellas,” just as Pat’s fist flies between the bars.

Chevy goes down hard.

He pitches forward into Wolf, Winnie screams, and the drum line, perhaps out of sheer nerves, launches into a song that sounds a little like a poor man’s version of Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off.”

Wolf and Chevy topple to the floor, taking a chair and a whole stack of folders with them. Papers flutter down like supersized confetti. Pat is still shouting threats at Wolf, and his brothers are holding him back.

And I—I am in the eye of the hurricane, watching the chaotic mess swirling around me. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

At that moment, a dark-haired man walks into the room wearing a suit I can tell from here is expensive. No one but me seems to notice him until he sets down his briefcase and puts his fingers between his teeth.

The whistle he emits is so piercing that all movement stops. Dogs in Austin are probably howling.

The man surveys the state of the room and grins. “Looks like somebody needs a lawyer.”





Chapter Fourteen





Pat





“Thanks to my lawyery magic, you are free to go, gentlemen,” Thayden announces, waltzing into the small room where we’ve been waiting since Chevy unlocked our cell. The space seems to function as both an interrogation room and the break room, based on the burned coffee smell emanating from an ancient pot in the corner. Between our stiff, mud-crusted clothes and these metal folding chairs, we are all ready for a change of pace.

“About time,” James mutters, shoving his chair back under the table with a loud screech.

But as I stand, Thayden grabs my shoulder, and his grin widens. “Oh, no no no. You, my dear Patrick, will be joining me in front of a judge today.”

I swear our lawyer and friend is having way too good of a time with all this. He’s on his way to being demoted to almost-friend. The amused smirk has not left his face since he walked into the fray thirty minutes ago, right after I accidentally assaulted a police officer.

Hitting Chevy was truly the cherry on top of my last twenty-four hours, in which my brothers came, saw, and dismissed Sheet Cake, we all got arrested for disturbing the peace at a local “bar,” and I got to see Lindy proposed to and pawed at by a man named Wolf. I’d like to stuff him in a shipping container like in the movie Madagascar.