Tristan (The Ruins of Emblem #1)

by Cora Brent

  “Spill the family gossip,” I said. “All anyone wants to talk about is Emblem and now I feel like I’m out of the loop with what’s happening up here.”

  “Well, Izzy has a new boyfriend and Uncle Deck hates his guts.”

  “How come?”

  She shrugged. “Probably because he has a penis.”

  I laughed and Cami continued with all the news of our Gentry cousins.

  “Derek just moved in with that cute little girlfriend of his, Paige. And Thomas started his classes over at ASU. He took Derek’s spot in the apartment and so now he’s living with Kellan, poor kid. Oh, Jake’s coming for a visit next month, did he tell you?”

  I hadn’t spoken to Jake in weeks. His response rate had always been a little unpredictable.

  “I hadn’t heard that,” I told Cami as she watched me. I thought her scrutiny might be because of Jake’s impending visit but she had something else on her mind.

  “He looks damn good,” she said. “I’ll give him that.”

  “Tristan?”

  She smiled. “So is this turning into a thing? You and the prodigal Mulligan brother?”

  “Of course not,” I said, not daring to hazard a glance in Tristan’s direction. My reporter sister was abnormally observant. “This is not a thing at all. We’re not even friends.”

  She nudged me. “Good, because judging by that patriarchal side eye from Cord Gentry, any idea that his youngest daughter might fall for an Emblem bad boy would not be met with enthusiasm.”

  My father, the aforementioned Cord Gentry, was visible in the living room, occupying an overstuffed armchair and having a conversation with Dalton while shooting stern glances in Tristan’s direction.

  The thing is, my dad had a lot of sympathy for people who’d suffered a raw start in life. After all, despite Curtis’s meager resume and criminal affiliations my father had given him a job and a chance because he recognized when someone was working to better his life. But there was something he’d always told us and I was reminded of those words when I watched my father watching Tristan.

  “There’s not much you can do about someone who enjoys his place in the gutter.”

  He might have been talking about his own parents who’d remained in Emblem, locked in their bitter vortex of violence and addiction until they died. But my heart rebelled against the idea that anyone was irredeemable. Even the insufferable Tristan Mulligan had some good points besides his brutally hot exterior. At least I thought he might.

  “You want me to take her?” Cami offered as Annabeth started moving her head around and grunting.

  I snuggled the baby closer. “Don’t you dare.”

  But then Annabeth began rooting around in the crook of my neck in search of something to latch onto. Since my equipment wasn’t suited to the challenge I had to settle for planting a kiss on her round little cheek before reluctantly handing her over to her mother.

  Now that my sister’s attention was diverted I finally risked a glance in Tristan’s direction. He was staring back at me.

  The heat rose in my belly. I looked away first.

  And I felt like I’d just somehow lost a minor battle when I didn’t even know the rules of engagement.

  Chapter Eight

  Tristan

  Even before I saw Curtis’s perplexed expression when he found me standing in his living room I was starting to have second thoughts about crashing his dinner party.

  Messing with Cadence Gentry was one thing but blindsiding my brother was another. He wasn’t unhappy to see me, not exactly. Just confused. And maybe, though it pained me to think so, a little wary.

  “Nice place you’ve got here,” I said, looking around at the homey accents and tasteful furniture, likely all selected by Cassie.

  “You’ve never been to the house before?”

  “No. We went to a restaurant after Breck’s graduation, remember?”

  “Yeah.” He nodded and didn’t settle back into the couch, leaning forward and running his hand over his jaw. He looked like the same old Curtis who’d run with gangbangers down in Emblem. Still tough and heavily tattooed. But his mannerisms had changed. He was calm now, at ease. He’d lost his edge in exchange for mutating into a serene family guy.

  “I wish I could have seen him tonight. Brecken I mean.”

  Curtis nodded. “I’m sure he would have made arrangements to be here if he’d known you were going to show up.”

  “Well, I might have shown up if I was invited.” I meant it as a joke but Curtis didn’t smile. I tried a more sincere tactic. “Seriously, congrats on the impending fatherhood. I’ll take a shot at being a decent uncle.”

  A smile flashed across his face as his eyes darted toward the kitchen where Cassie had disappeared a moment ago. “We’ve only known for a few days. I was going to call you.”

  “My number hasn’t changed.” Another semi joke that went flat.

  An awkward ten seconds of silence passed.

  Curtis leaned his elbows on his knees. “So how are things going?”

  “Good.”

  “You still driving a tow truck for Adelson?”

  “I am.”

  “Full time?”

  “Nope.”

  He wasn’t pleased to hear that. If I wasn’t driving a tow truck full time then he knew I was doing something else to fill in the gaps. I could have just lied to him and given him the peace of mind he was hoping for but that wasn’t my style.

  When I looked away from my brother’s pained expression I caught sight of Emblem’s hottest high school teacher. Cadence was extra fuck worthy tonight in that dress although at the moment she was accessorized with a baby and I couldn’t see how nicely her full tits strained against the fabric. Her legs would have looked even better in a pair of high heels but those flats could be just as easily propped up on my shoulders or that dress could tolerate getting pushed up over her hips for some filthy backseat action. I’d have to try that sometime. Tonight maybe.

  Cadence unloaded the wiggling baby and our eyes met. Maybe she sensed that I was picturing her hair spread out on my lap while she sucked me off with those glossed pink lips. In any case she reddened and looked elsewhere.

  Two seconds later my brother’s wife entered the room and told us dinner was waiting on the dining room table. Cassie smiled at the sight of two of the Mulligan brothers having a nice chat on the living room couch and I smiled back.

  I had to give Curtis credit for hitting the jackpot when it came to his wife. The girl was as close to flawless as the world ever created. The first time I ever saw Cassie I thought she was a walking wet dream that had strutted right out of a magazine centerfold but I’d long since gotten used to thinking of her as my sister-in-law. The two of them were a storybook couple and I was genuinely happy they’d found each other. Plus I got a kick out of seeing my formerly wild big brother tamed and conquered and living in a stucco tract house that sprouted fake greenery in every corner.

  Dinner was some chicken and rice thing I’d never heard of but it smelled good and suddenly I felt kind of bad that Cassie had to go to the trouble of creating an extra place setting for me. Somehow I wound up with Cadence on one side and her father on the other. The dude wasn’t real subtle about shooting me the stink eye for reasons unknown but I could pretend not to notice.

  Once the food started getting passed around multiple conversations erupted at once. Apparently there were endless people with the last name Gentry that required discussion and I was the only one who couldn’t keep track of them so I stayed quiet and shoveled food in my mouth. The last time I’d been treated to a home cooked meal was probably before my mother got collared for insurance fraud and went on the run, leaving me and Breck in Curtis’s care. She’d returned to serve her prison sentence and now she was living with some new age group in Sedona that worshiped tea leaves. She was happy I guess but she wouldn’t be cooking anyone dinner anytime soon.

  Cadence’s mother was talking now and I paid attention because she was sp
eaking to her daughter. “I meant to tell you about this article I came across about the most troubled schools in the state. Emblem High made the list. It wasn’t exactly an academic powerhouse back when your father and I went there but it sounds like the increase in local crime has taken a toll.”

  “There are some issues,” Cadence admitted and I thought she sounded a little defensive as she pushed her fork across her nearly empty plate. She’d finished eating even before I did, which was nice to see. I couldn’t stand it when girls acted as if they’d been born without appetites, like they could survive on nail polish fumes and flavored water. “But there are a lot of dedicated staff members doing their best and the year is off to a good start. I’ve been told it’s the first time in years that fewer than five police incidents have occurred in the first few weeks of school.”

  “What kind of police incidents?” asked her father.

  “Fights. Threats against teachers. Drugs. Weapons.” She shrugged. “I haven’t run into any real trouble.”

  Cadence’s dad leaned over, practically pushing me out of the way to address his daughter. “I spoke to your Uncle Chase yesterday. He said there’s a chronic staff shortage at his high school and he’s sure they’d welcome you even though the school year has already started.”

  Cadence scowled. “I have a job, Dad.”

  “I know. And you’re celebrating the fact that you haven’t yet been threatened by your students.”

  “Cord,” his wife warned.

  I realized this was a conversation I could contribute to. “Emblem High’s not so bad,” I said. “Don’t let that stabbing incident convince you otherwise.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “What stabbing incident?”

  “It happened last year,” Cadence said. “And that student was expelled.”

  “Who did he stab?” her father asked.

  Cadence didn’t like answering the question. “She. And supposedly she had some mental health issues.”

  “All right. Who did she stab?”

  “She knifed her English teacher,” I volunteered. “At least that’s what I heard around town. Is that right, Cadence?”

  “No.” She was getting exasperated. “It was her math teacher and she didn’t use a knife. Just a pair of scissors stolen from the front office.”

  “Right,” I said. “Of course it had to be her math teacher. No one likes math. Anyway I’m sure stuff like that happens every day at upper middle class suburban schools.”

  “I’m sure it doesn’t,” Cord growled.

  “What happened to the teacher?” Cassie wanted to know, gazing at her little sister with worry in her big blue eyes thanks to the marauding scissors-wielding lunatics of Emblem.

  “She quit and moved back to Scottsdale to teach at a Montessori preschool,” I said, inventing the victim’s fate out of thin air.

  “Stop helping me,” Cadence muttered under her breath.

  “Isn’t it nice to know you have options?” I asked her. “In case a pair of scissors falls into the wrong hands at Emblem High?”

  Curtis coughed, a paternal sound, a ‘you’re out of line young man’ warning. I found his face across the table and he looked irritated. Cassie looked worried. Her twin sister Cami looked at me like I was a dick. Cami’s husband Dilbert or Darren or whatever his name was had no idea what was going on because he was making dumb faces at his baby daughter. Cadence’s father frowned at his dinner plate. Cadence’s mother was giving her daughter a sympathetic smile. And Cadence herself slipped me an intense toxic glare that had me wondering if she wished she had some scissors handy. I was glad she didn’t.

  Then the baby started to cry so the mood instantly changed and everyone started going “Awwww!” and falling all over themselves for the chance to hold her. Getting passed around like a game day football didn’t improve the kid’s mood much so Cami and her husband decided to take off. She didn’t say anything to me but her husband shook my hand. He seemed like a decent guy. I should try harder to remember his name.

  Curtis went to go help Cassie clean up in the kitchen and Cadence joined them so that left me sitting in the living room alone with Cadence’s parents. Her mom was going out of her way to be nice and kept talking about Brecken, how well he was doing and how proud they all were of the young man he was turning into. Honestly she’d been more of a mom to Breck than our own mother so I appreciated the hell out of the woman.

  Then her husband jumped in to share his thoughts on Emblem and its problems and how he’d heard that it was the meth capital of the southwest and that a third of the homes were in some state of foreclosure, blah blah blah. I was growing a little tired of the hushed, grim voice he used when he talked about Emblem. For crying out loud it wasn’t the prettiest place on earth but it wasn’t some subterranean circle of hell either.

  I knew what Cord Gentry’s problem was and I was tempted to call him on it. He was a Made It, which had been my dad’s term for people who found success after exiting Emblem and didn’t return except maybe once in a blue moon to show off how special they were. Cord’s cousin was never like that. Deck Gentry had been a good friend of my dad’s and I suspected he’d helped out my mother after the family breadwinner took a bullet to the skull.

  As for Cord, he came across as the type who looked down his Emblem-born nose at anyone whose choices were different from his own. Curtis was on his good side because Curtis had decided to play the game with the wife and the house and the steady six-days-a-week job. When Cord fixed his pale gaze on me I could swear he was thinking, “I pulled myself up so why can’t you?”

  The man wasn’t entirely wrong but I knew how to change direction if I wanted to. There was no burning need for me to be smugly guided by Cord Gentry or anyone else. The guy obviously had issues when it came to the place he came from. Right now I figured he was mostly pissed that Cadence, his darling little princess, had rejected his carefully constructed castle life in favor of mingling with the dirty commoners.

  Cadence reappeared with her purse in hand and looked right past me, addressing only her parents. “I should get going. It’s a long drive back to Emblem and I just received a thunderstorm alert on my phone.”

  Her mother stood and embraced her. “It’s Saturday night. You’re welcome to be our guest in your old room and drive back tomorrow.”

  “I’ll even get donuts in the morning,” Cord promised, smiling at the sight of his wife and daughter locked in a sweet hug.

  Cadence slowly disentangled herself. “I can’t. I promised Grandpa we’d go to brunch tomorrow.” She exhaled loudly. “Besides, somebody’s got to drive Tristan back.”

  All eyes in the room turned to me. I was confident that now I knew exactly how an unwanted dog felt.

  “Why don’t you give me the keys to your car?” I suggested. “I’ll drive myself back tonight and you can go home with your folks. I’ll even come around tomorrow to pick you up. Just tell me when you want me to show up.”

  For the first time Cord Gentry looked like he approved of the words coming out of my mouth. Cadence didn’t feel the same way.

  “I am NOT handing over my car to you,” she said with a flip of her hair and that was that.

  My brother and his wife returned to the living room and they all spent a few minutes fawning all over Cadence before they allowed her to leave their safe grip and return to the perils of Emblem. Anyone watching from the outside might think she was marching off to war.

  I, on the other hand, received some limp waves, a warm hug from Cassie and an awkward handshake from my brother.

  Cadence was mad at me. She slammed her car door and immediately rolled the radio dial to blast out educational programming where some lady who sounded like she’d swallowed six Percocet twenty minutes ago droned on about the history of the saxophone. When I tried to speak Cadence turned the volume up to drown out my voice so I backed off and let her have her grumpy moment.

  I didn’t find myself in the passenger seat very often so rather than scrolling through
my phone and digesting nonsense headlines about who clapped back on Twitter I looked out the window at the procession of shopping centers and tract housing developments that were all squished together around here. With a flash of recognition I realized we weren’t too far from the crappy motel where I’d briefly lived with my brothers after Curtis hauled us out of Emblem in search of something better. I hadn’t cooperated with his plans, not even a little bit.

  The radio program about saxophones ended and then a panel of experts began discussing what kind of wine was best to bring to a dinner party. Maybe they were onto something. Perhaps tonight’s dinner party conversation wouldn’t have turned sour if I’d only brought some wine.

  My phone buzzed with an emergency alert and I glanced down long enough to see it was just another warning about a storm system rolling through. Dust and high winds and lightning were no joke when visibility was next to nothing out on a desert road. A wall of dust was already clouding the roadside lights and a click on the weather map’s radar screen showed several storm cells congregating in the southeast outside Emblem.

  The strip malls and subdivisions had been largely left behind and Cadence was about to turn down the stretch of two lane highway that snaked toward town.

  “We’re going to run right into a storm,” I told her over the noise of the great radio wine debate.

  “I know,” she said and kept driving.

  Five minutes later the roadside lights were obscured by a moving wall of dust and then the rain began with the sudden violence of a tsunami. Cadence turned on the windshield wipers full blast.

  “That’s like trying to bail out a sinking boat with a Solo cup,” I said. “Pull over.”

  “Shut up,” Cadence replied and leaned forward to squint out the windshield although I couldn’t say what she was squinting at since there was nothing to see thanks to the fire hose that Mother Nature had turned on upstairs. Cadence slowed down but she kept going like she figured a head on collision was worth the pain if she got to spite me in the process. Just because the girl had legs that deserved to be wrapped around my waist and tits that my mouth couldn’t wait to taste didn’t mean I was willing to die for her.