Draw (Gentry Boys #1)(30)

“Dinner?” I spat incredulously. “Funny thing is I’ve turned over a new leaf and no longer wish to dine with men who assault me. And you’re wrong, Devin, I do need to be a bitch about it. So take your laptop and shove it straight up your waxed ass.”

His mouth hung in the shape of a comically surprised O for a moment as the hand holding the laptop wilted. Then the familiar wrath flashed in his dark eyes and he smashed the thing on the hard floor, as he had done before. I started to back away as he came for me. This could be bad.

At the crack of the door being kicked open I whirled around to see Cord barreling through. The look on his face was madness. I said his name, desperately trying to deflect him. It didn’t work.





CHAPTER TEN


CORD



“Please, Cord,” she’d said and I couldn’t refuse her.

So I did as she asked and stayed on the other side of the door as she headed in to confront her nightmare alone. I leaned close to the door and listened, hearing Saylor’s voice. There was no yelling, not yet. God help him if he hurt her. I didn’t care how rich or connected he was; if he even brushed against her elbow too hard he would be wearing his own blood for a suit.

I didn’t walk the edge like Creed did. My feet were firmly planted and I knew, always, when to lash out and when to pull back. It was why I took more than my fair share of the fights. I was evenhanded, cool.

But as I heard the sound of his voice, this unknown prick who’d damaged that sweet girl, I was up on the railing and staring into the abyss. All he had to do was make a wrong move loud enough for me to hear and I would jump into the dark hole which awaited.

And then it happened.

He yelled and she yelled. Then there was a loud crash which was all I needed to launch into action. The door was easy to break and though I vaguely heard Saylor calling my name in shock I went for him anyway.

He was exactly what I’d expected; groomed and soft, the product of money and gym equipment. One of his arms, the one Saylor had broken in desperate self-defense, was bandaged stiff. But it was his eyes which were least surprising. They shone with real fear and I wouldn’t have been stunned to look down and see him pissing himself. Men like him, whether they came from a shiny tower by the ocean or a crappy trailer in the desert, were all alike. Hitters who were f*cking terrified of being hit.

His throat unleashed an incoherent gargle as I grabbed him by the hair and let loose with a cracking punch which split his nose. He waved his broken arm in the air as if to complain of the unfairness but when had the son of a bitch ever been fair to Saylor?

As I hit him again and again, he wasn’t some sorry rich bastard with a streak of cruelty. He was worse. He was my old man and he deserved to be f*cking maimed for the agony he’d wrought.

“CORD!”

She was yelling, sobbing, throwing her body against mine to pushing me back and stop me. I blinked.

Saylor was still clutching at me. Her head was lowered and her long brown hair hid her face. At my feet was a sniveling shit pile who called himself a man. I bent close to his ear. I was aware that I was speaking but didn’t even recognize my own voice.

“Listen to me, *,” I hissed. “You touch her again, I’ll kill you. You try and pull any bullshit with the law over this and I’ll kill you just the same. Nod if you understand what the f*ck I just said to you.”

He held his hand over his nose and moaned. But he nodded anyway.

Saylor was still holding on to me. But it wasn’t because she wanted to be close. She was trying to head off whatever move I made next. I pointed to the boxes by the door.

“This your stuff?” I asked her.

“Yeah,” she managed to say. She raised her head and looked at me. What I saw in her eyes made my mouth run dry. I had terrified her. When she saw me she saw a monster.

Calmly I stacked the boxes on top of one another and lifted them. I wasn’t sure whether she would follow me out. In her head it might have been a pretty awful choice; me or Devin.

Saylor said nothing, even when we reached the truck and got back out onto the road. She was done crying; I glanced at her a few times and saw her staring straight ahead with a look of baffled shock. She didn’t speak again until we were closing in on the windmills outside Palm Springs.

“Do you want to tell me now?”

I tightened my hands around the steering wheel. “What?”

She stared at me evenly. She was no longer horrified by the sight of me. But rather than the shy warmth I’d gotten used to, her expression was distant. “Why were your knuckles all bruised the night we ran into each other, as if you’d been ramming your fists into walls?”

“No, not walls,” I told her.

“People?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

There was no point in skating around the issue any longer. But I didn’t want to talk about it while careening down the Interstate. Saylor waited while I pulled over on the next freeway exit. It was the most intense part of the afternoon and the sun was brutal. I messed with the air conditioning setting while she sat quietly.

“My brothers and I earn cash winning fights.”

“You mean illegal fights?”

I shrugged. “Underground fights. I guess it would be illegal if someone decided to see it that way. What’s the difference?”