Monster (King Brothers #1)

by K. D. Elizabeth

  This is infinitely preferable, obviously.

  Rory, naturally, disagrees, for those same reasons. As soon as she realizes I’ve missed the exit for the hospital, she says, “You are not taking me to your brother!”

  “I sure am.”

  “No, you’re not.” Rory’s uninjured hand flies to the door handle as if she’d yank it open and do a dismount right onto the highway. I laugh because we both know she isn’t going anywhere, until I notice her grimace of pain.

  Sobering immediately, I say, voice thick, “I want you to get medical attention as quickly as possible, Rory. You’ll spend forever waiting in the emergency room. I can’t stand the thought of you sitting there, bleeding slowly when in a few minutes, my brother can stitch you up and give you a killer pain med prescription. You can be all fixed up in time for me to take you to dinner.”

  Her head whips toward me. “You are not taking me to dinner.”

  I nod seriously, my eyes never straying from the road. “You’re right. You must be tired after such a long day. I’ll make dinner at your house instead.”

  “Jackson!”

  I really need to get her saying my name more often. Maybe by the end of the night, she’ll even be moaning it. “So, that’s settled. Oh look. My brother’s house.”

  Rory falls silent, but I know this is only the opening salvo in the war. We’ll revisit this later, but I intend to make her dinner, and that’s that. Christ, even the thought of it makes my stomach rumble. Lunch was a long time away.

  I pull into Griffin’s driveway, my headlights shining into his bedroom. He’s opening the door before I’ve even put the truck in park.

  “Jackson? What are you doing here?”

  Griffin pads out of his house, barefoot and shirtless. I scowl slightly; my brother does not have a doctor’s pudgy body. He’s always got women hanging off him, but so far, he’s managed to escape the church.

  “Put a shirt on,” I hiss as I make my way for the passenger side, where Rory is already climbing down from her seat. I frown in distaste; I should clearly be carrying her inside.

  Rory guesses the reason for my disappointment, because she snickers at me in satisfaction and then says, “Are all the King boys categorically incapable of wearing shirts?”

  Griffin’s eyebrows fly into his hairline as he takes in Rory. He looks from me to her, confusion clear on his face—Griffin’s well aware of our backstory—until his eyes land on her wound.

  “Oh shit.”

  “‘Oh shit’ is right,” I say, then bend down and lift Rory off the ground, because fuck it. I’ll take any excuse to touch her.

  “Put me down!” Rory squeals, beating her fist upon my chest. But when her hand lands on my bare skin, she freezes, stiffening in my arms. Her eyes drop down to my chest, staring at the corded muscles, before ripping her gaze away and resolutely refusing to look at me.

  Fuck yeah, she’s eyeing me. I make zero attempt to mitigate the pride that surges through me at the idea that my body distracts her. I’m no longer a college boy; I’ve grown into a large, muscular, and virile man, thank you very fucking much. It’s about time Rory becomes aware of that fact.

  “I’m carrying you into the house. Consider me your own personal horse.” I lean closer, resolutely ignoring my brother’s exasperated shake of his head, my lips hovering at her ear. “And you can ride me anytime, peach. I’ll never throw you off.”

  “Jackson!” Rory’s tone is as disgusted as ever, but this time it’s accompanied by a flaming-red face and another dart of her eyes to my chest.

  That’s right, Rory, take a good, long, hard look.

  Griffin holds the door open for me. I stalk right into his kitchen and place her down on the counter, the closest thing to an elevated examination table this house will ever have. Rory immediately tries to slide off, but I move between her thighs, taking her arm gently in my hands and peeling away my ruined T-shirt.

  It’s still bleeding, but it seems to have a slowed a good amount. Thank Christ. I lift her arm higher, slowly turning it from side to side. It’s a huge gash, about four inches in length. With all the blood, I can’t determine how deep the cut is, but the jagged tears of skin puffing up around the sides are enough for me to know stitches are in order.

  And then there’s the grass. The tractor crumpled so quickly I had to drag her out faster than I would have liked. If I hadn’t, those razor-sharp pieces would have sliced clean through her. But in doing so, I dragged her right through the dirt and grass. A whole bunch of it is rubbed into the wound. It’s fucking filthy—and not in a good way. Griffin will need to scrub it, and it’ll be an absolute bitch to endure.

  “So what happened?” Griffin says, coming back into the kitchen with his medical bag. I glance up briefly to notice the bastard’s now wearing a shirt. Good. Rory doesn’t need to be making any comparisons between these two King boys.

  “Sliced it on the tractor,” Rory says softly. My head jerks up to glare at her, because that’s putting it pretty fucking lightly. Any words die, however, when I see her staring at me. She’s probably been doing it for the last minute without me noticing. That same vulnerable expression lingers on her face from earlier. Her teeth sink into her lower lip in confusion; a growl rumbles in my chest at the sight of it.

  Fucking fuck. This is not the goddamn time to screw Rory on the kitchen table, Jackson. Especially not with my own brother watching. I slowly step out of the cocoon of her thighs—more reluctantly than is intelligent—and turn to my brother. My voice comes out in an embarrassing rasp as I mutter, “She thought it would be a brilliant idea to climb under a tractor with dangling metal pieces hovering above her head. She kept poking around, and then it crumpled fully. She slashed her arm on some of the metal as I was pulling her out before she got killed.”

  Griffin’s eyes rise at this delivery, but he doesn’t comment on my hoarse voice or the fact that I’m clearly barely holding it together. Instead, he drops his bag onto the counter next to Rory and comes closer to inspect the wound. I try not to commit mental murder at the sight of him standing between her thighs. It’s a pretty close call.

  “Well, you’re going to need a tetanus booster. I obviously don’t have any of that with me here, so you’ll need to come to the clinic tomorrow. I can have one of my PAs administer it.

  “Apart from that, infection is the real concern. This cut isn’t very deep, thankfully. It hasn’t cut into the muscle, just through the skin. I’ll need to stitch the whole thing, but it’ll heal fine, so long as you stay ahead of any infection. That means keeping the bandage clean and disinfected. No running around the farm and getting into dirt. I know you’re harvesting now, but you need to let them take care of it while this heals.”

  Rory opens her mouth to protest, but I cut her off. “Don’t worry, she won’t.” Her gaze snaps to mine; I glare at her. She can just try to disobey the doctor’s orders. I’ll plant myself right in the middle of the goddamn driveway and watch her to ensure she takes care of herself. I don’t even care how creepy that sounds. That vampire bastard creeped in that girl’s bedroom every night, and he got away with it. My reputation can withstand such an affront to my manliness.

  Griffin notices our standoff and just shakes his head. He pulls a few items out of his bag and then takes Rory’s arm. “This is going to hurt, okay? But I’ve got to clean it out.”

  I last half a second watching Rory grit her teeth in pain before I take her free hand in mine and squeeze. Her fingers dig into mine painfully, but I don’t emit a sound, my eyes locked on her face. She stares at her wound as Griffin removes the grass and other debris from the cut and then scrubs with a strong-smelling antiseptic. A fresh trickle of blood escapes the wound.

  “You reopened it,” I say, the words more growl than statement.

  Griffin huffs slightly, the perennially put-upon sound of our childhood, then says, “We want to ensure that the dirt is fully removed. The blood helps clear the wound.”

  I make a skeptical nois
e. Seems like a crock of shit to me. Rory’s pained face implies I’m correct. Five years seemingly pass as he cleans the cut. “Okay, I’m going to apply a local anesthetic so that the suturing won’t be completely miserable. I think we’re looking at twelve stitches, okay?”

  Twelve stitches, for fuck’s sake. Rory nods harshly, glancing at the wound and paling slightly. “Look at me,” I say. Her gaze lifts to mine, and I know it’s fucking cheesy, but all the air is sucked right out of the room. Each tug of the needle, every wince of pain on her face, lances through me like I’m the one injured, like it’s me my brother is sewing up. I can’t look away, can’t even think of doing anything but stare into her beautiful brown eyes.

  It freaks me the fuck out. Look, I’m a guy; we don’t do feelings. And while my strongest feeling with regard to Rory is that I want to sink every inch of my impressive cock into her, what I don’t want is any of the emotional claptrap relationships entail. And what I’m feeling right now is the very definition of emotional claptrap.

  So the instant Griffin finishes stitching her up and Rory sags in relief, I gently extricate my hands from her death grip and say, jerking a thumb over my shoulder, “Hey, Grif, I’m going to steal one of your shirts. I’ll try not to stretch it too much. We both know your biceps are puny compared to mine.”

  Griffin mutters something assuredly derogatory under his breath that makes Rory laugh. I ignore both of them, especially Rory, as I make my escape to his bedroom. Obviously, I pull his favorite T-shirt out of the drawer and put it on, because little brothers always need to be put in their place. It’s the older brother’s sacred duty.

  I fiddle around in his room, rearranging books, unmaking his bed, generally being a dick because I need more time. More time to figure out what the hell just happened. More time to lock right back up that fucking dreadful emotion that, mere seconds ago, nearly strangled the ever-loving life out of me.

  When I finally convince myself Rory doesn’t mean as much to me as I know, deep down, she really does, I make my way back to the kitchen, just in time to overhear the two of them discussing the one subject I’ve tried to broach with Rory for ten fucking years.

  Chapter Seven

  “You have to admit it’s surprising, seeing the two of you here. Together, in the same house. In the same county.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, come on. You two loathe each other, and you suddenly show up on my doorstep bleeding profusely? What the hell was he even doing at your farm, anyway?”

  “His client is trying to buy my farm, Griffin.”

  I peek around the corner in time to watch my brother’s eyebrows disappear into his hairline. Axel instructed me not to tell anyone, not even our four brothers, that he’s buying the Larson farm. Despite being a huge loner, even Axel knows that such information would spread faster than a bushel of peaches rolling down a hill. That includes our family members, who can gossip with the best of them.

  So it’s just Axel and I who are orchestrating this sale. And thank fucking Christ for that, because after the shitshow that today has been, I can’t even begin to imagine what would go down if people believed Axel is trying to pull a fast one on Rory.

  But I guess now Griffin has the news. Some of it, anyway. I watch him digest this information, then say, “Are you handling it okay? It must be hard seeing Jackson so much.”

  “It’s perfectly fine. He means nothing to me. Today is the first day I’ve seen him in a decade.”

  I try damn hard to pretend those words don’t make me die a small death. It’s pathetic to let a woman bother me so much, especially one who so obviously feels nothing for me. But while she spat almost those exact words to my face today, when she utters them now they ring false.

  Griffin, chronic do-gooder that he is, comes to my defense. “That’s a rather cruel thing to say.” When Rory refuses to respond, he pushes further. “Jackson was really wrecked after what you did to him in college, you know. I don’t think he ever really got over it.”

  “What I did to him? Are you fucking kidding me? He did it, not me!”

  My breath whooshes out of my lungs. If I hold absolutely still, if I remain entirely silent, she might just admit what I did to her in college. I might finally learn what grievous insult made her desert me without the slightest explanation.

  Griffin doesn’t respond right away; he seems to be using his doctor sense to read between the lines. “I think the most-likely scenario is that there must be some misunderstanding between the two of you.”

  “I know what he did. There’s no excuse.”

  “Perhaps you should confront him about it.”

  “I don’t need to. I already have my answers. A decade ago I learned exactly how little he cared about me. Which was not at all. That hasn’t changed. I’m not going to stir up old feelings by pretending otherwise.”

  “Rory,” Griffin says, deadly serious. “Do you really think, based on his actions of the last half hour, that he truly doesn’t care about you at all?”

  She has no response to that. I practically lean all the way into the kitchen, straining to hear how she’ll respond, but she doesn’t utter a word. It’s goddamn frustrating. I want to shake it out of her. Fuck it out of her. Do anything to resolve the past between us.

  When neither of them continue talking, I sneak back to Griffin’s bedroom and then make a huge production of walking into the kitchen, like the pathetic excuse for a man that I’ve become. Griffin and Rory lean guiltily away from each other when I enter. I stare at Rory, but she resolutely avoids my gaze.

  Griffin, on the other hand, takes one look at the shirt I’ve selected and instantly gets all pissy. “Bro, you can’t wear that shirt. It’s my favorite!”

  Mission accomplished.

  I pull the hem of the shirt away from my body while I give it a lazy inspection. “You mean, this thing is your favorite? It’s completely faded, and there’s even a hole in the armpit. You have absolute shit taste, Grif.”

  “You know very well how much I like that shirt, fucker.”

  “Such language in front of the lady.”

  “Don’t worry, Griffin, you go right ahead and bitch him out,” Rory says, her tone serious but undermined by the slight glint of humor in those mesmerizing eyes.

  “Clearly, this shirt looks better on me. Even if it is a piece of shit. You’ll have to deal, Grif, until I can get it back to you.”

  “Which better be tomorrow, you bastard.”

  “Such a monstrous thing to do, isn’t it?” Rory says to Griffin in fake disgust. “I’d always want to slap Lex when she stole my clothes, and she’s younger.”

  I throw a hand over my chest, shaking my head. “Well, that was your first mistake. Younger siblings should live in absolute terror of what their older siblings will do if they steal any of their shit.”

  Rory rolls her eyes. “Yeah, whatever. I want my siblings to actually like me, but you do you.”

  I widen my eyes at her in mock surprise. “Are you implying my siblings don’t like me? They fucking love me. Don’t you, Grif?”

  “Keep telling yourself that, Jacks,” Griffin says, giving me a rather hard shove as he carries his medical bag out of the room. “Can you two go away now? I have someone coming over in an hour and I’d like you to be long gone.”

  Rory and I share a surprised look. Griffin doesn’t invite women over to his house. The stupid shit barely has any friends. He’s always working, helping little old ladies across the street, retrieving kittens from trees. He’s all Clark Kent, and no Superman, though. The only thing he’s missing is those nerdy glasses.

  Still, something is clearly going down with little bro. I’m going to have to pester him or some of my family members about it until I get all the dirt. Hopefully, it’s something terribly scandalous.

  I did tell you we’re all a bunch of gossips. I never said I excluded myself from that list.

  Rory makes to slide down from the counter, but I take
her in my arms instead, slowly lowering her to the ground. Every inch of her body slides down mine. It’s fucking perfect. Rory glares at me when she reaches the floor. I just wink at her shamelessly. I’m not going to miss such low-hanging fruit.

  “You need to take me home now,” she hisses.

  I pat my stomach. “You’re right. I’m famished. It’s far past time for dinner.”

  “You’re not making me or taking me to dinner!”

  “Oh, that’s definitely happening.”

  I’m robbed of hearing her assuredly wicked response by the reentry of Griffin, who’s waving a piece of paper at Rory. “I forgot to give you this. It’s a prescription for pain meds. Your wound isn’t that bad, and I generally tell people to avoid the opioids if at all possible. You don’t want to go down that road. Believe me. But you have it if you need it.”

  I pluck the paper from his hand and fold it before placing it in my breast pocket. Rory is a constant grouch, but she isn’t the type to gobble pain meds. Like my brother said, it’s nice to have it just in case, but if the wound isn’t that bad, I’d much rather she focus on me and my delicious cock—I mean, food, of course.

  Rory, naturally, isn’t on board. She wordlessly holds her hand out to me, brow cocked. We stare each other down for a few seconds, then I relent. I suppose controlling someone else’s medication is a dickish move, even for me.

  Griffin makes a big show of staring at his wrist, which is entirely devoid of any time-telling device. “Oh my, look at the time. It’s so very, very late. You really must go. Right now. Out, out.” He makes a shooing gesture, waving his entire arms toward the door. Gleefully ignoring him, I stand right there and study him.

  There’s a certain sort of gleam in his eye. Is it … excitement? I think the last time my buttoned-up brother was truly excited about anything was in third grade when he brought in birthday cupcakes for the class and everyone was excited about them being red velvet flavored.