Callum
I watched her from across the restaurant. I had been for the last thirty minutes.
I’d clocked her the moment she walked in the door and had been openly staring at her ever since.
“Can I get you anything else?” the waitress, a cute little blonde that couldn’t be more than eighteen, asked.
I glanced at her and shook my head. “No.”
Her smile dimmed, and I remembered to tack on a, “Thanks, though.”
Her smile renewed, she walked away, heading straight for the table with the beautiful redhead.
I had a special thing for redheads. My sister was a redhead when she was a baby. Not that I had a thing for my sister or anything like that, but she held a special place in my heart, and I’d always found myself gravitating toward them. In fact, my first girlfriend in eighth grade had been a redhead.
The rest of them had been blondes with big tits, but that didn’t negate the fact that my heart always wanted to go for the fiery ones. The ones that were trouble. Big, big trouble.
And the one sitting in the booth all by herself three tables down from mine?
She really looked like she was trouble.
The kind of trouble that made you fall in love with them and you lived happily ever after with kind of trouble.
I dropped my eyes back down to the paperback I was reading and waited patiently for my food to come out. And while I did that, I certainly did not look up and find myself staring at a certain redhead.
Nope. No. Nuh-uh.
I managed to stick to my guns, too.
At least until my brother’s ex-girlfriend and his ex-best friend spotted her.
At first, I was going to leave it alone. Really, I was.
But then they started giving her shit about her weight, at least in their snarky comments without outright calling her fat, and I lost a little bit of my composure.
See, here’s my thing. I want my woman to actually look like a woman. I want them to have curves. I want them to have thighs and ass. I want them to have tits that overflow my hands. I want them to have a soft lap for my head to rest in. Honestly, I like them pillowy. And the redhead? God, she was everything I ever wanted all rolled into one beautiful, boob and asstastic perfect package.
Malon? Mail? Mal? I couldn’t remember his name off the top of my head. But whatever his fuckin’ name was, reached into his pocket and pulled something out, tossing it onto the table right next to the woman’s appetizer.
Her face went ashen, and her eyes went wide.
That’s when I heard her say, “Mal, you told me that you couldn’t find the ring. That’s seriously the only thing I asked for back! It was my mom’s! My grandmother’s!”
I stood up then, catching the waitress before she could set down the food at my table.
“Take it to her table,” I ordered as I grabbed my glass. “I’ve decided to move. But don’t bring it until hers is ready, please.”
The waitress blinked. Then turned with my food in her hands.
I walked up to the table and sat next to the really pissed off woman that barely even acknowledged that I’d blocked her in.
“Hey, Malfo,” I said, grinning. “Whatcha doin’ here?”
Mal blinked. “It’s Mal.”
I shrugged. “You’re interrupting our dinner. Do you mind?”
Mal nodded his head and went to pick up his checkbook that I could now see out on the middle of the table, and I ‘accidentally’ knocked my half-filled drink over, soaking the checkbook.
“Oh, shit.” I managed to sound contrite. “I’m sorry.”
The woman next to me finally came unglued and placed her napkin over the spill. I did the same and had it contained before it started to roll off the table.
“No biggie.” Mal smiled as if I hadn’t done that on purpose.
We both knew that I had.
“If you don’t mind,” I said as the waitress finally set my food down in front of me, as well as the woman’s. “We’re hungry.”
Mal left, pulling Marjorie behind him before anything else could be said.
I guess I still had it.
Mal had never liked me and the feeling had been mutual.
“Thank you,” the woman whispered, staring at her food as if she was trying not to cry.
“Mal has always been a piece of shit,” I said as I picked my burger up. “Everything he does or says has a vindictive spin on it. Fuck him and everything that comes out of his mouth.”
I took a big bite of my burger and waited for her to do the same to her salad.
I usually didn’t like when women had salads. However, this particular salad actually looked pretty fuckin’ good.
So good, in fact, that I would consider eating it myself.
“Mal’s my ex-husband,” she murmured. “He gave my wedding ring, the one that used to belong to my mother and grandmother and her grandmother, to that woman.”
“Was she wearing it?” I asked in between bites.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“K.”
That’s when I got up and made my way to the table where Mal and Marjorie had retaken their seats. Eating much the same as they’d just bashed the woman for eating.
Mal’s eyes met mine before I could get halfway there.
I was still chewing my bite of burger as I stopped at their table.
I held my hand out for Marjorie to take, which she did.
“Marjorie, right?” I asked as I placed my other hand over hers.
Slip of the hand, and it was done.
“Yes,” she said. “You don’t remember me?”
I curled my lip up as I placed my hand in my pocket. “Yeah, I do. Which is why I’m only going to say this to y’all once. Leave her alone or deal with me.”
They both blinked.
“You don’t know me anymore, Callum. So don’t pretend to,” Mal growled.
My head tilted and I stared at him with cold, dead eyes.
“You don’t know me anymore, either,” I said quietly. “Think about that before you decide to hurt her again. And if I ever see you disrespect her in any way out in public again… well, let’s just say I know quite a few people in this town, one of which is your father.”
Mal’s eyes narrowed, and I wished I could pop him a good one before I left.
Alas, I liked being on the outside of a cell and not the inside.
That, and there was a very beautiful lady sitting next to my hamburger.
A pretty lady that was staring at me with curiosity when I made my way back to her.
The moment I sat down next to her, her face flamed.
“What did you just do?” she asked curiously.
I leaned toward her, shoved my hand into my pocket, and extracted her ring.
Holding it out to her on the palm of my hand, being sure to conceal it by holding it slightly under the table, her face went joyous.
“Oh my God!” she cried out.
Then she threw herself at me.
Unready for her show of happiness, I nearly dropped the ring and barely closed my hand around it before it fell to the floor.
“Whoa,” I said in surprise, closing my arms around her.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she whispered fiercely. “I would’ve been devastated if I never got it back.”
“Do you plan on wearing it for your next marriage?” I teased.
She shook her head, looking sad all of a sudden. “No. I plan on putting it in my jewelry box and never wearing it again. But that doesn’t mean I don’t still want it… it was never really for the marriage, anyway. It was for me… something that represented my mom and my grandmother. When they died, I thought I would die right along with them. It’s one of the only things I have left of them.”
“Glad I got it for you then.” I reluctantly let her go.
When she sat back, her face once again reddening, I held out the ring to her
.
She took it, gingerly picking it up and placing it onto her ring finger. Her right ring finger.
“You hate him, don’t you?” I asked.
Her eyes flicked up to mine. “You have no idea.”
“Try me,” I suggested.
Her smile was soft.
“I hate him enough to go run a Spartan race that I know I’m going to fail spectacularly at,” she whispered. “How’s that?”
That sounded pretty damn hateful right there.
I liked it.
“Well then, that makes two of us, because I’m running that, too,” I teased.
Or I would be now.
I just had to convince my brother that he was doing it with me.
The dickbag and his wet blanket walked past us, the wet blanket speaking loud enough for us to hear her as they passed.
“We’ll have to go get more,” I heard Marjorie whisper. “That’s our only book of checks like that. Damn, it’s going to cost us another hundred bucks.”
I found my mouth twitching.
“I hate her,” the woman growled.
I hadn’t much cared for her when she was my brother’s girlfriend, and I certainly didn’t care for her now.
“Me, too.”
Chapter 3
Does refusing to do cardio count as resistance training?
-Callum to Ace
Callum
“I don’t know why we’re doing this,” my brother grumbled for the fifteenth time. “I get enough working out at home.”
I looked at Banks, then back at the road.
“You’re doing it because I asked you to, and your stomach is starting to look a little flabby around the middle,” I teased.
Ace, my oldest brother, snorted from his seat next to me.
Banks, my twin, and elder brother by a whole two and three-quarters of a minute, looked at me from the back seat as if I was smoking meth right in front of him.
“You’re one to talk,” he teased. “Wasn’t it you I saw that had to go buy more jeans because yours wouldn’t button?”
“That was because Darby did the washing and fucked them up,” I shot back. “Not because I’ve gotten fat.”
“Sounds like a convenient excuse to me. Why else would you want to go to the gym?” he questioned.
I sighed.
“I met a girl yesterday at the diner,” I said. “Ace, did you know that Mal was married?”
Ace shrugged.
“Yeah.” He paused. “But I also heard that he got a divorce, too. That the chick was a piece of work.”
I started to get angry, which wasn’t rational since I’d known the girl a whole five minutes. After the two jackwads had left last night, so had she. She hadn’t even said thank you or anything. Not that she needed to since she’d already said it once. But I’d expected a smile or a ‘good job’ or something. Yet I’d gotten nothing. “Actually, it wasn’t her being a piece of work. It was him being one. The girl is super sweet… and just so happens to be friends with your Codie.”
Ace looked at me in surprise. “How do you know that?”
“I went by the feed store on the way home from eating yesterday,” I answered as Ace took a turn a little too sharply. “Asked around about her. Found out that Desi and she were best friends way back then and still are now.”
Ace made a sound in his throat that I knew for a fact resembled interest.
“And I found out that they’re going to be training for the Spartan race that Colt’s teaching the boot camp for at the gym,” I continued. “Did you know that?”
Ace didn’t say anything.
“Anyway, I thought we could run it, too. And just pop in when they’re there,” I continued when there was still silence in the cab of the truck.
“Why am I here?” Banks asked.
I rolled my eyes. Banks and his loner self never surprised me anymore.
“Because I wanted you to be.” I shrugged. “And because I thought you might want to do the race with us?”
Banks shook his head. “If it’s all the same to you, while y’all work out, I’m going to take the truck and run over to the Newsome’s. I need a haircut. And I like working out alone, not with a bunch of women in the gym to distract me. I’ll run the race, but I’m not doing the whole social working out shit.”
When Ace pulled to a stop in front of the gym, we all hopped out and Ace handed off his keys. “Sure?”
Banks answered by getting in the truck and pulling out without another word.
“What’s up with him lately?” Ace asked, watching the truck practically peel out of the parking lot.
He was acting even worse than he normally did.
Which was saying something since not only did Banks have PTSD from when we were children, but he also picked up some pretty nasty scars from when we were in the military.
“I don’t know, but I plan on finding out,” I answered. “I just have to get him in the right frame of mind to talk.”
Ace snorted. “That’ll be the day.”
It would, actually.
It had to be in the day, because there would be no talking to him at night. His nightmares always seemed to get worse as the sun went down.
“I’ll talk to him tomorrow,” I said. “But I have to do that after I talk to Darby.”
“Darby?” Ace asked as he walked toward the front door, his workout bag over one shoulder.
“Darby.” I sighed.
Darby was our youngest brother, and the biggest pain in the ass on the planet.
Well, he used to be. He was getting better, slowly but surely.
I wouldn’t have thought the same of him a few years ago, though.
When he was younger, Darby had been neck deep in messed up shit. He’d been hanging around with unsavory people, and those unsavory people had taken him down a dark path that nearly got his ass thrown into jail when he’d assaulted a police officer.
That same police officer being our big sister, Georgia’s, new love interest.
Well, old love interest, too, seeing as they’d been in love since they were young kids.
There’d been a lot of ways that Nico could’ve handled Darby, but in the end, he’d straightened him out instead of sending him to jail.
Which we were all thankful for.
But he’d also scared the absolute crap out of him and done what none of his brothers had been able to do—i.e., getting him onto a path that didn’t lead to jail time.
“What did he do this time?” Ace asked as he held the door of the gym open for me.
I walked inside, catching the door before it could slam on my face, and said, “I caught him trying to steal a couple of dollars out of my wallet.”
“That’s bad because?” Ace asked.
“Because I told him I needed the money and he couldn’t have it,” I said. “But I think he was just trying to confirm that I only had what I said I had. He thought I was lying about not having much cash on me. Thinking that I wasn’t giving it to him because I still think he’s a little liar.”
“Well, he is,” Ace said. “And though he’s done better lately, a whole lot better, I still don’t trust him like I do y’all.”
“True,” I agreed. “But I need to figure out why he needed the money so bad. He’s working, he should’ve had it himself.”
Ace shrugged as he stopped right inside the door, taking a glance around.
“This place is crowded as hell,” I murmured, taking a look around too. “Colt’s going to hate it.”
Colt, one of Ace’s best friends, as well as my own, and one of the group of kids we had met through the foster system, was fresh out of the military. He was also struggling to reintegrate himself into society.
The counselor at the VA had suggested that he find a place that made him comfortable, but also made him get out of his comfort zone, to try to get some human interaction.
And he’d chosen this place, as
a trainer, of all things.
Not that I didn’t think he’d do a damn good job, but I didn’t think he quite anticipated this kind of crowd out of it, either.
Though the Spartan race was a big thing here.
All proceeds from the race went to a local charity, Second Chance, that helped find disabled vets jobs.
The organizer of the charity, Mercy Spurlock, was the wife of a SWAT team member for the Kilgore Police Department. Miller Spurlock also happened to work with Nico, who had brought the opportunity up to Colt and me at lunch last week, had suggested that Colt maybe look into it.
And he, wanting to find a way to get over his struggles, had thought that doing this might help.
But I doubted he had a clue how popular it would be.
Glancing around the gym, I saw quite a few of the local police department there, as well as Desi and Codie.
Though Codie was a cute little thing, my eyes were all for Desi.
Desi was dressed in tight black leggings that hugged her every curve, a bright green shirt that said ‘Savage’ on it, and a pair of neon pink tennis shoes.
Her red hair was in a messy knot on the top of her head, and little tendrils were sneaking out and teasing the back of her neck.
She had absolutely no makeup on, but there was no doubt in my mind that she was the type of person that didn’t need makeup to be beautiful.
The woman was absolutely stunning.
Even sweating slightly and looking like she’d rather be anywhere but where she was.
It was more than obvious that she was uncomfortable, but she was pushing through the nerves and biting that full bottom lip as if she was about to run out of the gym at any moment.
“There they are.” I jerked my chin in the two women’s direction. “That redhead standing next to Codie is her best friend, Desi.”
“Pretty,” Ace murmured. “They don’t look like they’re happy with each other right now.”
I snorted. “No, they sure don’t, do they?”
“Want to go over there?” Ace asked.
I shook my head and started heading in the opposite direction of the two women.
“Nah,” I said. “Let’s go over here and get a workout in. Colt’s not going to start where we’ll want to start anyway.”
“True enough,” Ace agreed. “Want to start with squats or bench presses?”
Crazy Heifer Page 2
