Page 41 of False Start

I wanted to know what each permanent piece of ink etched into her porcelain skin meant to her. What it said about the woman inside. The girl she’d been before her mother died. The girl she became after. The woman who battled demons on the track and wrangled unruly old men with comfortable affection and humor.

Turning the corner, her back to me now, I swallowed hard.

Worse than the rips on the front of her jeans was the one across the back of her thigh, just a couple inches under the curve of her round ass.

My blood stirred, surging hot and heavy through my veins, burning me up from the inside out as my body reacted to the baggy sweater determined to hang off her shoulder.

With her hair up in a ponytail and bandana, the tattoo stretching over her back and climbing to the base of her neck lay exposed.

Bastard that I was, I took full advantage.

Her flesh just begged for a series of sensual bites.

All of a sudden joking around with Jackson about popping bone didn’t seem so funny.

Blinking away the connection, I searched for a polar vortex to sweep through and knock me down a few degrees. I glanced over and caught sight of Wes Myers, a fixture in this town who knew everybody after spending two decades as an ER nurse at the local hospital. He sat at the table with a couple of boys sporting shitty moods etched over their defiant little baby faces.

My mother’s corner table.

And there it was, the blast of cold to spank my ass before seeping into my bones.

The boys kept stealing glances at the floor, their skeptical faces morphing into rapt interest the longer they stared.

They didn’t look like they were in trouble with the way Wes reclined back in his seat, an unbothered look on his face. If anything, they looked like they wanted to be out there, but something held them back.

“Hey, man, you’re still here, huh?” Jackson nudged my arm with his elbow. “I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised since you spotted Maze,” Jackson said, earning a warning glare from me.

“Don’t read anything into it, Jackson.” The guy looked all too happy to be gloating in the gossip seeping from every corner of Galloway Bay. Just whose side was he on anyway?

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, rocking on his heels and just one step away from a jaunty whistle that might make me throat punch him.

“Does she come in here a lot?” I’m a fucking idiot. Hands down, the dumbest shit on the planet. The guy who couldn’t resist a temptation, or in this case, a stupid challenge.

I’m the guy. The guy who’d lay his tongue on the 9V battery. The dude who’d stick his tongue to the metal flagpole during recess when it was twenty degrees out. The idiot who’d take the dare to grab on to an electric fence because how bad could it be? Oh, and that puddle I stood in while doing it? That just made me more of a badass when I pulled it off.

I’m a drowning man and this asshole sidles on up next to me to help hold my head under water.

“Yeah, but usually the team rotates and she was here just last week. They all volunteer over at the youth center. Actually, they do time at the food pantry and created a mobile library too with the help of Marty’s cousin London who came up for a visit from New York and helped with the logistics.”

“What’s the deal with the boys sitting with Wes?”

“They said skating is for girls.”

Not my problem.

Don’t do it, Bishop. Don’t you fucking do it.

I pushed away from the locker and turned to him. “And you didn’t set them straight?”

“They didn’t seem to care what I had to say. Too bad they weren’t here fifteen minutes earlier.” Jackson glanced at the orange cones he’d put around the edge of the wall I’d crushed. “Maybe half an hour earlier,” he said, barking out a laugh. “You were a bad example fifteen minutes ago.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I’m a bad influence all the time,” I muttered.

“That’s Lana’s parents talking. What do you say? You up to setting the boys straight after the hit you took, old man?”

“Old man? I could kick your ass right now.”

“You could, but unfortunately I know for a fact your sense of honor won’t let you.”

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