Better when He's Bold (Welcome to the Point #2)(25)
I nodded numbly in agreement and rubbed the back of my neck with my hand.
“Any word on who might be trying to communicate this particular message?”
He shrugged. “Who knows? Someone trying to test the limits of whatever kind of agreement you’ve worked out with Nassir? Someone angling to get you both out of the way? Someone with a grudge who thinks they can set you up? In this place, the suspects are always too numerous to name, so you better be playing the game to win.”
Well, losing wasn’t an option, and I only ever played to win. I got to my feet and stretched my arms up over my head. I groaned out loud when I heard my spine crack all the way down. Titus rolled his eyes at me.
“Why are you still living in this place?”
“Because I feel comfortable here.”
I was never going back to the palatial mansion my parents owned on the Hill. I wasn’t going to pretend like what I did had a place in the quiet burb like Bax and Dovie, and living in a run-down apartment was no different from crashing at the loft. Plus the security was better here.
“How can you be comfortable? You don’t even have any furniture. What do you do when you bring a girl over? Tell her to give you five minutes to get a rubber on and pull the bed out of the couch? Not even you have that much game, pretty boy.”
He was wrong. I had more than enough game to sell that and anything else I wanted to pretty much any chick who came along. The problem was there hadn’t been anyone in longer than I wanted to admit that I was interested in trying to sell anything to. Except for Brysen, and with her, man, I didn’t need a bed, didn’t need much of anything to get the mood going. Just the flutter of her eyelashes and the way her pretty mouth pouted and curled and I was ready to make things happen on the drop of a dime. If her phone hadn’t rung yesterday, there was a good chance I would have christened my bathroom floor in the most spectacular manner.
I snorted at him and reached for the pair of jeans I had discarded the night before.
“Why do you care where I’m crashing? Bax is playing domestic house cat, he has a good life and a good girl. Are you trying to turn me into your pet project now that your little brother has his life all figured out?”
He swore at me and stalked to the opening that led to the hallway over the garage. He looked at me over his shoulder with a scowl.
“I know you aren’t a bad dude, Race. Your life got f*cked, but that’s not anything different than happened to the rest of us. Yeah, it had to do with the choices you made, but I respect that you were doing what you felt like you had to do in order to keep your sister safe. I just wonder how long you can be a guy with dirty hands who still claims to want to live a clean life.”
I didn’t know the answer to that, didn’t really know that it was possible either, but I was going to give it my best shot to make it happen.
“I wash my hands when I get home, Titus.”
He barked out a bitter-sounding laugh. “I wish it was that easy.”
I followed him to the top of the stairs and asked as an afterthought, “What would you do if you had a friend you thought might be being stalked?”
He stopped and turned on the stairs to gaze up at me.
“Why do you think that?”
“She’s been getting weird text messages, and last night someone took aim at her with a car. She’s just a normal chick. Goes to school, lives out in the burbs, kinda by Dovie and Bax. She even lives at home. This is not a girl who should be feeling threatened and scared. It doesn’t have a place in the kind of life she’s got going on.”
Concern flashed across his face. “She got a wound-up ex or something you can look into?”
I shrugged because I didn’t know if the pissed off TA or legion of spurned suitors really counted as being wound up enough to be dangerous.
“I don’t know. I have a guy who owes me a favor or six keeping an eye on her for a minute, but I don’t like it. It doesn’t add up to me, and that means it’s going to bug me until I get it all figured out.”
“You need to be looking out for yourself. Add a pretty girl in the mix and you end up with a weak spot anyone from a million miles away can see. Just ask my brother.”
“I dunno, Titus. Bax got wrapped up in Dovie and suddenly cared enough to take on the entire world for her. Seems to me that when you add a pretty girl into the mix, that’s when you give a dangerous man something to really be dangerous for.”
He tilted his head to the side. “Maybe. If you get any solid info—a name, a number, a license plate on the car—give me a holler and I’ll see if I can run anything down for you.”
I told him thank you and watched him disappear into the bowels of the garage. I was sure he was making a mental note of all the plates on the cars so he could run them against any that were reported as stolen. Titus was a good man, but he was a cop first. He might let Bax and me slide without any hard proof, but if we ever gave him a reason to, he would have no issue putting both Bax and me behind bars, and I knew that in his mind he would be doing it for our own good.
I trudged to the shower of doom and decided after a restless night full of sexual frustration that it was going to be ice cubes and not fire today. The way my neck creaked and cracked really did give testimony to the fact that maybe I should look into getting a bed for the place. And the truth of the matter was, I knew, just knew, things with Brysen and me were far from over and I didn’t want to be the schmuck trying to put the moves on her in a place that had one chair, a foldout couch, and only a bottle of Scotch in the freezer. She deserved better than that. I could offer her better than that, but then what? She would leave and I would have to pretend like I wasn’t living this life where I was constantly on the alert, constantly thinking twenty moves ahead.