Draw (Gentry Boys #1)(80)

“I hope so.”

Declan merely nodded and stayed quiet. The needle hurt more than I thought it would but I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind at all.





CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT


CORD



Creed glanced over as I took my phone out of my pocket. I stared at Saylor’s last text message for a long while.

“What?” he grunted, his eyes on the road.

We weren’t going anywhere, not really. We’d scoped out the frat house just north of the university and we were just driving around now, waiting for the daylight to fade completely. I didn’t want to venture a guess what would happen after that.

“Nothing,” I told him and shoved the phone back into my pants. It hurt picturing her somewhere down in Emblem, waiting for a response from me.

Creed was focused. There was a hard determination in him tonight which blotted out everything else. He didn’t even ask what Chase and I had talked about or why our brother had sounded so defeated as we left him alone in his hospital room.

I punched the dashboard with irritation. “How long are we gonna drive in f*cking circles?”

“All right.” He pulled to the left and made a u-turn. “Let’s start watching the place.”

“What are we looking for, Creed? Do you really think you’ll catch one or two of them coincidentally hanging out on the front lawn, waiting for us to come kick their asses?”

“Maybe,” he answered with narrowed eyes. “Cord, I told you I’d take this. No need for us both to go down.”

“One of us goes down and we all go down. That’s the way it’s always been. That’s the way it always will be.”

“Then quit your premenstrual bitching and roll with it.”

Within five minutes we were sitting across the street and three houses down from the frat house. There was a light on in the front room but other than that there didn’t appear to be much going on there.

“You sure that’s it?” I squinted.

“That’s it,” he grumbled. He opened up the window and leaned outside slightly.

I’d always counted on my instincts and they’d rarely been wrong. Right now they were screaming at me to get the hell out of there. But one look at Creed’s resolute face told me he wouldn’t go with me. So I stayed. I stayed because I couldn’t bear to leave him on his own.

But I was having trouble containing my agitation. After rifling through the glove compartment I came across an old spiral notebook.

“You got a pen?” I asked.

“You gonna write a letter or something?”

“Yeah, my last f*cking will and testament. Now can I have the damn pen?”

Creed reached into the backseat and felt around the floor before coming through with a ballpoint pen. “Happy now?”

I didn’t answer. I flipped to a blank page, and propped the notebook on my knees. The empty space on the paper was calling to the pen in my hand. Without a plan in mind, I began to lightly sketch, aware that my brother was watching me.

I’d forgotten what a release it was, to create something with my hands. I knew what to draw as soon the pen hit the paper. It was the only face in my mind.

“Saylor,” Creed said, nodding to the emerging picture.

I kept going, filling in the details as best I could with the limited tools at hand. I’d drawn her in profile, with a pensive expression and her long hair falling around her face. It was the way she looked when she figured no one was noticing her. I sighed and dropped the pen.

“She told me she heard you sing.”

Creed was startled. “What? Oh yeah. Her cousin’s girlfriend brought out the guitar and asked if I would do something with it.”

“Why don’t you do something with it?”

He looked irritated. “You really want to talk about music right now?”

“No. I want to talk about you. We’ve told you a thousand times there’s something to that talent you’ve got.”

Creed shifted and exhaled, looking away again.

I looked at the house. Another light flicked on upstairs. “How do we know, Creed?”

“What are you fussing about now?”

“Dammit, would you at least look at me! We don’t know that these are the guys. It’s a big fat f*cking guess.”

“What the hell do you want, Cord? You want an ironclad guarantee? Maybe we should just wait around and hope that they’ll turn themselves in out of a sense of civic duty.”

I shook my head miserably. The minutes ticked past. A couple of guys wandered out of the house and got into a convertible. Creed tensed and stared at them closely but they weren’t the ones we were looking for.

After a while I began to relax. There were probably a few dozen guys who came and went from that place every day. We were looking for two in particular, named Jay Pruitt and Henley Carter. It suddenly seemed very unlikely that they would just happen to roll up while we waited. I picked up the pen and began idly working on the sketch again. I figured after a few more hours of this I might persuade Creed to give it a rest for the night.

My brother sat up suddenly. “Well now,” he said in a deadly tone, “here we go.”

I looked up. The man exiting a silver Prius was Jay Pruitt. He whistled as he started up the walk to the front door of the frat house.