The Marked Men Series Books 1–6: Rule, Jet, Rome, Nash, Rowdy, Asa. Jay Crownover
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of guy. If my tight schedule made it hard for us to spend time together, I had no illusions that he would wait around for me to be free—he would move on to something easier and more manageable.
“I’ll be out around ten on Saturday and usually I’m out by seven on Sunday. The Sunday shift is optional. I just picked it up because we stopped going to Brookside and I figured I might as well make a little extra money.”
“My buddy Jet is playing at Cerberus this weekend, why don’t you grab your roommate and come hang out Saturday night?”
“What kind of music is it?” Cerberus had a pretty rowdy reputation in town. It was located in the warehouse district and had been shut down more than once for one thing or another. It wasn’t the kind of place I would normally consider spending time. In fact, it was the kind of place I normally avoided at all costs on the off chance I would run into someone I knew and they would rat me out to my parents, but if I was going to commit and try to spend time with this boy I had wanted forever, then my horizons were going to have to expand.
“Metal.”
I snorted a little. “Ayden is from Kentucky. She likes Taylor Swift and Carrie Underwood. I don’t know that I could wrangle her into that.”
“They’re actually really good; they went on tour with a pretty famous band last year. Besides, Ayden seems like a pretty cool chick. I bet she would go just to be your wingman. If she doesn’t come, just come alone. I won’t leave you hanging.”
“What about Rome?”
“He has to go to Fort Carson for the weekend. He has to set up meetings with his VA counselor. He’s having a rough time since he isn’t healing as fast as he thought he would be.”
“That’s too bad.”
“I’m not going to hide this from anyone, Shaw. If you want to play those kinds of games maybe you need to rethink whether this is something you really want to do or not.”
I grabbed his forearm and let the tips of my fingers dig into the body of the snake that was marked there. “No, I’m not going to hide. Just don’t make me look like an idiot, Rule. This matters.”
“It matters to me, too, Casper.” He climbed to his feet so that he was towering over me. He bent down and pressed a soft kiss to the crown of my head. “By the way, you look good in jeans. Come to the show Saturday.”
“All right.” I watched him walk out of the coffee shop and it wasn’t lost on me that so did every other girl in the place. I stifled a sigh and ruefully shook my head. I went to flip the top of my computer back open when the girl sitting directly across from me caught my eye. She was a little bit older than me, had long dreadlocks that were a startling ocean blue, and she was staring at me in open envy. I had to blink a little bit because I was so used to being the one who looked at the girls crawling out of his bed like that. She gave me a sheepish grin.
“You’re going to have your hands full with that one.”
Considering I wasn’t even a hundred percent sure what we were doing, I had no doubt she was right. It wasn’t like he asked me to be his girlfriend or even out on an honest-to-God date. He just said he wanted to hang out and spend time together. That wasn’t defined or clear and I didn’t even know what that meant to him. I appreciated that he told me he was willing to keep it in his pants, that he was aware that whatever was happening between us was important enough to try to figure out without the complication of other girls involved, but I was acutely aware that old habits tended to die hard, and Rule was not known to practice restraint. I huffed out a breath. “You’re telling me.”
The girl laughed a little. “He actually tattooed a giant lotus flower on my friend’s leg; she spent all three sessions trying to get him to ask her out on a date. I guess I can tell her he has a girlfriend so it’ll make her feel better.”
I picked my coffee back up and tried to get my head out of the Rule fog it had descended into and back into good-college-student mode.
“I’m not his girlfriend.”
“Really? It sure looked like it.”
“We’ve known each other a long time; it’s complicated.”
She winked at me and gave me a saucy grin. “Oh, honey, when they look like that and exude that kind of ‘do-me’ vibe, it always will be.”
Well, there it was. If a perfect stranger could plainly see after only five minutes of watching us together that it was always going to be a battle to keep things with him on the level, what chance did I have of making anything between us work? With that depressing thought I went back to assisted suicide and tried to cheer myself up.
CHAPTER 7
Rule
The club was packed. Enmity was a pretty big local draw for metal heads and punk rockers, plus Jet had been in the scene since he was just a kid so he had a solid local following from just being around for so long. Some crappy wannabe Slayer band was opening up for them and already doing their warm-up. They were going to be followed by an all-girl punk band so the show was supposed to run late, which was good because it was well past eleven, and I couldn’t stop looking at the display on my phone to check the time. Every time I did it Nash rolled his eyes and Jet laughed at me; granted, they were doing a bang-up job of polishing off a bottle of Patrón between them so I didn’t take it personally. I had sent Shaw a text more than an hour ago to verify she was going to be here and I hadn’t heard a thing back.
I was antsy and ill-tempered partly because I was navigating uncharted territory and, undeniably, because this whole monogamy thing was new to me. I was used to scratching an itch when I felt it, used to appealing to baser needs and letting my carnal instinct drive me. Behaving not because someone asked me to but because I wanted to was entirely new to me, and the side effects sucked—I was horny and irritable, plus I was sick of playing phone tag with her. I’d had no idea how busy Shaw’s life was. The girl was bouncing from class, to work, to volunteer stuff all day long. When I saw her before on the weekends I had just assumed she had free time and was choosing to spend Sundays with my folks, but clearly that wasn’t the case. Every minute of the girl’s day was carefully planned and I was starting to see how much she had sacrificed to care for our fucked-up family. “Chill out. If she said she was coming, then she’s coming.”
Nash shoved an elbow in my ribs, making me jostle the phone I was glaring holes into. I shoved it back into my pocket and picked up the beer I had been nursing for more than an hour. I caught the eye of a smoking-hot blonde who had been scoping me out under the radar since we walked into the bar and had to do a quick mental rundown of why I thought spending time with Shaw and figuring out how she had gotten my head all twisted and turned was a good idea when easy as pie was right in front of me. The blonde gave me a smile that all but screamed “I want you to take my pants off with your teeth,” and I almost choked when beer went down the wrong tube.
Jet snickered and rubbed a hand through his messy black hair. The guy looked like a rock star; he was lanky and had that permanent, freshly laid and right-outta-bed look that made girls stupid and dreamy-eyed with zero effort. He also had an awesome voice and could sing, like, really sing, which made the fact he chose to be in a heavy metal band ironic because most of his stuff with Enmity was screaming and loud. The guy was a consummate musician and could write a killer song as well as play pretty much any instrument he picked up. One night after a particularly nasty bout of beer pong, he had confessed that he liked metal because he couldn’t deal with the fame and adulation of more popular styles of music. The guy wanted to be in a band, but for reasons that made sense only to him, had no interest in being a full-blown rock star—even though he had the look and the vocal chops to do it.
“I swear you pull more tail than me and I’m in a freaking band. All you have to do is blink and you have broads falling all over themselves to have at it.”
I cleared my throat and set the beer down on the table.