Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
JENSEN
“I can’t believe you two.”
I glance up to where Della’s sitting in the window, coffee in her hand. Not a single hair is out of place, despite the chaos of the evening. The bar is empty, and we’re in the back room. Brothers went to lock up after taking Della’s gun and threatening to shoot everyone if they didn’t clear out.
I cock my head.
“You weren’t a little turned on?” I ask.
She purses her lips. The swinging door to my left creaks, and Brothers appears with another cup of coffee. He hands it over. I ease back against the wall, stretching my legs out. Everything hurts, from tonight and the two days before. My body doesn’t have quite the get up and go it used to.
Or maybe I’m just running it a little too hard.
“Well, I’ll be closed tomorrow,” he says. “But it’s nothing we can’t fix up.”
“Where are my guns?” I say, rolling my head to look at him.
“In the front.”
“What are the guns for?” Della interjects.
“Keeping us safe in the gorge until we’re ready to move in,” I say.
Brothers looks at Della, and she looks away fast. Brothers opens a cabinet beside the bookcase and pulls out a roll of bandages, some tape, and alcohol wipes. He tosses it all onto the chair beside me.
“Gonna wash up in the bathroom,” he says. “Y’all stay right where you are.”
He leaves, door swinging. Della sets her coffee aside and crosses to me. She’s in the prettiest sundress that hugs her body, letting her breasts hang naturally. It drives me crazy, seeing them shift when she moves, but it’s not half as bad as seeing her ass sway in the soft fabric.
I grip her thighs, pulling her in.
“Fuck, you look good,” I say.
She gives me the littlest eye roll, turning to pick up the alcohol wipes. “I think you’re just horny from the adrenaline.”
I think she might be right, but it’s hard to tell.
I’m always horny when she’s around. She rips open the pack and shakes out a wipe.
I keep quiet because I like just looking at her, feeling her warmth between my knees and under my palms. She grips my jaw, turning it to the side.
The wipe stings the gash left by the flying chair that started it all.
“You and Brothers are really a match made in hell,” she murmurs.
“You can say that again.”
“We need him, don’t we?” Her voice softens.
I work my jaw, more against the pain than anything. For some reason, I can fight a room of people after being decked in the head by a chair, but the minute she’s patching me up, everything hurts a hell of a lot more. Funny how a little of her sympathy makes me so damn soft.
“Yeah, reckon so,” I say grimly.
She daps my temple, lips thin. Then, she tears off some tape and starts folding the bandage.
“So you’re going to work with him?” she asks.
After the swamp and last night in the gorge, I don’t have a choice, not when it comes to keeping her safe.
They can’t see her, or Leland will know for certain she’s back.
From what Brothers said, Leland wouldn’t stop until he rooted her out and dragged her back.
Apparently, he thought she was bluffing with the divorce papers, and it was a bloodbath when she actually left.
My grip tightens. She winces.
“Sorry,” I murmur.
She tapes the bandage on and sets her hands on either side of my face, turning it up.
“I don’t think you or Brothers know how to keep out of trouble,” she says.
“I’m not like him,” I say reflexively.
She purses her lips but doesn’t speak.
“Della!” Brothers calls. “Where’s that Angel’s Envy?”
“It’s under the bar,” she yells back.
“Come here for a second. I don’t see it.”
She sighs, disengaging from me. I swipe at her, trying to smack the soft curve of her ass, but she darts out of the way.
The look she gives me is a warning. I sink back against the wall as she disappears into the front.
Their voices rise and fall. Then, she appears with a glass of bourbon in her hand, a sober expression on her face.
“Let me bandage up your knuckles,” she says, holding out the glass.
I take it. She kneels between my knees, which isn’t doing me any favors with how badly I want her right now. Brothers walks in and sinks against the window, knees braced and foot on the nearby chair. He takes a sip from the bottle of Angel’s Envy.
“Hate me any less, Jen?” he drawls.
“The verdict is out on that one.”
“Has been for a while, huh?”
I jerk my head, downing the bourbon and setting the glass aside. It’s a little bitter tonight. Della takes my hand and turns it over, studying the scabs from the other night. Fighting in the bar broke them open. Rivulets of dried blood streak my forearm.
She sighs. “You’re tore up, Jensen.”
“I’ll be alright.”
She cleans me up so carefully, I’m transfixed watching her, forgetting Brothers is even there.
I’m thinking about tonight, wondering when I went from the strait-laced kid who just wanted a truck to the man who tore up the town with Brothers Boyd.
It was probably a little bit after that day in the diner, when he had me thinking he wasn’t the one who fucked me up.
That was the day I officially broke it off with Holly. Of course, we fucked a few more times when I was feeling weak, but I told her to her face that I wanted out, that I resented what she’d done.
She cried and said she loved me.
But I never said it back.
My throat is tight. The room is a little hotter than before, and my head feels light, like I’m rising into the air. Down below, Della wraps my knuckles in crisp white. It looks like she’s a million miles away. Maybe I hit my head harder than I thought.
“You alright there?” Brothers drawls.
I look up and fall forward like a rock. She darts to her feet, arms out, but it’s Brothers who catches me.
“Easy there,” he says, laying me back in the chair.
I’m slipping into darkness. The hit must have been a hell of a lot worse, because I’m crumpling. My mouth won’t move. I’m trying to tell them I think I need a hospital, but they’re just watching me. Della has her hand over her mouth, tears streaming.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
No, this doesn’t make sense, but it doesn’t matter, because my eyes are rolling back. I’m sinking into darkness as warm and soft as a summer’s day back home.