Crazy Stupid Bromance (Bromance Book Club #3) - Lyssa Kay Adams Page 0,29
fuck to tell his woman that he’s in love with her?
Noah downed the last warm swallow of beer, still glaring at the bag.
Fine. He couldn’t sleep anyway. He grabbed the book, cracked it open, and started to read.
AJ Sutherland’s first mistake was going two miles over the speed limit in a dinky town like Bay Springs, Michigan, where the cops had nothing better to do than hide in dark alcoves with radar guns.
His second mistake was thinking anything had changed in the eighteen years since he’d been back to the northern resort town where he spent his summers as a teenager.
He banged his hand against the metal bars of the jail cell. “You know you can’t hold me indefinitely, right?”
The officer who pulled him over and arrested him regarded him with a mixture of boredom and outright hostility. “You have a right to remain silent. You might want to use it.”
AJ uttered an “argh” and ran his hands through his hair. “Look, Mr. Alvarez—”
“Mister?”
“Chief Alvarez. I get that you don’t like me and never have, but you can’t just throw me in jail for it.”
“Son, I didn’t arrest you because I don’t like you. I arrested you because you have an outstanding warrant.”
“Bullshit. For what?”
“Watch your language. You might be a big, bad NFL player to the rest of the world, but around here you’re just a cocky punk who walked away from his responsibilities.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Daddy, stop.” The female voice that interrupted their conversation was straight out of AJ’s memory bank, and he’d be lying if he wasn’t terrified to hear it. Because there was only one person on Earth who hated him more than Chief Sandoval Alvarez, and that was the chief’s daughter, Missy.
She walked down the hallway and stood next to her father in a long, dark trench coat and with a briefcase in her hand.
“Missy?” AJ croaked.
She sighed. “No one has called me that in a long time.”
“Sorry. Melissa, then?”
A single eyebrow arched. “What brings you back after all these years?”
“I have some decisions to make. This seemed like a good place to make them.”
Her expression remained unchanged and unimpressed. “I heard about that. You’re thinking of retiring.”
“Thirty-six is old for a quarterback.”
She looked at her father. “Let him go.”
“Can’t do that, sweetie. He’s under arrest.”
“On what charge?” AJ barked.
“Eighteen years of unpaid child support.”
AJ tipped his head back to laugh but it died on his lips at the look on Missy’s face. He blinked rapidly as his vision blurred. “Wh-What is he talking about?”
Missy looked at the floor and pinched her nose.
“Missy, what the hell is he talking about?”
She looked up. “You have a daughter.”
CHAPTER NINE
By the time he pulled into the parking lot behind Mack’s building the next morning, Noah was more than twenty minutes late and looking for a fight. Because he’d slept like shit, and that book? What the fuck was that? What kind of romance novel was about a guy who abandoned his child? He should have listened to his first instinct and thrown the thing away.
He stormed in the back door just in time to hear a loud clap and a man’s commanding voice. “Work those glutes, kids. Squeeze those cheeks.”
Oh no. No way. He absolutely did not have the energy for this today. Noah spun on his heel and was just about to nope the fuck out of there when he heard Mack’s voice.
“Where the hell have you been? We had to start without you.”
A frustrated growl emerged from Noah’s throat as he turned back around. Mack stood at the end of the long hallway that led to the bar area. He wore long track pants, a T-shirt bearing the logo for his bar, and a whiskered scowl.
“Damn,” Mack said, reeling back. “You could knock a buzzard off a shit wagon. What happened to you?”
“Fuck you. I’m here, aren’t I? And why the hell did you make us do this so early on a Saturday?”
“Because the Russian has a game tonight.” Mack turned around and nodded for Noah to follow. “Come on. We’re just warming up, so you didn’t really miss anything.”
Great.
The pulsating beat of a techno song greeted him as he walked into the main part of the bar. Sonia and the guys turned and looked in unison as Noah and Mack walked in. They formed two sloppy lines along the wooden dance floor where, come ten o’clock tonight, drunken douchebags would attempt to out-line-dance one another before stumbling into the street to