Page 377 of Love Bites

Time had changed him, and in all the right ways.

“So?” I pressed.

“Is this where we’re having the talk?” he asked, dropping his arms and tearing the wrapper from a bandage. His blue eyes flashed to mine as a warning. If I said yes, there was no going back. We were going to have some kind of important talk in a Laundromat.

I’d never seen Austin wear jewelry or watches, so I leaned in and admired his necklace again.

He grinned and looked down. “You like it? It’s a family heirloom—a talisman that brings good fortune. My dad gave it to me about a month ago.”

“Does your family still live here?”

“My parents moved away years ago, but my brothers—we’re back for good.”

I quieted and Austin tapped beneath my chin with the crook of his finger—something he used to do whenever I was moping.

“Mom was really hurt when you took off,” I said. “She thought of you like a second son, and it destroyed her when Wes died and you left too. It was like she’d lost two kids.”

He put his hands on the washer and leaned forward. “Wes didn’t die in an accident; he was murdered.”

I gasped. My heart rate took off and the room closed in. “What did you just say?”

“Wes was tangled up with some bad people. I tried to keep him away because he was getting too deep into my world. He tried to cut a deal with the wrong man—someone you don’t make deals with—and when he didn’t follow through, they put a hit on him. They staged it like an accident, but I tracked down the piece of shit who did it.”

“Wes wasmurdered?”

I shoved against his chest and he stepped back, rubbing his jaw. “That’s why I left town—to track down his killer. It took me six months to find him and…”

“And what?”

He folded his arms and lifted his chin. “And I took care of him.” His brows popped up when he said “took care of,” and I knew what he meant. “Not long after that, I was offered a job as a bounty hunter. I made a career out of tracking down the worst kind of men. It was too dangerous for me to stay here.”

“If you took care of him, then where was the danger?”

“I took care of the killer, not the man responsible for putting the hit on Wes.” Austin rocked on his heels and briefly grasped his talisman before dropping it again. His cheeks were red from the heat and he rubbed his jaw, looking around. “Sorry, I can’t explain everything to you here.”

“Cat and mouse. I see how this is going to be.”

I tried to hop down, but he stepped so close I had nowhere to go. Austin flattened his hands on either side of my legs. An electric charge hummed between us—or at least it felt that way. Maybe it was just me, or the vibration of the nearby appliances, but something felt so very different about Austin and I couldn’t put my finger on it.

He leaned in close. Hard. His chest pushed out and we were nose to nose.

“I didn’t say Iwon’ttell you everything, I just can’t do ithere.” His eyes motioned to the people sitting nearby.

And then it happened. A shift in the way he looked at me. His clear eyes softened and his nose twitched as if he smelled a perfume I wasn’t wearing. His eyes hooded and I leaned away, uncertain of how I felt about him looking at me like that. Austin was my brother’s best friend.

But then again, Wes wasn’t here. And we weren’t teenagers anymore.

A couple of young women by the door giggled and broke the silence between us. Austin backed up, tossing his bloody shirt into a nearby trash can.

“You just going to walk around like that?” I asked, as he was the only half-naked man in the Laundromat. Not that the two women by the door raised any complaint.

He answered my question by sitting down in one of the plastic bucket chairs in front of me, casually spreading his arms across the back of the seats and widening his legs. Whenever he was in one of his thinking moods, Austin’s brows pushed together and formed a crease in the center of his forehead.

When we were younger, it made him look pensive and angry. Now it just made him intimidating.

“So, are you married?” I tapped the back of my flip-flops against the washer and watched his Adam’s apple undulate as he swallowed. The hum of the machines gave us a little privacy.

“No. I never settled down,” he admitted.

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