Counting it down…
I had a shit dad.
Thus, I had to watch my mom do much what I was doing right now, except she worked harder and got less sleep because she had to cover me.
Then there was stepdad number one, who was a lot like Kev, except lazier.
Mercifully, Mom got shot of him pretty quickly.
Onward (hereditary?), I had terrible taste in men.
You’d think I’d learn with the very first one, who tried to slut shame me in high school when I wouldn’t put out, and he told everyone I did. This escalated to a lot of ugly lies on social media my mom had to lose her mind about and alternately stalk the principal and the police to put a stop to it.
But did that nightmare stop me?
Nooooooo.
Around the time Mom gave stepdad one the boot, high school boyfriend number two cheated on me with approximately half of the junior class, a quarter of the sophomore class and a third of the senior class (maybe an overstatement, but the dude was a dawg).
I had a brief period of being smart, as such, not dating at all.
Then came Kev, who broke down my barriers with the whole charm and compliments and love-bombing thing, suckering me good, before he exposed the real Kev.
After that, I had four years of him being a mooch, verbally abusive, me scraping him off, him not liking that, serious drama ensuing, him suckering me to take him back again, until I’d had enough and made it permanent.
It just didn’t take, not with him. He kept badgering.
What took was his best bud getting dead and the Nightingale Men disappearing him (however that happened).
Suffice it to say, no matter how it happened, I had no qualms with that.
And I did not miss him.
Oh, and let us not forget Sheldon, my ex-bestie’s douchebag boyfriend, who started her on pot, graduated her to E, and now, from what I’d heard, they were both all about meth.
I hadn’t seen her in years. The last time I did, she was in the E stage, and I was warning her Sheldon was no good, she told me to go fuck myself, reminding me while she did of my own stellar taste in the opposite sex. Hence the “ex” part of being my ex-bestie.
Thus, I was a twenty-eight-year-old woman who had chosen poorly more than once, witnessed those I loved choose poorly, and now I was faced with a guy who was maybe good, but probably another version of bad, who waded in to get me paid, could carry me, and who played with my hair when I slept.
He also climbed in that bed with me without permission, so there was that.
It was good this was what I was thinking when he angled out of the Jeep, wearing loose gray shorts and a black tee in some performance material, naturally looking scrumalicious.
And making matters worse, his cousin, one of The Originals, Luke Stark, slanted his long, lush body out of the passenger side.
I’d heard Luke was down from Denver, doing some training with the new guys. I just hadn’t met him yet.
But he was everything everyone said he was (and all of that was good, and it included how damn easy he was to look at).
Seemed to run in the family.
Bah!
“What the fuck is going on?” Gabe asked cantankerously as he prowled Shaw’s and my way.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Cameras at base caught one of the Angels’ informants cornering her in the lot,” Shaw said.
