Page 150 of Branded
Not fire engine red, but softer with hints of brown.
Like I said, pretty, and the first thing I’d noticed about her.
The second being those bright red lips, currently curved up in a smile at the young hostess leading her to a booth perpendicular to where the boys and I were sitting.
My stomach began churning, and I tried not to turn my head.
Tried and failed because I watched that smiling Beth in a pretty blue sweater that matched her eyes, her legs in tight black pants that had my temper spiking because they were tight and hell because they showed off her shapely thighs, the lush bottom curve of her ass. Her feet were in—thank fuck for one tiny victory—low-heeled boots.
Fuck, she was pretty.
That had my temper spiking.
I didn’t want to notice that either.
I didn’t want to notice one fucking thing about her, and instead, I was tracking every step, watching her move in that fluid way, even though she was carrying two babies, holding my breath until she made it into the booth, her ass sliding across the unpadded oak bench.
Unpadded, I knew, because my ass was on my own unpadded bench.
One that wasn’t particularly comfortable.
One that had me getting up and moving to the hostess stand, asking her to bring Beth one of the few cushions Donna’s had available on request.
My own ass was hardened from years of bruising it on the ice.
Beth’s was lush and curvy and…
Fuck, but I didn’t want her to be uncomfortable.
“So, she came up to me after she got out of the bathroom,” Cas was saying as I returned to the table, studiously avoiding both Smitty’s gaze and that booth perpendicular to ours, even though I was watching out of the corner of my eye to make sure that the hostess brought over the cushion. Thankfully, the conversation had turned to Cas, and Cas being young and hot and a professional athlete, had no shortage of crazy stories, most of them involving women and stupidity and most of that was because he continued to go to bars where young, beautiful, but perhaps not the most mature, women spent a good deal of time.
Hot, no doubt.
But a fucking nightmare, as I had personally lived through.
“And she was fucking pissed as hell because I’d talked to Jules.” He tossed up his hands. “That I talked to our waitress like a fucking human being. I don’t know what her deal was, but it was like she expected me to either be a total dick to Jules or to communicate in sign language or smoke signals or something that didn’t involve me actually verbally addressing her. Like my voice was somehow going to make Jules strip down and fuck me right on my stool.”
“Jules?” Theo groaned. “Aw fuck, man, please tell me that you didn’t take that chick to CeCe’s.”
Cas winced. “We’d been on three dates,” I muttered. “I thought she was at least semi normal.”
“Rookie mistake.” Smitty shook his head, lifted his mug, and took a sip. “We fly under the radar at CeCe’s because the staff and patrons are cool. We can’t do that if you start bringing women there who can’t deal.”
Like Monica.
Though Smitty didn’t say that.
Lucky for me, Monica had hated it so much she wasn’t going to stalk the place hoping for me to show back up. Nope, she’d just broken into my apartment and tried to convince me that she really did want a baby and she’d just made a mistake.
I’d had to make it clear, really fucking clear, that we were done.
A-fucking-gain.
Which hadn’t made me happy.
Though, thank fuck, that meant she’d cleared out, I’d changed the locks, and all was good again.
Good being a relative term, I supposed.
