“She’s a PI in Juneau,” Jericho said.
“Of course she is.” A smirk tugged at Sully’s lips. “I mean, her dad was the police chief for a couple decades. Seems like she’d go into PI work.”
“I actually heard she was a cop in Anchorage for a while,” Hudson said.
“That’s what I remember too,” Jericho said. “I don’t know what happened there, but apparently, she’s some sort of expert on the Sorros brothers. Determined to put them away.”
Sully smirked again, as did Hudson, their shared look making Jericho’s eyes narrow. “What?”
“Well, I’m just saying, maybe that’s not far from the truth.” Hudson lifted a shoulder, his smirk widening. “Given ... well...”
“Given what?” Malachi asked, his gaze darting between them, his root beer halfway to his mouth. “What are you guys talking about?”
“Just that Jericho has his own reasons for not liking the Sorros brothers,” Sully said, his voice low, his smile fading. “And they involve Harley.”
More silence and Jericho looked away. See, this was why he didn’t come home—didn’t take long for his regrets, his mistakes, to find him.
“All right, I know I’m five years younger than Jericho, but I am part of this family, and I feel like I deserve to know whatever you guys are talking about.” Malachi set his glass down.
Sully leaned forward, his elbows on the table. “Once upon a time, Jericho here had a thing going with the girl next door, Miss Harley Tatum. He called her HT. Here’s Trouble.”
Jericho scoffed. “Her initials are HT. Don’t get crazy.”
“It was more than a thing,” Hudson said, his gaze on Jericho. “It was a lifelong flame that turned into a summer inferno.”
“Please,” Jericho said. “We barely kissed.”
“It was true love.” Sully met Jericho’s eyes, almost dark.
Jericho swallowed.
A grin spread across Malachi’s face. “I remember you being friends. But she was always so—”
“Annoying? Stubborn? Infuriating?” Jericho added, his voice a little darker than he meant.
Okay, maybe he did mean it.
“Hot,” Malachi said, his grin widening.
Jericho couldn’t argue with that. With her long blond hair, her lean body, curves in all the right places, and the way she could spark something inside him that made him want to draw closer—yeah, hot. Like the kind that could burn a man. “She was also hot-tempered,” he said.
Sighed. “As the daughter of the police chief, she was always getting in over her head. I think she thought she should shoulder the family mantle of justice or something. Her younger brother Gabe was always in trouble, often with the Sorros brothers,and it just stuck in her craw. More than a few times, she stood up to the Sorroses in school. Which meant ... I got involved.”
“As the story goes,” Sully said, “Harley’s brother, Gabe, ended up in the hospital after getting high and crashing his car. Harley just lost it. She knew he’d gotten drugs from the Sorros boys and decided to go confront them.”
Jericho looked away, the memory raw and vivid as it flashed into his head. His own words to her at the hospital before she stormed away,“You’re going to get yourself—and me—killed! Don’t do this!”
“I told her not to,” he said quietly, his voice tight. “But she didn’t listen to me, of course.”
“That’s about the time Jericho came to get me,” Sully said.
Kennedy had put down her pizza, now looked at her husband, wide-eyed.
“I’m not sure he needed my help because he was pretty racked up,” Sully continued, “but we piled into Dad’s pickup and drove over to the Sorroses’ place—that ramshackle farm in the woods where they lived with their dad, Brand. They’d been gone for a few years down in Anchorage, so no one really knew they were back for the summer. But there was Harley, in the driveway, in Mars’s face, blaming him for Gabe’s accident and telling him she was going to stop him and prove they were the ones who gave Gabe the drugs.”
Yeah, that moment was branded in Jericho’s brain—driving up, a cloud of dust behind him and Sully, screeching to a halt, piling out of the truck, pretty sure that Mars was going to send a fist into Harley’s face at any second. And her standing there, toe-to-toe with him, like she didn’t care at all that the man had fifty pounds and half a foot on her, his two brothers looming behind him.
“Jericho and I got there in the middle of the shouting match,” Sully said, his voice low. “It wasn’t going to take much for Marsto beat her like his dad had done to their mom. Just mean, all of them. So yeah, I grabbed the tire iron because I was—well, I was sixteen, and they freaked me out.” He glanced at Kennedy, his voice softening. “I mean, I was aware they were a lot bigger than me.”
