An Ounce of Hope (A Pound of Flesh #2)(31)

She knew too well the damage drugs could do. She also knew Max really shouldn’t be drinking. Substituting one addiction for another was something she knew plenty about.

“So,” Max continued with a sarcastic wave toward the bottles of spirits. “Unless the bourbon around here is laced with narcotics, which, I’ll be honest, would be f*cking stupendous, I’d like a shot of it, if it’s all the same to you.”

His words weren’t mean, but the tone he used was. It skittered down Grace’s spine and left her cold. It wasn’t as though she and Max were friends, as much as she wanted them to be, but the man sitting in front of her wasn’t who she’d grown to know. He was volatile, and sharp, and unsettled Grace to her very bones. Without another word, she turned and poured the drink. She placed it on the bar and watched as he took it from her, staring at it as if it were a grenade about to detonate.

Minutes passed and still he stared at the drink. His lips moved in inaudible mutterings until with a loud “f*ck it” he knocked the drink back. He hissed, cursed, and coughed, but the slam of the shot glass back on the wood bar was triumphant. “Another,” he ordered.

Grace’s heart clenched for him and the war blatantly raging within his head. “Max, honey, why—”

“Are you deaf?” he snapped, glaring at her. “Do your job and keep the drinks coming, okay? I don’t need a friend or a chat. I need to get shitfaced. That’s all.”

Wounded by his sharp tongue, Grace poured the drinks and he shot them.

Time and again he sat with the drink between his hands before he’d knock it back and, time and again, Grace’s urge to cry for him and the memories his actions evoked inside her intensified. His buddies from the site did nothing to help. They bought several rounds of drinks, as well as inviting a group of three girls over to join them. Although normally so indifferent to the women who approached him in Whiskey’s, tonight Max eyed the girls in a way that made Grace nauseous. It was feral and hungry.

Was this the dangerous stranger Deputy Yates had warned her about?

Was this the real Max O’Hare?

She didn’t know.

All she did know, when she watched Max stagger out of the bar hours later with his arm wrapped around an eager blonde thing with googly eyes and her hands on Max’s ass, was that the tiny piece of hope she’d kept deep inside, waiting patiently for someone good enough to share it with, had splintered into a thousand pieces.





There was banging.

Loud f*cking banging that rattled Max’s already hurting brain within his very skull. He lifted his head from his pillow, and damn if it wasn’t a lead weight, squinting against the sunlight pouring through the open drapes.

“Max, open the door.”

Motherf*cker.

Tate.

“Max.” His voice was hard, angry. “I don’t give a shit if I am a cripple; I will break this door down. United States Marine Corps, *. Let’s go. Get your stupid ass up. I don’t care if you’re naked, either. I’ll shoot whatever the f*ck I’ve not seen before.” He hammered the door further. “Now, Max. Get up! I know you’re in there.”

The room tilted like a freaking roller coaster when Max sat up and his stomach sloshed in a way that really didn’t feel good or normal. He stood on wobbly legs, pulled a pair of jeans over his underwear, and stumbled to the door, kicking a pizza box and an empty bottle of Jack out of the way.

“All right,” he croaked as he rested his forehead against the door and unlocked it. He took a deep breath and pulled the door open. When he saw Tate’s expression, he really wished he hadn’t.

“Morning, Starshine,” Tate snapped. “What. The. Actual. Fuck?”

Max leaned his cheek against the door’s edge, trying to put into words and full sentences just exactly what he’d been thinking when he went to the bar last night and drank his body weight in liquor.

“Get dressed,” Tate said. “We’re going out.”

Max glanced at his watch. It was past noon but he could easily have slept for another twelve hours. “Tate, man, I can’t, I need—”

“No,” Tate barked, his eyes flashing with a disappointment that made Max want to go fetal. “I’ve driven two hours to get here. I’m tired and I need coffee and I don’t give a shit about your hangover.”

Lacking the energy to argue back, and knowing he was the dick-head Tate was implying he was, Max pulled a clean T-shirt from a drawer, pulled on his boots, grabbed his wallet and his jacket, and headed out of the door, wishing the sledgehammer sticking in the front of his head would just back the f*ck off.

Max directed Tate into town, unable to drive them himself, and to the coffee shop he frequented, ordering the strongest coffee on the menu, as well as a chocolate muffin. They sat at the same table he’d been sitting at when Grace had joined him the day before. Max’s headache strengthened at the thought of her. Jesus. She must think him an absolute prick. He was an absolute prick.

“So you wanna explain to me why I got a phone call from you at two o’clock this morning, at three o’clock this morning, and at four o’clock this morning?” Tate asked, showing him the missed-calls list on his cell phone. “As well as several texts telling me how much you wanted to drink yourself to death, how you couldn’t stay clean, how you were giving up?” Tate dropped his cell to the table and crossed his arms over his chest, serious and stern despite the T-shirt he wore, which read “A salt with a deadly weapon” underneath a picture of a salt shaker holding up a gun to a pepper shaker.