Authors: Jay Crownover
with school and work to have a boyfriend.”
“If he was the right guy you wouldn’t have felt that way. You would have made the time because you
wanted to be with him.”
She looked at me with both blond brows raised to her hairline. “Are you, Mr. Manwhore of the Century,
seriously trying to give me relationship advice?”
I rolled my eyes, which made my head scream in protest. “Just because there hasn’t been one girl I
wanted to hang out with exclusively doesn’t mean I don’t know the difference between quality and
quantity.”
“Could have fooled me. Gabe just wanted more than I was willing to give him. It’s going to be a pain
because my mom and dad both loved him.”
“True that; from what I’ve heard he was pretty much custom-made to make your folks happy. What do
you mean he wanted more than you were willing to give? Did he try to put a rock on your finger after only
six months?”
She gave me a look and curled her lip in a sneer. “Not even close, he just wanted things to be more
serious than I wanted them to be.”
I laughed a little and rubbed between my eyebrows. My headache had turned into a dull throb but was
starting to be manageable. I needed to ask her to swing by a Starbucks or something if I was going to get
through this afternoon.
“Is that your prissy way of telling me that he was trying to get in your pants and you weren’t having it?”
She narrowed her eyes at me and pulled off the freeway at the exit that took us toward Brookside.
“I need you to stop by Starbucks before going to my parents’ house, and don’t think I didn’t notice you
aren’t answering my question.”
“If we stop we’re going to be late. And not every boy thinks with what’s in their pants.”
“The sky isn’t going to fall on us if we show up five minutes behind Margot’s schedule. And you have
got to be kidding me—you strung that loser along for six months without giving it up? What a joke.”
That made me flat-out laugh at her. I laughed so hard that I had to hold my head in both hands as my
whiskey-logged brain started screaming at me again. I gasped a little and looked at her with watery eyes. “If
you really believe that he wasn’t interested in getting in your pants, you aren’t nearly as smart as I always
thought you were. Every single dude under the age of ninety is trying to get in your pants, Shaw—
especially if he’s thinking that he’s your boy. I’m a guy, I know this shit.”
She bit her lip again, conceding I probably had a valid point as she pulled the car into the coffee shop’s
parking lot. I practically bolted out of the car, eager to stretch my legs and get a little distance from her
typical haughty attitude.
There was a line when I got inside, and I took a quick look around to see if I recognized anyone.
Brookside is a pretty small town and usually when I stopped by on the weekends I inevitably ran into
someone I used to go to school with. I hadn’t bothered to ask Shaw if she wanted me to grab her anything
because she was being all uppity about having to stop in the first place. It was almost my turn to order
when my phone started blasting a Social Distortion song in my pocket. I dug it out after ordering a big-ass
black coffee and took a spot by the counter next to a cute brunette who was trying her hardest to not get
caught checking me out.
“What up?”
I could hear the music in the shop blaring behind Nash when he asked, “How did this morning go?”
Nash knew my faults and bad habits better than anyone, and the reason we had maintained our
friendship as long as we had was because he never judged me.
“Sucked. I’m hungover, grumpy, and about to sit through yet another forced family function. Plus,
Shaw is in rare form today.”
“How was the chick from last night?”
“No clue. I don’t even remember leaving the bar with her. Apparently I did a huge piece on her side so
she was a little pissed that I didn’t remember who she was, so ouch.”
He chuckled on the other end of the line. “She told you that, like, six times last night. She even tried to
pull her top off to show you. And I drove your dumb ass home last night, drunko. I tried to get you to
leave at, like, midnight but you weren’t having any of it, as usual. I had to drive your truck home and then
take a cab back to get my car.”
I snorted and reached for the coffee when the guy behind the counter called my name. I noticed the
brunette’s eyes follow the hand that wrapped around the cardboard cup. It was the hand that had the flared
head of a king cobra on it, the snake’s forked tongue making the
L
in my name that was inked across my
four knuckles. The rest of the snake wound its way up my forearm and around my elbow. The brunette’s
mouth made a little O of surprise so I flashed her a wink and walked back to the BMW.
“Sorry, dude. How did your appointment go?”
Nash’s uncle Phil had opened the tattoo shop years ago on Capitol Hill when it mainly catered to
gangbangers and bikers. Now with the influx of young urbanites and hipsters populating the area, the
Marked was one of the busiest tattoo parlors in town. Nash and I met in art class in the fifth grade and have
been inseparable since. In fact, ever since we were twelve our plan was to move to the city and work for
Phil. We both had mad skills and the personality to make the shop bump with business so Phil had no
qualms apprenticing us and putting us to work before we were both in our twenties. It was killer to have a
friend in the same field; I had a plethora of ink on my skin that ranged from not-so-great to great that
chronicled Nash’s evolution as a tattoo artist, and he could state the same thing about me.
“I finished that back piece that I’ve been working on since July. It turned out better than I thought and
the dude is talking about doing the front. I’ll take it, because he’s a fat tipper.”
“Nice.” I was juggling the phone and the coffee, trying to open the door to the car when a female voice
stopped me in my tracks.
“Hey.” I looked over my shoulder and the brunette was standing a car over with a smile on her face. “I
really like your tattoos.”
I smiled back at her and then jumped, nearly spilling scalding hot coffee down my crotch as Shaw
shoved the door open from the inside.
“Thanks.” If we had been closer to home and Shaw wasn’t already putting the car in reverse I probably
would have taken a second to ask the girl for her number. Shaw shot me a look of contempt that I promptly
ignored, and I went back to my conversation with Nash. “Rome is home. He got in an accident and Shaw
said he’s got a few weeks of R and R coming to him. I guess that’s why Mom was blowing my phone up all
week.”
“Kick ass. Ask him if he wants to roll with us for a few days. I miss that surly bastard.”
I sipped on the coffee and my head finally started to calm down. “That’s the plan. I’ll hit you up on my
way home and let you know what the story is.”
I flicked my thumb across the screen to end the call and settled back into the seat. Shaw scowled angrily
at me and I swore her eyes glowed. Really. I have never seen anything that green, even in nature, and when
she gets mad they are just otherworldly.
“Your mom called while you were busy flirting. She’s mad that we’re late.”
I sucked on more of the black nectar of the gods and started tapping out a beat on my knee with my free
hand. I was always kind of a fidgety guy and the closer we got to my parents’ house, the worse it usually
got. Brunch was always stilted and forced. I couldn’t figure out why they insisted on going through with it
every single week and couldn’t figure out why Shaw enabled the farce, but I went, even when I knew
nothing would ever change.
“She’s mad that
you’re
late. We both know she couldn’t care less if I’m there or not.” My fingers moved
faster and faster as she wheeled the car into a gated community and passed rows and rows of cookie-cutter
minimansions that were built back into the mountains.
“That’s not true and you know it, Rule. I do not suffer through these car rides every weekend, subject
myself to the delight of your morning-after nastiness because your parents want
me
to have eggs and
pancakes every Sunday. I do it because they want to see
you
, want to try to have a relationship with you no
matter how many times you hurt them or push them away. I owe it to your parents and, more important, I
owe it to Remy to try to make you act right even though lord knows that’s almost a full-time job.”
I sucked in a breath as the blinding pain that always came when someone mentioned Remy’s name
barreled through my chest. My fingers involuntarily opened and closed around the coffee cup and I
whipped my head around to glare at her.
“Remy wouldn’t be all over my ass to try and be something to them I’m not. I was never good enough
for them, and never will be. He understood that better than anyone and worked overtime to try and be
everything to them I never could be.”
She sighed and pulled the car to a stop in the driveway behind my dad’s SUV. “The only difference
between you and Remy is that he let people love him, and you”—she yanked open the driver’s door and
glared at me across the space that separated us—“you have always been determined to make everyone who
cares about you prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt. You’ve never wanted to be easy to love, Rule, and
you make damn sure that nobody can ever forget it.” She slammed the door with enough force that it rattled
my back teeth and made my head start to throb again.
It has been three years. Three lonely, three empty, three sorrow-filled years since the Archer brothers
went from a trio to a duo. I am close to Rome—he’s awesome and has always been my role model when it
comes to being a badass—but Remy was my other half, both figuratively and literally. He was my identical
twin, the light to my dark, the easy to my hard, the joy to my angst, the perfect to my oh-so-totally fucked
up, and without him I was only half the person I would ever be. It has been three years since I called him in
the middle of the night to come pick me up from some lame-ass party because I had been too drunk to
drive. Three years since he left the apartment we shared to come get me—zero questions asked—because
that’s just what he did.
It’s been three years since he lost control of his car on a rainy and slick I-25 and slammed into the back
of a semi truck going well over eighty. Three years since we put my twin in the ground and my mother
looked at me with tears in her eyes and stated point-blank, “It should have been you” as they lowered Remy
into the ground.
It’s been three years and his name alone is still enough to drop me to my knees, especially coming from
the one person in the world Remy had loved as much as he loved me.
Remy was everything I wasn’t—clean-cut, well dressed, and interested in getting an education and
building a secure future. The only person on the planet who was good enough and classy enough to match
all the magnificence that he possessed was Shaw Landon. The two of them had been inseparable since the
first time he brought her home when she was fourteen and trying to escape the fortress of the Landon
compound. He insisted they were just friends, that he loved Shaw like a sister, that he just wanted to protect
her from her awful, sterile family, but the way he was with her was full of reverence and care. I knew he
loved her, and since Remy could do no wrong, Shaw had quickly become an honorary member of my
family. As much as it galled me, she was the only one who really, truly understood the depth of my pain
when it came to losing him.
I had to take a few extra minutes to get my feet back under me so I sucked back the rest of the coffee
and shoved open the door. I wasn’t surprised to see a tall figure coming around the SUV as I labored out of
the sports car. My brother was an inch or so taller than me and built more along the lines of a warrior. His
dark-brown hair was buzzed in a typical military cut and his pale-blue eyes, the same icy shade as mine,
looked tired as he forced a smile at me. I let out a whistle because his left arm was in a cast and sling, he
had a walking boot on one foot, and there was a nasty line of black stitches running through one of his
eyebrows and across his forehead. The Weedwacker that had attacked my hair had clearly gotten a good
shot at my big bro, too.
“Looking good, soldier.”
He pulled me to him in a one-armed hug and I winced for him when I felt the taped-up side of his body
clearly indicating some injury beyond the busted ribs. “I look about as good as I feel. You look like a clown
getting out of that car.”
“I look like a clown no matter what when I’m around that girl.” He barked out a laugh and rubbed a
rough hand through my spiky hair.