Page 138 of The Winslow Brothers

My elder brother lets out a deep sigh. “Fucking hell. He’s a mess.”

“What do you mean?” I jerk my head back, and Rem simply tosses his thumb over his shoulder to lead my gaze in the direction of our baby brother, who is currently on the dance floor with a bunch of women surrounding him.

A bottle of champagne is in one hand as he shakes it up and squirts the liquid around on the crowd before him.

“Ah, fuck,” I mutter.

“You said it, brother. That’s spiraling if I’ve ever seen it.”

“What happened?” I ask just as memories of my conversation with Jude outside of Marco’s start to float around inside my head.

Don’t tell me I had a part in this meltdown…

“Not sure,” he answers with a shrug. “Been trying to figure that out for the last hour, but the train wreck is just chugging along, as you can see.”

Honestly, I’ve been feeling guilty about that conversation ever since it happened. I make a point never to put my nose in my brothers’ business. That’s Remy’s and Winnie’s job, not mine. But there was just something about his recklessness with Sophie that didn’t sit well with me.

She seemed like a really nice girl, and the more I saw the way she looked at Jude, the more I started to get worried that Jude wasn’t keen on what was really happening.

I look back at the dance floor just in time to see a woman with long red hair sidle up to my brother. She’s in the shortest dress I’ve ever seen, and she’s doing everything in her power to get Jude’s attention.

When he looks at her, he smirks, even lifts his bottle of champagne into the air and pours her a long drink. But then something changes. He shoves his bottle of liquid courage into the chest of a random, dancing man a few feet away and proceeds to put as much distance between himself and the flirtatious woman as he can.

What is he doing?

I furrow my brow and look at Remy.

“I know, man. He’s all over the place. One minute, he looks as if he’s trying to flirt with every skirt in the room, and the next, it’s as if he remembers he wore his chastity belt tonight.”

Jude has always been a panty-charming kind of guy who downright revels in female attention. And that redhead is a woman I’d expect to see him go home with once last call was announced from the bar.

But he’s avoiding her—completely—and it tells my strong intuition everything I need to know.

Shit. This is exactly what I was hoping it wasn’t…

“I think even a blind man could put these puzzle pieces together.”

Rem’s eyes move off the freak show our brother is putting on in the center of the dance floor and back to me. “Wait…you think you know what’s going on with him?”

“C’mon, Rem,” I say through a harsh laugh. “You can’t be that dense, bro. There’s only one reason for a man to look likethat,and it’s got tits.”

“Oh no.It’s that woman he brought to Lexi’s competition, isn’t it? Sophie, right?”

I raise my eyebrows and lean into a hard stare that Remy can read well enough. If the reason for this breakdown isn’t her, I’ll donate my left nut to scientific research.

“Well, shit, Flynn,” Rem mutters and looks out at Jude again. “I think it’s safe to say this won’t resolve without an intervention.”

“Copy that.”

Just like we’ve done what feels like a hundred times before—though, most of them occurred when we were all in our early twenties and Jude and Ty were acting like drunken idiots—Rem and I stride away from the bar to remove our brother from the crowd.

Rem on one side, me on the other, we slide our arms beneath his shoulders and drag the mess off the dance floor and up to a quieter, calmer area with fewer distractions.

Jude bitches and complains the whole way, but we ignore himandthe curious looks we get from clubgoers. And we don’t stop until his ass is firmly on one of the couches in what I’m assuming is the VIP section he said he set aside for us tonight.

He glares. “What the fuck are you guys doing?”

“That’s funny. We were hoping to ask you the same thing,” Rem comments with a smirk. “You’re a goddamn lunatic tonight, and it’s high time you tell us why.”

---