Page 17 of Rules of Association

Settling his eyes back on me he moved his gaze across my face and then grimaced. “Sorry.”

“You should be. You can’t just go reaching into girls’ beds. And anyway, I’m like six inches shorter than her, you couldn’t tell it wasn’t her?” I tsked. “Aren’t you supposed to be the smart brother?”

This brought a slow tilt to the corner of his mouth, the gleam in his eyes morphing just slightly. He rocked a gentle step backward but lingered there as he looked me over. Coming to some sort of conclusion he scoffed, shook his head, and started turning his shoulders to leave. I don’t know what it was about that reaction that threw me off, maybe the fact that I’d insulted him and he’dsmiled, but it had me perking up.

“Wait!”

He obeyed, stopping in his retreat and turning back to me. He was silent as he waited for me to continue and I remembered then that he wasn’t much of a talker.

“What’s so funny?” I asked, filling the silence.

He shook his head as if to say, ‘you don’t want to know’.

Like an insane person, I answered his unspoken words as if he’d actually spoken them aloud. “I want to know why you’re laughing at me.”

Thick eyebrows shot up his forehead and the next gaze he cast about me was more appreciative. More discerning. When he met my eyes again he shrugged and said, “It’s just interesting to see that all this isn’t a front. You genuinely just wake up offensive.”

I smiled. I couldn’t help it. Wasn’t he supposed to be nice? But then again I don’t know why I’d expected that. None of the Fergusons were what I’d call “nice.” Clementine wasn’t even fully sunshine and rainbows. Still, I guess I’d expected him, the quiet one, to be sweeter—maybe more docile than the rest of them.

And why was it so intriguing that I was wrong?

Shaking hair that was wild from sleep out of my face, I said, “Well, I’m usually a sweetheart in the morning. You just happened to catch me before I’ve had any food.”

He snorted.Snorted! And that intrigue I had turned to triumph in my gut. I wondered then if I could get him to smile. But it looked like his face was doing the opposite as he took a closer look at me. “What happened to your face?”

My hand floated to my lip which was busted from the hard knock I’d caught to my face when my ex-boyfriend-douche-bag-thief, tried to shut his apartment door on me. I’d launched myself into the small opening in a rage and it wasn’t pretty from there. Let’s just say, I would rather tell my dad about the motorcycle bar than what happened that day after I found Peter Knoll.

“I ran into a door.”

His eyes tracked over every movement I made as he gradually edged back into the room. “Did your fingers run into it too?”

“They may have run into the jaw of an ex who deserved it.”

His eye twitched, but that’s the only reaction visible on his face. For a second I thought he was going to ask me if he hit me back or if I was seriously hurt. All that alpha male protective boy shit that my brothers and dad did when it came to us girls. Instead, he sauntered in closer to me, standing over the bedside and peering down. Reaching out a hand, he raised an expectant eyebrow as he waited. After a long moment I realized he was waiting for me to show him my hand. And, taken a little off guard, I did. Laying my bandaged hand in his big paw and watching as he turned it over for inspection.

When he was finished, he tucked the hand back to my abdomen, leaning his shoulders back to put distance between us again. Looking up at his face I expected to find anything other than what I saw there. He was smirking again! He was also leaning away like he was going to leave and the prickle at my neck told me I didn't want him to.

So, opening my big mouthagain, I asked, “What?”

“You can’t throw a punch. That’s why your thumb’s all jacked up,” he said.

My jaw dropped.

“I can too—” I started but shook my head. “Hold up. Shouldn’t you be asking me what happened? Am I okay? That kind of stuff?”

“You’re okay,” he declared, flicking eyes up and down my person.

I narrowed my eyes. “You don’t even know what happened.”

“Do I need to know?”

“If you’re going to throw accusations around then yeah,” I said.

“Weren’t you the one who called my sister a gold digger?”

“Yeah, so?”

“So, that sounds like an accusation to me,” he said, pinning me with a mean stare.

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