by Jess Bryant
A few times his cousin had asked him for more serious favors but he told himself that he’d never broken any major laws to sleep at night. He’d never been more than a driver or a threat in the background. He liked to believe that meant he couldn’t get in too much trouble if he were ever caught but he wasn’t stupid enough to believe that made him innocent.
He operated in a gray area that most people didn’t have. Cash and his girl Jemma, normal people, they lived in the white. Decker, Lincoln and the rest of the Bomars lived almost entirely in the black. He was somewhere in the middle and that was something he’d learned to accept.
If somebody had to bridge that gap, it was him. Maybe someday he’d be able to cross over to the other side with Cash. But not until he’d erased his debt and struck the Bomars from his life once and for all. Until then, he waded back and forth, trying to work his way through hell without forfeiting his right to heaven.
As if to prove that he was still very much in his own personal hell, the door chimed again seconds after Lincoln stepped out of it. Colt glanced up and felt his smile drop before he could stop it. The man coming towards him didn’t deserve that reaction, not at all, but if he noticed Colt’s less than warm greeting, he didn’t let it show.
“Hey man!”
“Hey Trey.” He nodded, forcing his smile firmly back into place as if they were old friends, as if he didn’t hate his guts, as if he didn’t contemplate breaking his face each and every time he saw him.
Just because the guy was dating the girl of Colt’s dreams didn’t mean he couldn’t be civil. Trey wasn’t a bad guy. God knew she could do a lot worse. Hell, she’d be doing a lot worse if she chose him.
“You got an appointment?” He smiled politely as the other guy strolled closer. “I didn’t think I had you on the books today.”
“Nah, that’s why I’m here. I was passing by and thought I’d see if you had time to work on that back piece.”
“Sorry man, not today.”
Trey glanced around the empty shop and Colt bit the inside of his cheek. Too fast. Too harsh. He was running a business and Trey had been a good client in the months since he’d moved to town. His personal dislike of the guy had nothing to do with finishing the tattoo on his back.
He softened his stance, “I’m about to close up for the night. It’s been slow and I’ve got somewhere to be.”
“Oh, yeah, no problem.” Trey nodded good-naturedly.
“Let’s get you on the books though, we need to get that thing finished.”
He forced himself to open his calendar and make small talk with a man he wanted to hate as they found a good day and time for an appointment. The truth was, he didn’t like talking to Trey because the more he got to know him, the harder it was to hate him. The guy was too damn easy to like. Trey was a good guy, which just made lusting after his girlfriend that much worse.
Colt really was a bastard.
If there was one thing in the world Skylar Holland hated it was being treated like an invalid. She’d been sick when she was a little kid, like really sick. She’d spent more time in the hospital than she had the schoolhouse. There had been doctors that she called aunt and uncle because she saw them so often but that had all changed when she was twelve and the surgeons finally fixed her broken heart.
And no, that joke would never get old.
What did get old, however, was the way her parents, older brother and pretty much everyone in her life still treated her with kid gloves. As if she was still weak and sickly. As if she were a fragile, breakable thing.
She wasn’t.
She’d worked hard to show them that she was happy and healthy. That she was fully capable of living a normal, typical life. That she could do and be whatever she wanted, just like anyone else, no matter what the scar on her chest looked like.
Part of that was living an independent life. She’d insisted on going to cosmetology school. She’d moved out of her parents’ house at the first opportunity and over their arguments. She’d even gone so far as to refuse her parents’ money to open the salon.
Split Ends was hers. Not her parents. Not her family’s. Hers, and okay yeah, maybe a little bit of it still belonged to the bank. But it was something she’d done herself, gotten for herself.
She’d needed to do it on her own, to prove that she could, and she had.
She liked to think of herself as stubborn and independent and those were not dirty words in her opinion just because she was a woman. She didn’t need anyone to do anything for her that she couldn’t do herself and she liked it that way. She’d spent too many years at the mercy of others, being coddled and catered to when she was sick. She wanted to prove she was strong.
But God, she didn’t feel strong right now. She felt weak. She felt emotional. And she kind of wanted her mommy.
Being sick was the worst. She hated it. She tried like hell not to do it really. She worshipped at the altar of Lysol and washed her hands religiously. During flu season she downed Vitamin C and was always careful about germs and being around other sick people. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d been sick.
That was why, when she’d first felt nauseous, she’d honestly thought it was some sort of sympathy pain for her roomie/best friend forever. Jemma had a case of early onset morning sickness that was in no way relegated strictly to mornings. For the past few weeks, the girl had all but lived in the bathroom so at the first sign of sickness, Skylar had blamed her best friend, naturally.
Twenty-four hours later, with her stomach cramping, an inability to hold down anything heavier than water and a fever that alternately burned her from the inside out or chilled her to the bone, she’d been forced to admit that she might actually need a doctor.
Maybe.
She hadn’t decided yet. She was going to give it a few more hours to see if she improved first. Or died. Because the only thing she hated more than being sick was being treated like she was sick and doctors had a special brand of condescension that set her teeth on edge. She hated doctors so much the idea of going to see one sent a chill through her that had nothing to do with her current illness.
It was probably just food poisoning. That was what she’d decided sometime this morning while she was praying at the porcelain altar. That was what she got for trying grocery store sushi in a rural Oklahoma town nowhere near a coastline. Yeah, it was definitely food poisoning which meant it would pass on its own… eventually.
In the meantime, she’d made a fort in the bathroom so she didn’t have to run back and forth from her bed. She was buried under a pile of pillows and blankets that helped warm her when the fever spiked and she felt like she was freezing. Alternately the cool tile floor beneath her was hard but provided a much needed chill when the fever broke.
Gross? Yeah, definitely. But she didn’t really care what anyone thought of her current predicament because she never intended to tell anyone just how sick she was.
She would rather suffer in silence, alone, than deal with her family while she was sick. She knew the drill too well. One mention of feeling under the weather and her parents went into overprotective mode, convinced she was backsliding and should have every three letter test known to man administered immediately. They would show up and drag her straight to the hospital and if by some miraculous feat she convinced them she only needed to stay at home in bed, they too would stay and hover over her as if every breath might be her last.
They meant well, she knew that. She was their baby girl. She was their only daughter. She’d been ill from the day she was born so that every moment of her childhood had been spent with them worrying about her. She knew that even if she hadn’t been a sick child with a serious medical condition that it would have been natural for them to worry about her. But that didn’t mean it was any less annoying.
Luckily, both of her normal babysitters were out of town for the weekend. Her older brother, Owen, had taken a last minute shift filling in on a rig somewhere in Texas this week so he wouldn’t b
e by to pester her anytime soon. And she’d sent Jemma off with her guy after promising that she would call her parents if she got worse.
Really, Jemma knew her well enough to have called her out for that blatant lie but her bestie must have been distracted by the six plus feet of her fine ass fiancé ushering her out the door for their mini-vacation.
Just thinking about the adoring way Cash looked at Jemma sent another pain shooting through her. This time she knew it didn’t have a thing to do with food poisoning. She’d had it for months. Ever since Jemma rolled back into town, Skylar had felt the green-eyed monster rise up inside of her.
She wasn’t jealous of Cash per se, even though he was a gorgeous male specimen. It was more that the man had eyes only for Jemma. She was envious because her best friend had found a man that thought the sun rose and set on her cute little ass and in Skylar’s short and sketchy dating history, she couldn’t remember a single one of her boyfriend’s ever looking at her like Cash did Jemma.
As if she was his entire universe. As if he would set the world on fire for her. As if no other woman existed but her.
And, okay, if she was being completely honest with herself she was also jealous because Cash was a Bomar. He was a member of the ill-reputed, outlaw clan that ran the dark underside of their tiny little town. A family full of rough, dangerously sexy men that could not be tamed.
Truth be told, Skylar wanted one of them for herself.
She’d been telling herself for a long time now that wanting one of them was nothing more than a silly fantasy. The Bomar boys ran roughshod over every girl with daydreams about domesticating them. And every girl in town had them, daydreams and crushes that turned into broken hearts because they would never settle down.
Only, Jemma had domesticated Cash and ruined that theory in less than one month flat.
Cash had settled down, happily. He was a one-woman man, always had been. He loved Jemma. He’d pined for her for years, had proposed to her as soon as he won her back and knocked her up in record time. He was downright anxious to get his girl down the aisle and start their life together officially.
And if Cash could do it, why couldn’t the others? Why couldn’t the one she wanted? After all, he was Cash’s twin!
She wanted him. Thought about him all the time. Lusted after him, even when she was mad at him. And God, she was mad at him. She always seemed to be mad at him these days. But did that lessen her desire? Nope. It only made her think about how rough his edges were, made her wonder if he would cut her if he ever let her get close enough to actually touch him.
She had a feeling if he ever did it would be rough and wild and the flush those thoughts caused didn’t have a thing to do with her fever.
Just like the accompanying pain in her gut couldn’t be attributed to her sickness either. At least not to food poisoning. That was all due to the self-loathing she felt for daydreaming about a man that she didn’t even like all that much at the moment, a man that had made it clear on more than one occasion that he didn’t want her the way she wanted him. Most importantly, he was a man that wasn’t her boyfriend.
God, that made her the absolute worst. Who did that? What kind of woman lusted after another man when she already had one? A bitch, that was who. She was a total bitch.
Trey was a good guy. He was probably the best guy she’d ever dated really. Grade-A husband material. He treated her like a princess, was emotionally available, had never displayed any anger issues and, at least to her knowledge, had no arrest record whatsoever.
In short, he was everything she was supposed to want and the complete opposite of the man she couldn’t stop thinking about.
Her stomach cramped again when her phone buzzed and she saw Trey’s name pop up on the screen. As if she needed a reminder about how great her boyfriend was? He’d been calling to check on her all day.
He’d offered to come over and keep her company but she’d refused. She didn’t want anyone seeing her like this, least of all the man that she’d been planning to break up with this weekend. Since she was too sick to do that, she’d rejected his attempts to bring her things like soup and juice but that hadn’t stopped him from texting hourly with funny jokes to keep her entertained.
The latest one read:
I’m not saying I’m Batman. I’m just saying we’ve never been spotted in the same room together. Throw up a bat sign and we’ll see who shows up to save you.
If she didn’t feel like such a shit, she probably would have laughed. He was so sweet. He knew she was sick and was trying to make her feel better. Of course he had no idea that all of his messages only served to make her feel worse that she was going to break up with him when she was back on her feet.
She didn’t want to hurt him. That was why she’d put it off for months. But it wasn’t fair to either of them to be in a relationship that wasn’t going anywhere. He deserved a girl that looked at him the way Jemma looked at Cash, the way she feared she sometimes looked at Cash’s brother.
Her phone buzzed again and she winced when Katy Perry started cooing about kissing girls. Again. She really needed to mute the thing. It was giving her a headache and if Jemma was here she’d punch her right in the ovaries for being an overprotective pain in the ass that kept calling.
Okay, probably not the ovaries, at least not until bouncing baby boy Bomar came into the world.
“What?” She groaned, burying herself in her blanket fort as she answered.
“You don’t sound better. Do you feel better?”
She fought an eye roll solely because she was certain it would make her throw up again, “Yep.”
“Liar.”
“Nag.” She managed a smile for her best friend, “You’re barely even pregnant and you’re already in overbearing mother mode. Have you been taking lessons from Melanie?”
“Don’t call your mom by her first name, you know she hates that.”
“Ha! You’ve totally been talking to her haven’t you? I knew it.”
“Stop changing the subject, I called to check on you. How are you feeling?”
“Fantastic. I think I’m going to order in Chinese for dinner. Spring rolls and orange chicken.”
Jemma gave an exaggerated sigh on her end of the phone, “There’s no Chinese delivery in Old Settlers. Can you be serious for five seconds, please?”
“Five seconds starting now. Fine. I feel like shit but I haven’t puked in about twenty minutes so I’m calling that a win. Your turn, how’s the nausea?”
“It’s not so bad.”
She could hear Jemma’s smile on the other end of the phone, “How many times has Cash had to stop the car?”
“Uh like… twice?”
“Five times.” A gruff male voice full of laughter was muffled on the other end.
Skylar grinned as she listened to them argue and tease each other. They were so good together. It would have been clear to a complete stranger but she’d had the pleasure of seeing it up close and personal. They’d been cute back in high school, when they’d first fallen in love. But seeing them together now, older and wiser, having overcome their issues, they were perfection. She’d been wary of the relationship at first but seeing them together it was impossible to deny they were meant to be together.
That was what she wanted. Someone to finish her sentences and tease her about her quirks and look at her like…
“Oh God…” She shot upright as her stomach turned.
“Sky? Skylar are you okay?”
She could hear Jemma calling her name on the other end of the phone as she heaved over the toilet bowl again. She couldn’t answer though. She was too busy spilling her guts and trying not to die.
“Oh damn, is she puking too?” Cash’s voice was muffled but there, “Baby, I can’t handle much more of that sound. Tell her you’ll call her back.”
God bless that man.
“Sky, can you hear me? Sky? Okay, honey, we’re going to call you back later. If you get worse, please call your mom and go
to the hospital. Feel better. Love you. Bye.”
Skylar dry-heaved for another ten minutes after the phone clicked off. She wiped the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. She swished with the mouthwash she’d dragged down from the counter and spit it into the toilet before flushing. She crawled back to her blankets and curled up with a groan.
She’d rather die than go to the hospital… and she was starting to think she just might.
Chapter Two
Despite what he told Trey, Colt didn’t end up closing the shop early. He ran a business. He had a responsibility to be open when he said he would be open. Still, it wasn’t the first time Lincoln had called him in to fight on a night the shop was open late. He’d made the necessary calls and fortunately he had at least one cousin that was interested in what he did and reliable enough to help him out when he was in a bind.
Bentley Bomar was Lincoln’s younger brother. Their father, Auto, was Decker’s older brother. Like all Bomar’s the old guy was a violent bastard with a mean streak but since he’d always been good to them, Colt couldn’t bring himself to hate his uncle. Auto had been there for them when they had nobody else, had even given Cash his job at the garage. He looked out for them almost as if they were his own sons, and if you listened to rumors maybe they were.
That was how fucked up his family was. His uncle might be his biological father. His father might actually be his uncle. It was a sick, twisted mess that he didn’t like to think about.
Didn’t like to think about just how much he and Cash resembled their cousins, who might be their half-brothers. Didn’t like to think about how Uncle Auto had two sets of twins already; Lincoln and Ford then Bentley and Royce. Didn’t like to think about how nobody else in the family had produced twins in their generation or how Auto used to hang around when Decker was off whoring and drinking, taking care of Chrissy too.
So he didn’t.
That was how he survived. He didn’t think about all of the shit that threatened to tear him down, tear him apart. If he didn’t think about it, he didn’t have to deal with it.
