by Jaymin Eve
Shit. He didn't deserve that end. He'd been a genuine friend in the short time I'd known him. Had Dylan even seen him lying dead there? He hadn't said anything, so maybe not.
"Do you think we can go somewhere else?" I asked the big, threatening bastard who was already back on his phone, presumably talking to Jasper about my missing bracelet.
He seemed confused by my question, then looked around the room and realized what I was really asking: Can we go somewhere significantly less like a scene from Dexter and get this mess cleaned up?
"Yeah, sorry. I forget sometimes," he murmured, tucking his phone back into his pocket and peered around the floor. For a moment I was totally lost as to what he was searching for, but then he located my hospital slippers and brought them over for me. "Uh, here." He placed them down beside my bed on a patch of floor not covered in blood, and I tucked my feet inside them.
"Evan can come clean this mess up," Beck told me as we left my room.
I paused just outside the doorway, though, looking back into the room at the shadowed lump that was Ben. "It's not just a mess to clean up," I told him defensively, a frown drawing my brows low. "Ben died trying to defend me. He didn't deserve that; he was a good person.”
Beck winced, seeming to hear his own words back for the first time. “Yeah, sorry. I didn’t mean… Look, death and violence are a part of life for us, so it doesn't touch me as deeply anymore. I don't even remember what it's like—seeing someone you like be killed—for the first time. So, I'm not trying to be a dick or anything. Just practical."
"Jaded," I corrected him. But then, because there was nothing else to do, I continued along the silent, empty hospital corridor with him. "Where are we going?" I wrapped my arms around myself as tremors started quivering my skin. All I wore were some ugly granny panties, a thin, cotton hospital gown, and the slippers Beck had found for me, and it wasn't enough considering my state of shock.
"I'll take you to our safe house," he told me, pressing the elevator button. "Riley's there; she'll take care of you. Give you clean clothes and shit."
That actually sounded pretty great, so I followed along gratefully. I didn't bother asking where the hospital staff on my floor had gone or how he and Dylan had known I was in trouble. I was too damn tired, and if he told me that lovely nurse, Grace, or Dr. Mooney were dead, I might lose my tenuous grip on sanity.
Nope, I just needed to bury my head in the sand. At least for a couple of hours until I could wash the spatters of my brother's blood from my skin.
26
What Beck had failed to tell me as we left the hospital was that his safe house wasn't driving distance away. He'd given me a thick woolen coat from the trunk of his car, and we'd driven only a few minutes to the local airstrip. I was past the point of questions, though, and just hugged the coat tighter around me as we boarded a small aircraft.
I fell asleep before the plane even took off. In the grand scheme of things, leaving the hospital with a practical stranger who'd just snapped a man's neck in front of me, then getting on a plane to an unknown location? Yeah, not the most street-smart of choices. But I was a sheltered, naïve idiot, and the thought didn't even cross my mind until I woke up the next evening in a lush king-size bed.
Thankfully, though, I still wore my thin hospital gown, and I didn't feel like anything bad had happened. Listening to my gut was a new thing for me, but in this instance, it seemed to be telling me I was safe.
A small pile of folded clothes sat on a chair near the bed with a folded card propped on top.
These should fit you! Come downstairs when you're ready. xx Riley
Yeah, she was definitely redeeming herself after being such a ball-busting bitch at our first encounter just a few days ago.
My body, especially my ribs and face, screamed at me when I took my first steps—I really hoped Dylan made Blake hurt a lot before he killed him. After I’d warmed up, the pain eased, and as I was well used to having aches, they were easy to ignore.
After a bit of poking around, I found a small attached bathroom, already stocked with shower products, so I took the opportunity to wash up and comb through my tangled hair. This was when my ribs really made their annoyance known, but I managed to get clean, eventually.
The mirror showed a nice, colorful display of bruising already starting across my cheek, and I had a lovely fat lip, but all in all… I’d had worse.
The clothes Riley had left me fit well. Soft sweatpants, a tank top with a built-in bra, and a black zip-up hoodie. It was incredible what a shower, clean hair, and fresh clothes could do for a person, and when I emerged from the bathroom, I felt a million times better already.
And hungry. Holy hell, I was hungry.
That hunger alone was what pushed me out of the bedroom in search of the kitchen. I found the stairs, then followed my nose as the salty smell of bacon wafted through the house and made my stomach lurch.
Oh man. It smelled so good, but the last time I'd tried to eat bacon it tasted like fish.
Please have been a one off; I can't quit bacon forever!
"Hey, girl!" a pretty chick with a blonde-and-teal braid running down to her waist greeted as I entered the kitchen. "You slept for ages. But excellent timing, my pretty pregnant friend; my babe is making breakfast for dinner."
I blinked at her several times in confusion, tucking my arms around myself and shifting my gaze to the tattooed guy standing at the stove with a frilly Mrs. Claus apron tied around his muscular neck.
"Um." I wet my lips, looking back at the girl. "Sorry, have we met? I don’t—”
"Oh shit, sorry, girl!" She grinned like she was about to start laughing, but not in a mean way. Or it didn't seem to be, anyway. "Sorry, where are my fucking manners? I'm Eddy, this is Dante."
The guy at the stove raised his spatula in a wave, and I gave him a small nod of greeting.
"And you're Brooke, right?" Eddy gave me a bright smile. "Come sit, Brooke. I wanna hear all about you and how you met Dylan."
"Eddy!" Riley scolded, coming into the kitchen behind me. "Leave Brooke alone. Jesus, nosy bitch." She slid onto the barstool beside Eddy and exchanged a loving smile with the other girl, clearly joking. "Brooke, are you hungry? We all slept in pretty late, so it's breakfast for dinner."
I didn't need to ask what that was; it was pretty obvious, given that Dante was cooking bacon and eggs and the clock glowing on the oven told me it was seven in the evening.
"Uh, yeah. Yep, I'm pretty hungry." I awkwardly took a seat beside Riley and sat on my hands. "Thanks for the clothes, by the way."
"No worries." She reached out and poured a glass of orange juice for herself, and then one for me too. "How are you feeling? I hope you don't mind me overstepping a bit, but I arranged for an obstetrician to come over later tonight to check you over. Only if you're okay with it, though."
"Oh." My eyes widened with surprise.
Riley cringed. "Too far? That was too far. I just freaked when Beck said your brother had hit you and thought maybe you'd want to see someone—”
"No, you're totally right," I said, quickly cutting her off. "That was really thoughtful, thank you." I wrapped an arm around my stomach. It was such a stupid thing to do, like I could somehow physically reassure my pea-sized baby that I was doing my best to keep it safe. But it made me feel better, so whatever.
Relief flashed over Riley's beautiful face, and she gave me a genuine smile. "Good. Okay, cool. Well, he's going to come here to see you in about an hour. I figured you probably wouldn't want to go back to a hospital right now."
I grimaced, remembering the state of my hospital room when I'd walked out of there with Beck. There had to be repercussions for shit like that, didn't there? Police investigating or... something? Or did Delta just make that sort of shit disappear, never to be spoken of again?
Dante dished up plates of bacon and eggs for all of us and then several more, then handed plates directly across to Riley, Eddy, and I where we sat at the island.
&nb
sp; "What the fuck?" a surly voice snapped from behind us, and my spine stiffened harder than steel.
Riley made an annoyed sound in her throat, then spun around in her seat with a vicious smile on her lips. "Well hello to you, too, D-man. You look terrible; you should shower."
I didn't turn around to look at him, but I could feel him get closer to me. Then he leaned over my shoulder and shoved the plate of food away from me with a hand covered in dried blood.
"She can't eat bacon, Dante. It made her vomit the other day, and cured meats contain too much salt and possibly harmful bacteria for early pregnancy." He delivered this gem of information with an edge of anger that immediately pissed me off. What the hell was he so angry about?
My jaw tensed, but I still wasn't bold enough to call him out on his shitty attitude, which led to an extended, awkward silence. Eventually it became too much for me, and I gave Riley a tight smile.
"I think I'll go back to bed until the doctor gets here," I told her. "I suddenly don't have much appetite anyway."
Her brow furrowed. "Fuck that. No way! Dylan isn't going to make you scurry back to your room to hide. If you can't eat bacon, we will make you something else." She nodded to Dante, who was already putting a fresh skillet on the gas burner. "As for you." Riley glared past me to Dylan—I assumed—and raised her chin. "Go shower, and don't come back in here until you can apologize to Brooke."
"Me?" Dylan sounded stunned. "For fucking what?"
"For acting like a goddamn caveman. For all your shitty parents’ neglect, you were still raised with better manners. Go and find them." Riley death-glared him all the way out of the room, and it wasn't until she spun back around in her seat that I let myself relax.
"Don't let him pull that alpha-male bullshit on you, Brooke babe," Eddy told me with a stern nod. "You give an inch, he'll take a mile. Put his arrogant ass in its place."
"I feel like I shouldn't be party to this conversation," Dante muttered as he cooked a chicken breast in the pan. "But I do love when you girls remind them who's boss."
Eddy and Riley both snorted a laugh, and Eddy slipped out of her chair. She circled around the counter and snaked her arm around Dante's waist. The look on his face when he turned to look down at her was pure adoration, and the way he kissed her gently said she was his whole freaking universe. It was all kinds of heartwarming.
"Get a room," Riley teased when their kiss turned heated, and she threw a piece of ripped-off toast at Dante's head. "Don't mind them," she apologized to me with a smile. "They're getting married next week, so they're all over each other twenty-four seven."
Eddy almost busted a gut laughing. “Have you seen Riley and Beck together?” she choked out. “My innocent eyes are permanently scarred.”
They were both engrossed by their men, and… it didn't bother me. I loved to see people in love. It made me hopeful that maybe one day I'd get to feel like that, instead of the painful, uncomfortable, unrequited infatuation I'd developed with Dylan. Of course, now I was pregnant with his baby, which he so very clearly didn't want... Somehow, I suspected it might be a long time before I got to experience what these two couples had.
"So, there was something I've been meaning to ask you, Brooke," Riley said with a coy smile as she ate her bacon and eggs.
"Oh! Yes!" Eddy released her fiancé and came back around to her seat to re-engage in conversation with us. "Yes, curiosity is killing me."
My brows raised, I looked between the two of them. "I'm nervous now, but also intrigued. What did you want to ask?"
Riley flashed me a smile. "You said in the hospital that when you met Dylan, you were using your cousin's ID. Right?"
I nodded, confused about what that had to do with anything.
"Can we ask what her name is? Or what name you gave Dylan?" She bit her lip, like that could somehow hide the smug grin creeping over her face.
I shifted my gaze to Eddy again, but she looked just as enthralled, waiting for my answer. Weird. So weird.
"Uh, Serena," I told them truthfully. "Serena Michaels. She's not actually my cousin, not by blood. She was my mom's best friend's daughter, but they moved away before my parents died. I just always called her my cousin because our moms were as close as sisters."
Riley was grinning with pure glee. "I knew it!"
"Aw, now you're making me all heart-eyes over this," Eddy commented with a laugh, propping her head up on her hand.
Dante let out a sigh. "So much girl talk," he muttered. "Someone else in this friend group needs to learn how to cook."
Both girls ignored him, still staring at me with their metaphorical heart-eyes.
"Dylan told us about you," Riley half explained, half teased. "Or about Serena anyway. He kept finding bullshit reasons to travel to Colorado just so he'd have an excuse to see you—so stinking cute. Boy is totally in love with you, you know that?"
My cheeks flamed and my heart thumped hard in my chest. "What? No." I shook my head in utter denial. "No, we were just a casual hook-up thing. You probably got me mixed up with someone else."
Eddy snorted a laugh. "Doubtful. Dylan's not really a multi-woman kinda guy. The odds of there being two petite blondes in Boulder, Colorado, that he was making excuses to visit every two weeks? Low, girl. Real low."
I had absolutely nothing to say to that. Nothing.
"Okay, we're making Brooke uncomfortable," Riley conceded. "Change the subject. Did you guys decide on a honeymoon location yet?"
The girls smoothly shifted the conversation away from Dylan and I, and Dante placed a plate of creamy chicken and pasta down in front of me to eat. How the hell he’d cooked that so quickly, I had no idea, but I also wasn't arguing.
I ate quietly, only half listening to the conversation around me as I obsessed over what Riley had just told me. Dylan had told his friends about me? He'd made excuses to be in town? I'd always believed we were just a convenience thing—an easy fuck when he had business nearby. That's all it'd felt like... He’d never offered to take me out anywhere or even tried to talk to me. It was only ever about the sex with us.
Wasn't it?
"I think I might go lie down for a minute," I murmured after finishing my food. "Thank you for cooking, Dante; that was incredible."
The big, tattooed guy gave me a nod. "No worries."
"I'll bring the doctor up when he arrives," Riley told me with a soft smile. "Sorry if we freaked you out before."
I shook my head, still in denial. "No, all good. Just still feeling a bit beaten up, you know?"
Eddy and Dante both gave me smiles, and I made my way back up to the room I'd woken up in, a million conflicting thoughts buzzing through my brain. Just those few innocent comments from Dylan's friends had me second-guessing everything.
All those nights I'd turned up at Dylan's hotel room and we'd slept together... In my memory, he'd been interested in nothing but losing himself in my body for the whole night. But now I found myself analyzing our encounters more closely. And the more I thought about it, the more I remembered him trying.
The first couple of times we'd met up after that initial night together, he'd offered to meet in public places like restaurants and bars, but I was the one who'd shut him down. I'd been so paranoid that Blake would find out, it was me who had pushed our liaisons into the privacy of a hotel room. It was me who’d refused to talk about my life or anything personal. All along, it was me who had the walls up, who wouldn't let things progress beyond casual fuck buddies.
Yet he’d kept coming back. He’d kept making excuses to be in town and to meet up, and he’d honored my near pathological need for secrecy.
Were the girls right? Ugh, thinking about the possibility of Dylan actually caring was making my headache worse than it already was. I needed to lie down.
I let myself back into the room with the incredible bed and flopped down without even taking my hoodie off. The movement hurt my ribs, and I just moaned in pain against the pillows. They held a familiar scent, one I couldn't place,
but it was welcome.
My thoughts were so loud inside my head, though, that I didn't even notice the shower was running in the attached bathroom until it shut off. Then I froze.
"Are you okay?" Dylan asked, and I lifted my face from the pillow just long enough to look over at him. He was in the doorway to the bathroom, steam billowing from behind his broad frame and just a towel slung around his trim hips.
God damn. It should be illegal to be so sexy. It sure as fuck wasn't fair when I needed to be mad at him.
Needed. Not wanted, needed. Because I was quickly realizing that since day one, it had been me holding him at arm's length. The whole excuse of him being in love with Riley was just that: an excuse. And not even one backed by facts, only gossip and suspicion.
I was the asshole here, not him.
27
Dylan's brows rose and his lips moved, but it took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to realize he was speaking to me. Shit.
"Um, sorry, what did you say?" I cleared my throat and licked my lips. Dammit.
The corners of his mouth tugged into a small smile. "I asked if you're feeling okay, Brooke. You really should still be in the hospital."
I rolled over to sit up and ran a hand through my fluffy, white-blonde curls. "Yeah, well, someone redecorated my hospital room with death, so I didn't have much choice." I’d intended it as a casual comment to change the subject away from the fact that I'd just been totally lost in drooling all over his body. But it came out with an edge of accusation, and Dylan's jaw tightened.
"If you think I'm going to apologize for what I did to Blake, I won't." His voice was cold and emotionless, his eyes like shards of glass.
I frowned, biting my lip to force myself to look at his face and only his face. "I wasn't..." I started to argue, then trailed off and shook my head. "I'm not expecting anything from you, Dylan. I didn't ask to be in this position."
He and I both knew I was talking about a whole lot more than just my abusive brother and the fact that Dylan had likely spent the whole day torturing him before killing him.