Crazy Stupid Bromance (Bromance Book Club #3) - Lyssa Kay Adams Page 0,7
tell her that without ruining it.
The sound of crinkling paper brought him back to the present. Alexis leaned against the counter next to him and opened her second taco. “Thank you. You have no idea how much I needed this.”
“I had a hunch that you would have forgotten to eat again.”
“It’s been nuts in here today.”
“The girl come back?”
“Yes.” She said it with an annoyed groan.
“What’s that noise mean?”
Alexis swallowed. “It means she looked like she was finally going to talk to me but then Karen marched in.”
Noah reached over and plucked a stray piece of cilantro from the corner of her mouth. “What’s she pissed about now?”
Alexis launched into a story involving parking lots and a dead rat.
“It couldn’t have been him,” she said of the part cat, part demon that was one hundred percent terrifying. “He’s been inside all day.”
She gestured toward a cat tree by the front window. Beefcake flexed his paws, and Noah’s life flashed before his eyes. He’d never been high on the cat’s very short list of people he tolerated, but things had taken a turn for the worse a month ago. The vet put Beefcake on a diet, and now the cat stared at him like a platter of BBQ chicken. He had an unkempt, murderous look about him, as if he’d just gone a few rounds inside a clothes dryer and liked it. His hair stuck out at wild angles with spiky tufts atop each ear. Over his eyes was a unibrow of dark, unruly gray fur that gave him the look of a perpetually pissed-off cavalry man in old Civil War tintypes.
“Anyway,” Alexis sighed with a stretch. “She said she was going to take this up with the city, and then she stormed out.”
“What the hell does she think the city is going to do? Change parking ordinances? You’re not breaking any laws.”
“I’m a dirty slut, remember? That’s the only law she cares about.”
Noah stiffened. “She said that?”
Alexis brushed a curl off her face. “Not in so many words. But her meaning was clear. We’re just a bunch of lying harlots.”
Noah scowled. “I hate it when you say shit like that.”
“Just repeating what everyone else is thinking.”
“No one decent thinks that.”
“I think you overestimate human nature.”
Noah snorted. “I’ve definitely never been accused of that before.”
Five years in the hacktivist community had left him with little hope for humanity. But she was also right. The months following the Royce incident had introduced him to a depth of human depravity he hadn’t known existed. His blood boiled just remembering some of the voice mails and emails Alexis had received from Royce’s fans. Even with a dozen credible accusations against him, his most rabid fans still refused to believe that their precious hero would do anything wrong. The women must have been lying. They were just disgruntled former employees or spurned lovers.
Noah had helped Alexis set up a new email filtering system that blocked the worst of the messages, but he knew she still received some of them. She had gotten good at just deleting them, but sometimes she still shared the most egregious with him. She’d shrug and say she was used to it, but Noah could read her body language like a favorite book. Her lips would flatten, and she’d have to swallow before talking. It bothered her. A lot. But anytime he suggested she do more to fight back, she would say it wasn’t worth the time or effort. Her life was about finding peace now.
Noah felt her gaze on him and glanced over. “What’s up?”
“Huh?”
“You’re staring at me. Do I have something on my face?”
“Yeah, this,” she said, reaching over to scratch his beard. “What do you look like under all that scruff anyway?”
He waggled his eyebrows. “You don’t want to know.”
“Wow. That bad, huh?”
“No. That good. I have to scruff myself up, because the level of male beauty under all this is more than mere mortals can handle.”
“So it’s a public service.”
“Absolutely.”
Alexis swallowed another bite. “Is Zoe going to be there tomorrow?”
They were going to his mom’s house for dinner to celebrate his birthday. His sister was supposed to be there, but . . . He shrugged. “Who knows? It’s Zoe. She does what she wants.”
“Marsh?” Alexis asked casually.
“He’ll be there too.”
She offered him a sympathetic smile, because she knew there was nothing else to be said. His relationship with his father’s old army friend, Pete Marshall—or Marsh, as everyone called him—was complicated. Noah wouldn’t be where he was