Page 14 of Pucked Up

I flipped him off.

“Fine. At least unclench around it. And I’m just saying that if your dad knows this guy, maybe he knows his stuff.”

“I don’t want some fucking Parisian?—”

“He’s from Dijon,” Journey corrected.

“Does it look like I give a fuck about French geography?”

He laughed and rolled his eyes. “You don’t give a fuck about anything except your pet best friends,your lucky puck, your Sponge Bob socks, and whether or not you eat enough protein in each meal.”

He wasn’t wrong. But he also wasn’t right. I did care about quite a few things. I just hadn’t let him in long enough to know who I really was, and I was okay with that.

“I don’t care if you hate me,” I told him, “but you have to agree that he is the wrong person for the job.”

Journey gave me a long look. “Do you…know him?”

“What?” My cheeks heated.Fuck. He couldn’t possibly know what Hugo and I had done.

His eyes went wide. “Youdo. This is personal, isn’t it? Did you know your dad was sending him?”

Oh, thank fuck. He didn’t know the truth. Not that I was a hundred percent sure I’d actually done what I’d done. I was tempted to sneak a picture of Hugo and send it to Tiago, but I had no idea if he’d be able to recognize his face. Blind guys were, unfortunately, unreliable when it came to suspect lineup photos.

“I have no idea if he knows my dad, and this isn’t about that. It’s personal because this is…” I trailed off and sighed. I didn’t want to give him my pathetic attempt at a comeback story. Journey knew I was angry and determined, but he didn’t know those intimate details because he’d never been worth it.

And that wasn’t going to change just because he was chasing after me in an attempt to calm me down. Jacob had probably sent him.

Andthatpissed me right off.Reaching up, I plucked my hearing aids out of my ears as I stared him right in the eye. My hearing settled into a dull roar—kind of like shoving my head into a pillow and listening to someone talk.

“Oh, real cute,” he said. He wasn’t impossible to understand, but he didn’t know that.

I spun in my chair and wheeled toward the doors. “Tell Jacob he’s going to be sorry,” I called. Journey shouted something back, but this time, he didn’t chase me.

I made it to my car, a fire burning in my chest, determined to burn this whole thing to the ground. Hugo had called me petit feu, but I was about to show him just how much damage one little fire could do. If that little fire was angry enough.

And I sure as shit was.

CHAPTER

FOUR

HUGO

“So.How is it? I’ve heard the East Coast isn’t as miserable for you dirty Euro trash as the West.”

The sound of my brother-in-law’s heavy Scouse voice crawled under my skin. Not Roger’s accent but the way he always managed to sound like such a fucking snob. “First of all, no one calls anyone Euro trash anymore. It’s not 1984. And secondly, it’s perfectly fine. But so is the West Coast.”

“They can’t even do a proper brew.”

“Luckily for me, I don’t like tea. Coffee is just fine, and even in this small town, there’s no shortage of coffee shops.” Which was true. There were as many coffee shops as there were petit roadside churches, which seemed to decorate every street corner.

I didn’t understand that, but then again, I was a Catholic-born Atheist who hadn’t set foot inside a house of worship since my husband’s funeral. And that was under both protest and the fight I’d lost with his parents. Reid had made it very clear after hisaccident that he hadn’t wanted any big ceremonies when he died.

The fucker had always been planning his funeral. Of course, he lived for so many years after his accident I thought we’d end up two crotchety old men together with some hot, pool-boy-esque caregiver taking care of his needs until we died of natural causes.

I’d been half-right.

He had gotten a hot caregiver a few years before he passed, but while I felt old, I was barely middle-aged.

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