Nash (Marked Men #4)(11)

Saint wasn’t lying, I did taste like a barroom floor. That was an entirely different mess I needed to try and clean up. I knew she only stopped by out of some kind of professional obligation, because she was nice and kind, and obviously possessed a huge heart. I knew she wasn’t particularly fond of me, but she had looked past her dislike and offered comfort and soft words when I needed them most, and in repayment I had acted like a jackass. I needed to apologize and see if I could minimize some of the damage. I wanted her to like me, wanted her to think I was an all right guy, and not just because I thought she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. It went beyond her awesome hair, rocking body, and soft gray eyes. I wanted her to like me because she had a way about her, a delicate kind of sweetness that I wanted to wrap myself all up in. It didn’t make much sense, but nothing in my life right now did.

I had vague recollections of Saint from high school, still pretty but slightly heavier and desperately shy to the point of it being painful. She was smart and in all the accelerated programs Brookside High had offered, so our paths generally never crossed. There had been a point in time when I recalled our lockers being side by side and I had tried to engage her, made it a point to smile and say hi, but beyond that we moved in different circles and I don’t think she wanted to slum with the likes of me. Still I remembered her hair and those eyes … even then the light gray was full of kindness and understanding. She wasn’t the kind of chick my teenage self tried to get lucky with, mostly because she was out of my league intellectually and even then radiated a class I didn’t understand. Rule and I had spent most of our teenage years screwing anything that moved and partying in ways that the older versions of ourselves marveled at now. We were a couple of unscrupulous horn balls, and girls like Saint Ford, then and now, were not the kind of girls that wanted to get tangled up with guys like us.

Only to everyone’s amazement Rule had settled down, was getting married in a few weeks to a bona fide society princess. She was just as smart, just as classy and beautiful as Saint, and she loved Rule with everything she had. Shaw Landon was any guy’s dream girl and Rule was the lucky bastard who’d landed her. Now he was going to make sure he got to keep her forever because he was putting a ring on her finger and changing her last name to his.

After a scalding-hot shower that made my skin red and woke me up enough to get my feet under me, I crawled into a pair of jeans and pulled a long-sleeved thermal over my head that had the logo of the tattoo shop where Rule and I worked on the front of it. Catching sight of myself in the mirror over my dresser, I had to wince. My face was covered in a week’s worth of stubble and my normally clear eyes were lined with red veins. Despite my outward appearance I was generally a pretty mellow guy. I had learned to go with the flow and take things as they came. I had to with a guy like Rule as my partner in crime. He had enough attitude and a desire to stir shit up that I never needed to be “that guy”—the volatile, unpredictable type. Plus when you put bold and bright tattoos on the sides of your head, people took it at face value that you weren’t someone they wanted to mess with. However, right now the reflection staring back at me was totally “that guy.” I looked angry, confused, ready to throw down for no reason, and behind it all I looked sad … really really sad.

I sighed and pulled a plain black baseball hat on over my shaved head. I grabbed a hoodie and met Rule back in the living room. He had thrown the discarded pizza boxes and Chinese food containers away and tossed the empty bottles of Patrón I had lying around into the recycle bin. We had lived together for a long time before he had bought a house and moved in with Shaw. He knew where everything was and just gave me a “really” look when I shrugged.

“I was thirsty.”

“Obviously. Between you and Ayden, I should buy stock in Patrón.”

Ayden was Shaw’s best friend and the wife of another one of our childhood buddies. She was model pretty, had legs that made men stupid, spoke with a light southern twang, and could drink most of us under the table. Jet Keller was another one of my friends who’d found the quintessential dream girl and decided to keep her until the end of time. It seemed to be happening to everyone around me lately.

Even Rome, Rule’s older brother and someone else I looked up to because of the kind of man he was, had found his perfect match. I don’t know that anyone would consider Cora Lewis a dream girl. She was too bossy, a little too mouthy, and a whole lot of stubborn packed into a small, colorful package, but Rome seemed to think she was great. They were two very different people, but together they worked, so much so that Cora was expecting their first baby sometime in March. Everyone I cared about was falling in love and settling down. It made me happy but also made me nervous because I had seen what happened in the name of love when someone made life-changing choices based on it. I was a child that had been cast aside by an uncaring mother in the name of love.

We walked out the front door and I turned around to lock it behind me. The door across the hall opened and the goddess that lived across the hall came strolling out with a gym bag in her hand. She was pretty, really pretty, in an overly exaggerated way. Had I not had so much on my mind and still felt like such a bastard for treating Saint like I did the night before, there was a good chance I would’ve been all over welcoming her to the building in a much more personal and hands-on way. As it was, all I could do was offer her a brief nod in greeting as her gaze slid over the top of Rule’s crazy hair to the tips of his worn black boots.