Hotter ‘N Hell (Mississippi Smoke #2)

Prologue

Saylor

Was it a sin to hate the dead? Not that I was worried about sins, but I was curious. To think, two months ago, I had not only witnessed someone dying, but it was the boy I loved. The one I had loved for as long as I could remember. It was a horrific nightmare, except I didn’t wake up from it. It was all real. One minute, it had been a normal Friday night, his arm around me, and the next, he had been bleeding from his mouth, struggling to breathe as he lay on the pavement. And all I could do was scream.

The details of every second replayed in my head when I closed my eyes at night. Sleep only came for me now because of the meds my parents had insisted I be put on. Not just for sleep, but also the panic attacks. They were new as well. I hadn’t understood them at first and thought perhaps I was about to die too. The world had slowly faded to black, I passed out, and my body had started breathing again.

Dramatic.

That was what they were all saying about me. I didn’t have to hear it. I could see it in their eyes. The way they saw my reaction as selfish. Seeking attention. Making it all about me. Bane Cash, my dead boyfriend’s older brother, had actually said that to my face. He was a bastard like that. Apparently after witnessing the death of the boy you’d loved and then finding out that he had left a baby momma behind, you should be okay with it. Accept it and carry on.

My life had been a lie, and I’d not even known it. But falling apart over that was selfish. I was a bitch because Crosby Cash was dead and he’d been fucking some other girl behind my back without a condom. Now, she was having his baby when I had always thought I’d have Crosby’s babies. That I’d marry him.

Crosby wasn’t here, and yet I hated him so much. I wished he were alive so I could scream at him, hit him over and over again. Demand he tell me why he had done it, tell me when he’d stopped loving me. Because I swore to God, if my mother, my father, or my best friend—Gathe Bowen—told me one more time that Crosby had loved me, I was going to jump out of a fucking window. He had not loved me. Lying to me did not take away the pain of his betrayal.

I was angry. It boiled inside me, ready to explode at all times. The rage that I couldn’t find an outlet for was taking over the person I had once been. I didn’t recognize myself when I looked in the mirror. That girl had died with Crosby. He’d taken any hope of me eventually healing and finding happiness.

My mother wanted to claim it was PTSD, like the doctor had said, but I knew that wasn’t it. She could hold on to her excuse for my behavior if it made her feel better. I would keep my truth to myself. There was nothing left of who I had been. I was a cold, empty shell who had to go through the motions to make everyone around me happy—or at least ease their worries.

I wouldn’t mourn him. Not anymore. It was impossible to mourn someone you hated.