Page 83 of Drawn To You (Paloma's Edge 1)

“But that’s not your problem. That’s Chase’s brother. And if Hunter lays a finger on you one more time or makes any of your hairs on the back of your neck stand, I will knock him back to last Sunday when you met his ass. Chase is my boy and yeah, Hunter is his twin brother. But you mean a lot more to me.”

“Hunter and I are friends.”

“No, you guys aren’t friends.”

“We’re not gonna see eye to eye on this.” I sighed. “You know Cindy showed up at your parents’ house last night,” I said, changing the subject.

He nodded. “She’ll stay at the Paloma.”

“Is that where she was last night?”

“Yeah.”

“I haven’t seen her at the hotel. Maybe she’s lying low. It would do her some good. She was crying last night because the guy went back

to his family. I know that her feelings were involved, but she’s dickmatized.”

“I swear it’s a fucking affliction. Doesn’t discriminate against age, race, religion, country of origin, or level of intelligence.”

I shoved him playfully. “Speaking of afflictions, you and Mona are friends with benefits again?”

“Nah, we’ve been hooking up with different people,” he answered, and from closely looking at his eyes much like my own, I knew that he was telling me the truth.

“Did you come close to leaving with her, though?”

“I know that we’d thought about it. But we’ve been there, done that for over a decade.”

I grabbed his arm. “Can I take you for a bite to eat?”

“Yeah, but I am paying.”

“We’ll flip a quarter when we get there and see about that. I am driving us in my new car.”

Chapter 16

Chase

For the past two days, I had thought about Beth and Hunter constantly. I knew when I’d seen her face that she hadn’t cheated on me with my brother. She’d thought that I was never going to tell her about him, but I was going to. I didn’t want the love that I’d seen in her eyes for me to be a part of my past too. After we’d made love on Friday, she was going to say that she loved me. Before she was about to verbalize it, I could sense it. While she’d been ambivalent from the very beginning about giving in to her pull towards me, once she gave me a chance, she didn’t give me bits and pieces of who she was, she gave me everything. And I hadn’t been doing that. Which was why I hadn’t wanted her to say that she loved me, because it wouldn’t have been true. How could she love me when she didn’t know what had made me want to live my life differently?

So I was sitting in my car, a block down from Lasting Impressions Tattoo Studio. After I’d received the final stamp of approval from my Mr. Dobbs and began working on the graphic animation, my horrible argument with Beth replayed in my head repeatedly. I’d been such a dirt bag.

Hunter came out of the studio, uninterested in the group of girls that’d passed by him and checked him out. I’d grown oblivious to that sort of attention myself. Shutting my door and locking the car, Hunter instantly spotted me. I’d been aware of him my whole life and he’d been aware of me too. I didn’t think it was a twin thing. I think it was a “there’s another brolic ass dude in my vicinity” kind of thing. Disbelief flashed in his eyes and he gestured me to head a block up from where we were.

We paused in front of a small mom-and-pop café.

“Did Beth tell you where to find me, or was it Jake and Mariska?” Hunter asked as he held the door for me.

“Beth,” I replied, almost growling.

He gave me a stiff smile. “Chase, I wanted her to give you my card.” He pushed the door and went inside. The smell of coffee was out of this world. The cashier’s face brightened and he put two fingers up. I sat down by the last table on the left so I could see the people who came in.

“I wouldn’t have come down to see you otherwise,” I admitted. He nodded and took his place across from me. His face didn’t look sunken in, and his arms were almost bigger than mine for the first time in our lives. He’d been a big guy before, but he hadn’t had my fitness regimen when we were teenagers. The weight he had on now fit his frame much better than the weight he’d lost the last time I’d seen him. “You’re healthy now.”

“That I am,” he sighed, and glanced around the shop, connecting and separating the tips of his fingers together restlessly.

“Why’re you in Miami? Are you in treatment here?” I whispered.

He met my gaze dead on. “I am here because you’re here.”

---