“What?”
His jaw was clenched as tightly as his fists.“Whendid you two…? Jesus Christ, Jace!What the actual fuck?”
“The night we all went out,” I confessed.
“Your welcome home drinks?” Again with the pubescent voice.
I swallowed thickly and nodded.
A string of Spanish expletives burned my ears as Darren berated himself. “She only went that night because I fuckingblackmailed her into it!”
“So—”
“Don’t even fucking speak!”
“Darren, if I could fix this I would!”
“Yeah? Well, I know exactly how to fix this,” he seethed, splaying his arms wide.
I took a step toward him with a sudden rush of wrath. “Hell, thefuck,no! She said she wants to keep it, so that’s what’s happening!”
He closed the space between us and jabbed a finger into my heaving chest.“No.You’re gonna fix this bymarryingher.”
“What?Are you actually fucking high right now? Seriously, mate. No.”
That wasn’t what he wanted to hear. His eyes burned with fury as he landed the first shove.
“So, what? She’s good enough to fuck for the night, but not good enough to make an honest woman out of her? Or is it that you don’t want to be tied down with akidas well asa woman?”
“You motherfucker!” I flew at him, only holding back until the nanosecond he threw the first punch. It caught me on the jaw in a tooth-jarring impact. Then all bets were off. Brothers were now at war.
Aside from me being slightly shorter with a few extra kilos on him, our strength and fitness were comparable. One thing was for sure, we were both giving as good as we got, and I was glad this was going down in his house because shit was getting destroyed.
We slammed against the wall-mounted TV and trampled the Xbox under our feet. A vase of flowers was pitched by a wayward elbow and Callie’s girly ornaments flew off the nearby shelf.
Darren grunted when I landed a body shot, then decked him in the face. The pain shooting through my knuckles was overridden by the surging adrenaline.
Ignoring the throbbing and how much blood flowed from Darren’s nose, I grappled with his forearm as he grabbed the back of my head and pulled it forward, slamming a fist up into my eye. While I reeled from the impact, he tackled me backward onto the wooden coffee table. With a huge splintering crack, the table gave way under our combined weight, and I became pinned between him and slivers of broken wood.
His hands wrapped around my throat as I continued to land as many punches as I could before my vision completely faded.
Through the blood-thirsty haze, the door slammed and Jax’s screaming grew louder.“¡Paren! ¡Dejen ya de pelearsepar de salvajes![Stop it! Stop fighting!] Get the fuck off him, Darren!”
I was brought back to full consciousness by a tsunami of frigid water surging over us. It stunned the hell out of Darren, who finally loosened his grip on my throat. I flailed beneath him, trying to simultaneously breathe and cough away the mixture of water and blood that dripped from his face onto mine while shoving him off.
If I thought Darren was pissed, Jax was one hundred and sixty million percent more murderous. She stood locked to the spot and was absolutely rage-ridden as we sheepishly rose to our feet.
“Callie is going to fuckingkillyou guys for this. I expected a scuffle, but this shit is next level. Look around at the fucking mess you two idiots just made!” Borderline homicidal, she added a sweeping arch of her arm.
Our heavy breathing punctuated the deathly silence as Darren and I surveyed the wreckage in his living room. Jax was right; Callie would be digging our shallow graves by nightfall. The dismayed hush was broken by Jax’s irrational laughter.
“Dammit, Jax! This is notfunny!”Darren growled while stripping his shirt over his head to hold it against his bloodied nose. “Ah fuck! I think my nose is broken!”
Jax waved a hand at us, then over the strewn carnage we stood amongst, then buckled in half with laughter. While she was busy being entertained by the ruin, I stalked to the kitchen and dug through the freezer for a bag of frozen peas. Coming back into the lounge and seeing the damage from another angle took me aback.
Darren picked up various items off the floor. He mindlessly shook the shattered glass from a picture frame before swearing when he spotted the crack running across his fifty-two inch flat screen TV.
“I guess I owe you a new table or something?” I mumbled, eyeballing the flattened coffee table.