Ignite On Contact (Brotherhood by Fire #2) -Jaci Burton Page 0,31

sure it’s not. That’s what family is for. Still, I know it’s been a rough few years for both of you.”

She shrugged. “Life’s hard sometimes. You know all about that. You didn’t have the easiest life, either.”

He scooped some rice onto his fork. “Earlier part of my life sucked, that’s for sure. I had shitty parents. It was easier for me to live on the streets than live in fear of getting shot during a drug deal gone bad.”

She leaned back in her chair, shocked at how matter-of-fact he’d made it sound, when she knew it had been anything but. “Good God, Rafe. I had no idea. Did you run away? Is that how you ended up homeless?”

He nodded. “It got dicey at the house. People coming and going all hours. I never slept. My mom would disappear for weeks to head down to Mexico to visit family, or so she said. My old man mostly forgot he even had a kid, so I was on the streets anyway. And there were always shootings in the neighborhood. I was scared all the time. I ran into Jackson one night, and he took care of me. Then I just didn’t go home.”

“And they never came looking for you?”

He laughed. “They were happy to be rid of me. One less mouth to feed, one less thing to worry about. I stopped by the house not long after, but they’d split. They were always relocating to avoid the cops. I’m sure they were happy to be rid of me.”

She reached across the table and squeezed his hand. “They were horrible people, and you were the one lucky to be rid of them.”

“Yup.”

“But then being homeless on top of the hell you lived in. That couldn’t have been easy.”

He swallowed and took a sip of beer. “Surprisingly, the homeless part wasn’t as bad as the hell I came from. And then it got a lot better. The Donovans are amazing.” He smiled as he thought of his real mom and dad.

She cast a look of concern at him. “No one comes through something like that unscathed.”

The last thing he wanted was to talk about his past, especially his birth parents. “I imagine with what happened to you, you didn’t, either.”

She leaned back. “I didn’t. I got married to the wrong guy at twenty-one and got divorced at twenty-three.”

“So what made you choose him? The wrong guy?”

“He seemed like the right guy at the time. And I guess I was tied up in grief over losing Abuela, and my heart and my mind were mixed up. Grandpa was mourning as well, doing the best he could with me, you know? But I was in my last year of nursing school, and the grind was tough. I had gone out with my girlfriends on Friday night, and I met Tod at a dance club. He and his friends actually got rid of some guys who were bothering us, so we asked them to sit with us.

“Tod and I started up a conversation. He had just graduated from UCF with his degree in Criminal Justice and was preparing to apply to the police academy in Ft. Lauderdale.”

Interesting. Rafe knew a lot of Ft. Lauderdale cops. “Yeah? Is he still on the force now?”

She shook her head. “He was. I mean, he’s still a cop, but he transferred to Orlando a couple of years ago. Anyway, we hit it off and talked about how tough college was, and he asked me out and I said yes. In the beginning, everything was great. We’d been dating for about six months when he asked me to marry him. And I was so into the whole romance of the thing that I didn’t see the signs.”

Rafe frowned. “What signs?”

“That he always put himself and his needs first. I saw that as his commitment to his career, and I put the same emphasis on finishing school, so it was one of the things I admired about him. What I didn’t see at the time was that he was always going to put himself first, no matter what.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. But we got married, and the first six months were great. We got an apartment. I graduated nursing school and started my job. And that’s when things started sliding downhill in a hurry. I had second shift, so I was gone nights, and he was on day shift, and I wasn’t there to put dinner on the table when he got home, and sometimes the