Burn Down the Night (Everything I Left Unsaid #3)- Molly O'Keefe Page 0,59
he’d trained. That…that was just the power he had over us. And he said he was doing this to make me understand that when I walked away, I had to walk away forever.”
“Or he’d kill your sister.”
I nodded.
“Bastard.”
“Yeah. But I knew he had to sell those drugs so I followed him. And I followed Gwen and finally they all led me to the Velvet Touch.” I tipped my bottle to my lips but it was empty. “But then he had the camp moved and I couldn’t find them again. Hand me another beer would you?”
He grabbed a beer from the bucket on the other side of his chair, popped the top, and handed it to me. But he didn’t let go when I grabbed it.
“I’m real sorry,” he said.
I was a little too raw and his apology was like salt in a wound. I nearly hissed at the strange pain.
“Fuck you, Max.” I said without any heat and jerked the bottle out of his hand.
“Only if I get to put the handcuffs on you this time.” Ah, this was familiar ground. Good, solid ground.
“In your dreams, dick.”
“Ah ah.” He pointed his own bottle at the dark windows of the condos surrounding us. “Is that anyway to talk to your husband?”
“In your dreams, sweetheart,” I said with a smile full of teeth.
“Your aunt—”
“No. I’m done talking about my shit. You want to talk about your brother? How about your dad? You know I lived next to him for five beautiful months.”
“All right. No talking about family.” He reached down to grab another beer for himself. His back had that wide, beautiful muscle that fanned out from his shoulder down to his spine. I eyed him shamelessly.
“What’s the tattoo?” I asked, trying to see the large tattoo that was on the inside of his arm.
“Which one?”
“Under your arm?”
He lifted his arm up and I turned my head and was able to make it out. It was a tree in full bloom, but its roots were tangled around a bunch of grimacing and laughing—or possibly screaming—human skulls.
“Jeez, Max,” I said.
“You don’t like it?” He turned his arm toward his face and smiled down at the gruesome tattoo. “I always thought it was kind of pretty.”
The word pretty coming out of his mouth was hilarious. Or maybe it was the beer on an empty stomach.
“So, no talking about family,” he said. “What will we talk about?”
“Why you won’t help me get my sister.”
He groaned. “You are lousy on vacation. Let’s talk about you and your girlfriends.”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Okay, how about you tell me about Annie.”
That made me pause.
“Annie? Dylan’s girlfriend?”
“Yeah. What’s she like?”
“Well, why don’t you go visit your brother and find out?”
“You know her, right?” he asked, watching me out of the corner of his eyes, ignoring my little dig about visiting his brother.
“I know her. Not a lot. She’s good, you know. Solid.”
“You make her sound like a table,” Max laughed.
“She’s the kind of girl any guy would want to have as a girlfriend.”
“Sucks a mean dick?”
“Stop.”
“Loves anal in the morning?”
“Max!”
“What makes her so special? I mean, Dylan didn’t come down off that mountain for nothing. And suddenly she’s in the picture and everything changes.”
“She’s sweet,” I said. “But she’s tough. Loyal. Kind of fierce that way. She’ll surprise you. She surprised the heck out of me. I think she’s probably real good for your brother.”
He nodded and stared into the darkness, all that crude joking gone. “That’s good,” he said softly and took another drink of his beer. “He deserves to be happy.”
“And you don’t?” I don’t know why I asked that question; I knew what he was going to say. It was like me taking the blame for Jennifer. Some things just were.
“I don’t think like that Joan. I don’t…happy doesn’t matter, you know. Not in a life like mine.”
“I think you deserve to be happy.”
“Because you are?” he asked.
“Because I want to be. Don’t you?”
His…ache was bleeding out into the air around us, and I felt that compulsion to make it better. To ease it. Ease him. To take on his pain. Bullshit ruinous nonsense.
So I kept my mouth shut and the two of us drank our beers in silence, my steak growing cold on my plate.
“You going to eat that?” he asked, pointing at my steak with his knife.
“No. I’m full.”
“Why are you lying?”
Surprised, my head snapped up.
“You’re hungry, Joan.”
Oh God. That voice. Those eyes. That crazy tattoo under his arm like a secret.