I reached out and brushed my fingers down the little guy’s back. I could feel the ridges of his spine and ribs, as well as the rapid rise and fall of his too-quick breaths. Lennix was right. He was in pain and needed help. There was just one problem. “Sweetheart, it’s after 9:00.” The vet’s office was already closed, and in a town as small as ours, we didn’t have an emergency animal hospital. The closest one was two towns away, and I didn’t know if the pup would be able to last that long.
She shook her head, reaching around and pulling her phone from her back pocket. “It doesn’t matter. Hardin will answer for me.”
Something about that sentence made my gut churn. She had the phone to her ear before I knew it. “Hey, yeah, Hardin. I’m sorry to call this late, but I have an emergency.” She was quiet for a moment, and the smile that stretched across her face at whatever he said on the other side of that call had me clenching my fists.
“Oh, thank you, Hardin. You’re a lifesaver.” I suddenly had the desire to punch one of my oldest friends in the face. “Yeah. I’m on my way now. I owe you one, big time. See you in a few.”
My mind went down the unpleasant path of wondering exactly how she thought to pay him back for this. Hardin was a good friend, and a good guy, but he was also a single man whose reputation with women was similar to my own. Only reason his was slightly better was because he’d attempted the monogamy thing before and gotten married. They’d even had kids. But when it imploded and they got divorced, Hardin swore he’d never do it again. To make matters worse, he was also a handsome fucker with too much goddamn charisma for his own good.
Lennix moved then, heading back toward the car and pulling me from my musings. “Come on. I need to hurry and drop you off so I can get this little guy to Hardin.”
Like hell I was leaving her alone with that animal-healing son of a bitch. He’d play the hero for her, and Christ knew what would happen then. It would be a shame if I had to beat the shit out of a close buddy.
“I’ll go with you.” I blurted the words without a moment’s thought.
Lennix stopped halfway to the car and looked back at me in confusion. “What?”
“I’ll go with you.” I pointed at the little dog shivering in her arms. “I mean, you can’t really drive and hold him at the same time, can you?”
She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth and chewed on it for a second before finally relenting. “Yeah, okay. You drive. I’ll hold him. ”
She climbed into the passenger seat with the puppy while I jogged to the driver’s side, adjusting the seatwayback so my much longer legs could fit.
Then I headed for the vet’s office, content to get a few more minutes with the woman I should have been staying far away from.
Chapter Nine
Raylan
Itried really hard not to overanalyze the relief I felt when, instead of taking a moment to lay on the charm, Hardin had taken one look at the injured puppy and rushed him straight back to the exam room as soon as we walked through the door.
I also couldn’t bring myself to question why every minute I spent with Lennix only left me wanting another. And another. And another. I’d never had this kind of reaction to a woman before, never had someone burrow their way beneath my skin and make me consider things I wasn’t built for. Some of my siblings had managed to dodge the Bradbury curse. Gypsy and Marco were still as strong as ever. My other sister Sunny was happy with her husband and kids. Even my oldest brother Rhodes was settling down with the love of his life and her three kids. I wanted that for them. I wanted all my brothers and sisters to be happy. But I knew that wasn’t for me. There was something inside me that was tainted. I could feel its insidious claws sinking into my skin. Making me just likehim.
I never told anyone in my family, because I didn’t want to put the burden on their shoulders, but I’d found our lousy, piece-of-shit father several years back. It was simply by chance that I ran into him at a casino in Las Vegas while I was in town for a buddy’s bachelor party. As far as I knew, none of us had a clue where Danny and Peggy Bradbury had disappeared to when they bailed on us years ago, and none of us really cared.
But seeing him sitting at that blackjack table, his back and shoulders hunched, face hard and weathered like old shoe leather from years of bad living, I felt like I’d had the wind knocked right the hell out of me.
Something came over me and I wasn’t able to just walk away, to push him out of my head and get on with a weekend that was supposed to be all about fun. Instead, I found myself confronting him. Stomping over to his sorry ass and ripping him off the stool by the frayed collar of his tattered shirt. The man looked like he’d lived the shitty life he so deserved, but I didn’t take the opportunity to bask in that fact because I was too busy demanding answers. I needed to know where the hell they’d been, why they’d taken off without a word. Had they ever even cared about us? Thought about us in all the years they’d been gone?
For some reason, my ire at encountering the father who had abandoned me and my siblings more than twenty years ago made the asshole laugh. My pain and anger were humorous to him. He got off on my misery.
“You’re just like me, boy,” he’d spit out, his lips curving into a grin that showcased yellowed and missing teeth. For some reason, hearing that made me snap, and I drove my fist into the fucker’s face. “Chip off the old block,” he’d cackled as security intervened, pulling me off the miserable piece of shit. “Like lookin’ into a mirror when I was your age,” he continued to heckle as I fought to get in another blow, needing to exorcize thepain inside me. And the only way I knew how to do that was with violence. “Take a good look, son. This is what your future looks like,” he shouted as I was dragged out of the casino. “This is what you got to look forward to.”
I never spoke about what happened that day with anybody, never told a single one of my siblings that I’d seen our father. But his words had burrowed into my brain and taken root, making themselves at home. Any time I ever felt myself getting close to someone, those vile words would pop back up, reminding me of what I had to look forward to, until the day finally came where I decided that I was never going to leach that poison into anyone else.
It hadn’t been hard, honestly. There wasn’t much temptation for me to settle down. At least not until Lennix grew up. Now my head was a fucking mess. It felt like every day was a struggle to keep her safe from the ugliness inside me that I inherited from my piece-of-shit father.
I would never be like him in that sense. I would never abandon my family. Because I would never have one. The risk was just too great. Butfuck, Chaos made me want. And it was that wanting that was so dangerous.
We’d been in the empty waiting room for forty-five minutes, and Lennix hadn’t been able to sit still the whole time. She alternated between pacing the length of the linoleum floor and bouncing her knee a mile a minute when she did attempt to sit down. That big heart of hers had latched onto that little puppy, and she was worrying herself sick.
“Everything’s going to be all right,” I finally said. I wasn’t sure how much more of her pacing I could take. She was starting to give me motion sickness. “Hardin will fix the little guy right up.”
For as good a flirt as he was, he was an even better vet. There was a reason he’d gotten into this line of work, and if there wasanyone who had a bigger heart than Lennix when it came to animals, it was Hardin.
“I know. I’m just so mad.” She spun around to face me, her eyes flashing with fire that made the deep forest green look as bright as summer grass. “How could someone do that to a poor, helpless little puppy? Just dump him out in the wild like he doesn’t matter? Like he isn’t a living, breathing thing just as deserving of love and care as you and me?”
The anger in her gaze gave way to tears as her heart broke for the animal. I stood and closed the distance between us, reaching out to rub her arms in an attempt to offer comfort. “Some people suck, Lenni. It’s an unfortunate truth, but the truth none the less. But for every shitty human being out there, there’s someone like you who just wants to do good. Who helps where it’s needed. Whoever dumped that dog will get what’s coming to them eventually. In the meantime, Hardin is going to get him back into fighting shape. And if I know you, I know that little guy in there just scored himself the best home he could ever ask for.”
