Brutally Beautiful(53)

I stared at her blankly.

“Holy crap, you like Kade.”

“No. Yes. No.”

“You can’t fix him, Sam,” she whispered. “He’s not broken and bleeding. It’s something inside his mind, babe.”

“I didn’t say I wanted to fix him…”

Bree sucked in her cheeks. “Really? You’re standing in front of a mirror putting lip-gloss on and I can see in your head, I can see it…”

The slamming of the trailer door and hooting alerted us to Dylan and Fran’s arrival. Grabbing our coats, we followed their voices and found them lounging on one of the couches in a deep conversation about the healthy effects of drinking red wine as opposed to beer. Fran was going off on one of his tangents, stopped, looked me up and down, smiled and said, “You look nice tonight,” and continued his rant.

Nice. Isn’t that the adjective every woman wants to hear?

Fran’s rant took us all the way through the drive into town to a huge bar called Shenanigans, where a decent sized crowd sat drinking and listening to people horribly singing Karaoke. I pointed Dylan to the empty booth closest to the exit. “Let’s sit back here.”

Natalie waved to us from the bar and skipped over with a round of beer in her arms and winked, “First round is on me! And I ordered chips and dip; it’s so delicious here. So good.”

Fran attacked poor Natalie with another enthralling conversation, explaining what the rest of us had heard him drone on about for the entire car ride there, how healthier a glass of red wine is for your body. Dylan laughed and shook his head as Natalie sat listening closely to everything Fran hit her with.

After another round, I was bored out of my mind listening to Fran and Natalie telling me what I needed to do to live a healthier lifestyle, and Bree looked about ready to stick a fork in one of their eyes. In one large gulp, I drained my beer in front of the both of them and slammed my bottle down against the table hard. When the chips and dip arrived, it just got worse. As soon as Fran tasted the chips and dip, he would not shut up about it. Would. Not. Shut. Up. Maybe it was just me. Maybe I was losing my patience and easily irritated. I looked at Dylan and Bree who both wore the same expression as I did. No, it was all Fran.

“Lainey, you have to try this sauce,” he moaned, through a mouth full of chips.

It’s dip, not sauce. I took a chip because I was starving, but I didn’t feel like dipping into a huge bucket of dip where everybody was double dipping their saliva. Ugh.

“Lainey, just dip it in the sauce. This sauce is delicious. You have to try it. Dip it in the sauce. Just dip it in the sauce,” he pushed.

What the hell kind of sauce fetish owns this moron? “Jesus, Mary, and Jerome…I don’t want to just dip it in the sauce,” I said calmly. I wanted to slam my fist into the stupid bowl of chips to shut him up, but instead, I sat cool and composed, plotting how I was going to get him and Natalie together, so he would leave me the hell alone. I grabbed Dylan’s beer and downed the rest of his as he sat back beerless, and laughed at me.

When I looked up, my heart nearly surged out of my chest. Kade had arrived and was walking his way over from the door. While it was true that, everyone seemed to turn to look at him with some sort of fear, I just looked at him with awe, knowing how strong he must be to go against his comfort zone, and he was drop dead gorgeous. Dressed casually in a worn pair of jeans and a beaten to hell leather jacket, he looked the part of a dangerous, reckless, and completely out of control man. It made my cheeks flush, and it made my insides heat, knowing that he came here because I asked him to.