“Finally?” I said, slinging an arm over the back of my chair. Ash regarded me with a smirk. Of course. He’d known they were there all along. That was what Ash did best—noticed women.
“Yeah,” Wyatt said slowly, his ears a little red. He seemed embarrassed to have been caught. “Wonder what those clothes are all about. What’s their story?”
“ ‘Their’?” I repeated, scrunching up my face. Before I could question further, Ash cut in.
“Uh, yeah, Reid. There’s three chicks over there.” He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Didn’t you see ‘em?”
I whirled probably a little too fast for my own good. Holy shit, he was right. There were three of them over there, but somehow I’d only noticed her. What the hell was wrong with me? She wasn’t even the only one wearing a weird dress. Right next to her was a shorter, younger-looking girl with hair the color of fresh-plucked straw, tucked up under the same kind of bonnet that looked like it belonged in a museum. She wasn’t quite as wide-eyed as the girl I’d set eyes on, but she had a pretty pair—a shade of blue bordering on aquamarine. She was rocking on the balls of her feet, hands moving as she talked, clearly excited about something. I realized that she was the one Wyatt had singled out, not the girl who’d caught my eye, and lowered my hackles.
The third chick looked like she actually belonged here, but when coupled with the other two, stuck out like a sore thumb. Her hair was bonnet-free and a darker shade than the first two, maybe dyed, for all I knew. Styled in soft waves, very modern-looking, the kind of girl I’d expect to see here. She had green eyes that flashed whenever they caught in the light and was wearing a pair of skinny jeans she looked like she’d been poured into. Ash’s eyes were trained on her alone. So predictable, going for the easy prey.
Some of us were better than that. Some of us liked a challenge, the thrill of the chase. In my mind, Ash’s player status was completely undeserved. He always took the easy way out. Maybe I hadn’t stuck my dick in as many women as he had, but then again, I had standards.
“I think they might be Amish,” Ash said to Wyatt while I was checking out the lineup. “I’ve seen a few buggies on the outskirts of town. They’ve got a village there. Usually I only see men.”
“Wonder what the hell they’re doin’ here,” Wyatt murmured.
“Yeah, thought they were, like… insular, or some shit. Isolationist,” I said. I didn’t know much about the Amish, but I at least knew that.
“They are,” Ash said. “Normally. But here they are.” He finished off his whiskey. “Why don’t we go ask them?”
I snorted. “What, just like that? Aren’t they über-religious, or something? They’re not gonna fall for some cheesy pick-up line like ‘What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?’ Do they even speak English?”
“Good question.” Ash rose. “I think I’m gonna find out.”
“You’re serious?” Wyatt said, turning to him. “Reid’s right. Girls like that, they’re… out of our league. Shit, they’re playing a whole different game.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Speak for yourself.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Wyatt hissed back. “But look at ‘em. Except for the tall one, they look like goddamn nuns. We’d be barkin’ up the wrong tree.”
“Maybe you two losers would be,” Ash said, smoothing his hair. “But not me. I don’t strike out.”
“That’s because you don’t swing for the stands,” I sneered, “or the curve balls. You take the low, slow pitch every time.”
“What’s wrong, Reid?” Ash asked, a grin splitting his face. “You afraid of a little competition? Does it piss you off that I could walk over there, right now, and have all three girls eating out of the palm of my hand, just like that?” He snapped his fingers dangerously close to my face. Dangerously, because if he’d left them there a second longer I would have broken them.
“Fuck off,” I said, also rising from my seat. “There’s a lot of words I’d use to describe you, Ash, but ‘competition’ isn’t one of them.” I’d seen my brother do some crazy shit when it came to women, but getting all three of them into bed, especially two church mice? Bullshit. Wasn’t gonna happen.
“Oh, really?” Ash said. “Don’t suppose you’d care to bet on it?”
“On what?” Wyatt asked, turning his attention to us again. “On all three of them?”
“Nah, that’d be way too hard for you two,” Ash answered. “We’ll go for one each. Whoever gets one of those three girls into bed first, wins.”
This was absurd. “Wins what?” I asked him.
Ash shrugged. “Respect. Bragging rights. Shit, if it’s you, Reid, I won’t call you a pussy for a whole year. How’s that sound? If you don’t, though, it’s all I’m gonna call you. Same goes for if you don’t take the bet.”
I glowered at him. “You can’t possibly be serious.”
“I’m dead serious. Pussy.”
I ran a hand through my hair and looked back at the girls at the bar. For a moment, I couldn’t decide what I wanted more: the one with the strawberry-blonde hair, or to pick up my chair and crack it over Ash’s skull. Only one of those wouldn’t land me in jail… probably.
“Whatever,” I said, both a dismissal and sign of acceptance. “I call dibs on the one with the freckles.”
“The tall one,” Ash said, “in normal chick clothes. What about you, Wyatt? You in?”
“Deck seems kinda stacked, doesn’t it?” Wyatt said, but his gaze was locked on the blue-eyed girl. “I mean, we get the nuns, you get the normal one. The fuck’s up with that?”
“I have it on good authority she’s a tough nut to crack,” Ash replied, “and I’ll tone down my game to give you two a better chance. How’s that?”
“Bullshit,” I answered. “Bullshit, is what it is.”
But I had the urge to look back at those girls again, at the one with the gorgeous hair and softly parted lips. Those wide eyes, so innocent, so full of wonder and a little fear. They made me want to know more about her. So much more…
“Does that mean you don’t want in, then?” Ash said, snapping me back to the conversation like a too-tight rubber band. He was leering at the group of girls now, a wicked grin on his face. “’Cause if you don’t, a two-for-one special would suit me just fine.”
Something in the pit of my stomach began to burn and I clenched my fists hard enough to turn my knuckles white. No way in hell I was letting Ash at her. No way was I going to let him drag my name and reputation through the mud on this one. I was Reid-fucking-Brody. I didn’t back down from a challenge.
“I said the one with the freckles,” I growled, and it was like the room dropped ten degrees. Even Wyatt winced. He was a hothead. A ball of flame when he got pissed off. But me? My rage was always served cold. Hard. Relentless. Ash’s smile faded just a little and he couldn’t hold my eyes. He turned to Wyatt instead and clapped him on the shoulder.
“Well, guess that leaves you with blondie,” he said. Wyatt didn’t seem to mind going last, for once. He just nodded, shrugged, then took a long draught of his shitty Pabst beer.
“Now that it’s all settled,” Ash continued. “I’d say all that’s left to do is for us to meet our marks. You two sure you’re ready for this?” He eyed us skeptically. “I’d hate to throw you to the wolves…”
I shook my head and picked my beer up from the table. “Those aren’t wolves, Ash. They’re sheep. Lost little lambs come in from the cold. And I’m going in for the kill.” I stepped away from the table. “Whenever you two ladies wanna join me…”
I turned around then and set my sights on those strawberry blonde locks. That girl, whoever she was, was mine. She just didn’t know it yet.
But I knew. From the very moment I saw her… I had to have her.
Chapter 2
Sarah
Of all the places I never thought I’d be, here in this bar was the most unexpected of all of them.
I still couldn’t believe I’d done it. T
hat I’d actually run away from home. The sheer insanity of it was threatening to double me over. The lights were getting fuzzy around the edges, a halo that served to remind me just how far from grace I was about to fall.
“Hey.” Next to me, Beth had noticed I was crashing. “Are you all right, sister?”
“I’m not sure,” I whispered in reply. The room seemed to be spinning. The scents of liquor and sweat and blood and all kinds of unspeakable debauchery were an assault I could not defend myself from. Underneath it all was the crippling guilt that we’d sinned. We had failed to honor the laws of our father. I think I mumbled something else then, something in our mother tongue, when I felt a much stronger hand upon me.
“Sarah…”
I looked over. Hannah was there, her jade green eyes tethering me to the here and now. When she smiled, I felt the hot sting of tears. I hadn’t seen my older sister in so long…
“It’s okay,” Hannah said, sitting me down on a barstool. I wobbled a bit and had to grab the bar to keep from toppling over. “This is new. This is all so new. I get that. It felt like that for me, the first time around…”
Rumspringa. That was what Hannah was talking about. It was an Amish rite of passage for youths who had not yet committed themselves to the church. A time when they could explore the English world—that was what we called anything outside our community—and decide which appealed more: the simple life, or the allure of something darker, more complex. A life of temptation. Of sin.
Hannah had embarked upon her Rumspringa years ago. And she never came back. Not even to say goodbye. Of course, the night before she’d gone away, she had told me and Beth how much we meant to her. How very much she loved us. It took me some time to accept, but I realized as I matured that that had been her goodbye to us. Even if she’d never uttered that exact word.
And now here she was. A bartender. In this… place. Wearing those clothes; skin-tight denim and a sleeveless blouse—a tank-top—sheer enough to show off the color of her undergarments beneath. I blushed on her behalf. It was… scandalous. Frankly, I’d never seen anything like it, and I wasn’t handling it well.
Beth, though? She was as awestruck as I was, but in a different way. For her, this was incredibly exciting. She had that youthful elation still; she was the most defiant of us all, no matter how many times our mother tried to teach her temperance. She was a bundle of nerves in the way that she couldn’t stop herself from vibrating, from practically jumping up and down at the newness of it all. Part of me wished I had half her enthusiasm.
Beth was the one who had convinced me to go. Right at the last second I hesitated, and she had given me the push I needed to come here, to see Hannah after almost two years. The letters Hannah managed to leave in a hollow stump on the edges of our land weren’t enough; no matter how often we corresponded, defying our parents’ instruction, Beth and I needed more. We needed to see her. Our sister. The one whose name our parents refused to speak. Whose name had been forbidden from our lips, as well.
We’d been forbidden from more than that. We’d been forbidden from Rumspringa entirely. All the girls who had come of age were. The young men were merely discouraged, but for us, shunning was at stake. I was already mentally preparing myself for that possibility when we returned. Or, as Beth kept saying, if we returned.
I couldn’t think about that now. Not when my heart was beating so fast already.
I looked up into Hannah’s face as she said, “You wanna drink? Should calm you down a little. Promise I won’t card you, though I’m pretty happy with the way those IDs came out, if you know what I mean.” And she winked.
I knew roughly two-thirds of what that meant. But “carding”? What was that? I stared blankly at her, and she rolled her eyes and snapped at a man on the other side of the bar. “Hey, Jake, can you grab my sister a…” Hannah turned her attention back to me, looking me up and down. “You know what? Just get her some wine. We’ll start slow.” Jake nodded and I watched him uncork a bottle, filling up a glass halfway.
When he set it down in front of me, my stomach turned. This was too much, too fast. We didn’t drink in the community. We were New Order, which means we didn’t drink or smoke. Those were gateways to ruin, our father often said. And here Hannah was, serving it up, not just to me, but to a whole room full of people. Too many people…
“This is too much,” I whispered to Beth. But she wasn’t paying attention to me. Only Hannah seemed to hear.
“Look,” she said, “you two are out in the real world now. You’ve gotta do some real world things. Live a little! Isn’t that what Rumspringa’s supposed to be about—exploring, getting your hands dirty?”
“You seem to have done quite a bit of both,” I muttered, then winced immediately. I hadn’t meant it like that—not really. It wasn’t my place to judge Hannah, after all. But a little bit of my mother had shown through just then, and I could see the hurt in Hannah’s eyes. I swallowed hard and reached over to take her hand. “I’m sorry, sister. My tongue got away from me…”
For as long as I could remember, Hannah had been the “strong one” of our trio. She was passionate, headstrong, and seemingly invulnerable—in many ways, she reminded me of our late grandmother, who’d been referred to as a “hard woman” by almost every man in our village. She was quite skilled at putting up barriers and walls. So when I saw even the briefest flicker of shame cross my sister’s face, it pulled at the strings of my heart with such regret my cheeks burned.
But then Hannah shrugged, put a mask of placidity back on, and said, “Well, if you’re looking for someone to catch it for you…” She nodded at the rest of the room behind my shoulder.
I turned, and instantly my cheeks bloomed brighter. There, toward the back of the bar, three men were staring in our direction. Not just any men, either. These men were… well, objectively speaking, attractive. And they looked nothing like the boys Beth and I had left behind just hours ago.
All three of them were tall and built, composed entirely of a series of powerful muscles that coiled like serpents whenever they lifted their drinks to their mouths. Those were not the lean sort of muscles earned by farming and woodworking. These muscles were larger, harder, different. Alluring in ways I hadn’t expected. I found it hard to draw my eyes away from the bulge of their biceps, the cords of their shoulders, and my mind went to a very dark place where I imagined with what ease those arms might hold me.
My heart was in my throat by the time I’d dragged my eyes up the neck of the one nearest to me. He had a jaw sharp and defined as the edge of a blade, and it looked just as strong as the rest of him. His chin was square, not soft in the slightest, and led up to the bow of his lips stained by a scant trail of foam from the beer he was holding. I saw his nostrils flare just a little and met his gaze, piercing enough to nearly startle me off my stool. His eyes were the most beautiful shade of brown I’d ever seen, the shadow of his brow giving them a depth that left me breathless. And yet they seemed to have an inner glow, a fire that turned them amber and then honey toward the center.
He lifted one of his jet eyebrows and curled his lips in a smirk when I didn’t look away. Then he swept his tongue, just slightly, over his lower lip and my pulse began pounding in my ears.
And… somewhere else, too.
I tore away and turned back to Hannah, who was grinning from ear to ear. When I began muttering a prayer, she rolled her eyes and took me by the shoulders.
“Sarah, loosen up! Most girls your age would kill for men like that to undress them with their eyes! Beth certainly doesn’t seem to mind.”
I looked over. My younger sister was distracted, gazing longingly in the same direction I had been a moment before. I shook my head at them both.
“Beth’s not old enough to know better,” I said, and it was true. She was just barely nineteen, hardly old enough for baptism let alone to know anything about men. I wasn’t much better at twenty-two, but I at least had the good sense to be wary of outsiders in a way Beth h
ad never been. She was the baby, and that had afforded her a certain amount of freedom and naïveté that struck me as ill-suited for the English world.
At my detraction of her character, Beth blinked and looked at me, a scowl on her young and innocent face. “Hannah’s right, Sarah. You need to have some fun. This is what Rumspringa is all about.”
“It’s not!” I protested, fighting the urge to slam my hands on the bar. I nestled them in my skirts instead, clutching the material tightly. “Rumspringa is supposed to be a time of contemplation. We venture into a world of sin so that we may know the nature of temptation, and so we may be thankful for the simple lives we lead back home. Rumspringa is supposed to be a cautionary tale, not a license to… to…” I turned away, disgusted. “To become inebriated and fornicate!”
Hannah laughed, hard. To my right, I heard Jake laughing too, as well as a few other patrons who had undoubtedly overheard. My face was blazing now and I covered it with my palms, sending a silent prayer up to God that Beth and Hannah would come to their senses and we would all go back home.
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