Total pages in book: 135
Estimated words: 139088 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 695(@200wpm)___ 556(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139088 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 695(@200wpm)___ 556(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Brady was sitting in a booth in the back.
I headed that way.
He slid out when I got there, his smile not near the fun-loving, easy-going Brady I knew him to be.
Yup.
Something was on his mind.
Brady was about the same height as Knox. He had dark hair with a burnished cast, and a full, kickass russet beard that flirted with being almost too long, so obviously it was awesome.
He also had the prerequisite Nightingale built body and inherent confidence.
When we met him, we dubbed him Lumberjack Hottie, because he was so Lumberjack Hottie and he so worked it.
After we hugged hello, he waited for me to slide in (so, yeah…also the inherent Nightingale gentlemanly manners) before he slid in opposite me.
He already had a beer.
After I did a scan of the joint to ascertain if Cheynne was there coincidentally (she wasn’t, so it appeared stalking was a probability), I barely reached for the menu when the server was at our table.
I ordered an ale.
She took off.
“What’s shaking?” I asked Brady.
“You know where I work?” he asked back.
I nodded.
“Then you know everything’s shaking because everything always is,” he answered.
I smiled at him.
“Let’s order and get into it,” he said.
The way he said that didn’t sound promising, but I perused the menu, got stuck on the Nashville hot chicken sandwich and stopped looking, because I knew if I kept looking I’d probably find five other things I wanted, and then I’d be undecided.
A huge pet peeve of mine was when people hemmed and hawed over what they ordered, making the server return five times, and everyone at their table have to wait an extra twenty minutes to get to their food.
Find something you like. Stick.
And yes, this was partly because I was a server who got annoyed when I had to go back to a table five times for an order…but even when I was out in the wild, it irritated me.
I set the menu aside and saw Brady taking a sip of his beer.
“You going to karaoke?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he answered.
I smiled again. “What are you going to sing?”
He leveled his sky-blue eyes at me. “I’m only going as an observer.”
I knew this as truth.
The only male in our group who sang at karaoke nights was Tito (his song of choice? “The Lime in the Coconut” of course), and sometimes Titus (one of our informants-turned-friends, which kinda happened to all our informants—we Angels had a bent toward collecting people—bee-tee-dub: Titus tended to sing Teddy Swims and killed it).
The server came back with my ale, jotted down our orders and vamoosed.
I took a pull from my beer then shared, “Not to horn in on your action with whatever you wanted to talk about during this meet, but you should know I outed Knox and me to the girls on Saturday.”
FYI: I didn’t know if Knox had confided about us to any of the guys, even Cap (however, I doubted it, because Cap one hundred percent would have told Raye).
I just knew Brady knew about us because he overheard Knox talking to me on the phone when we were together and obviously cottoned on to when that was no longer the case.
He then got pissed when Cheyenne was introduced to our posse, and the rest was history.
At least now, I hoped it would really be history.
“So they know you and me are just flirty friends,” I finished.
“I think we should keep going,” he said.
I blinked at him, and a funny feeling stole over me.
We were just buds.
Yeah, he was a good flirt (then again, so was I…eek!), but we’d always been just buds.
Don’t get me wrong, he was gorgeous, but he…
Dammit.
He wasn’t Knox.
In other words, I never had those kinds of feelings for Brady.
Did he for me?
“Brady—” I began.
“You’re the shit, Luna, but it’s not that.”
Relieved I didn’t have another hot guy romantic minefield to navigate, I took another sip of beer and asked, “Then what is it?”
“Knox needs to get his head out of his ass.”
I would agree, though he might not be thinking the same things I was.
“About what?”
“About everything,” he bit off, looked away, took his own sip of beer, and I was just then realizing he was ticked.
“What’s going on, Brady?” I demanded.
He turned back to me. “He went in alone.”
He was talking about when Knox got shot.
“I know, that was messed up,” I agreed.
I had more to say, but I didn’t finish that either.
“Most of the guys didn’t even know he had that situation happening in his family.”
That totally tracked when it came to Knox.
Then again, it would. It probably wasn’t fun sharing your father and brothers were drug smugglers/warehousers/distributors, and your sister was hooked up with a man who had ambitions to be a criminal kingpin.
“You can understand why,” I said quietly.
“Sure,” Brady returned curtly. “If he’s going to live his life with them excised from it. His history is his own. It’s when he puts his ass on the line for whatever it is he was doing last Thursday night that’s the problem.”