Page 36 of Dangerous Men
It’s not that I don’t trust my brothers. I absolutely fucking don’t, but that’s not the point. Their liaisons with women are usually over so fast I don’t even bother looking into most of the ones they bring home. But this one? With both of them focusing on her so completely, and spending so much time around her, there was no way I wasn’t going to look into her background.
Sure, from the outside she might seem like just an unassuming little bookstore owner, harmless and brainless as a gnat,but you never know for sure until you look deeper. My misplaced trust almost cost us everything once, and I sure as fuck won’t ever let that happen again. So while my brothers might be too stupid and too distracted by a nice pair of tits to help themselves, it's my job to know better. For all of us.
Luckily, their newest toy is no one we need to worry about. She’s a nobody. A commoner with no red flags in her background whatsoever. The only interesting thing I learned about her was that her parents died when she was sixteen, leaving her an orphan, just like the rest of us. An interesting shared experience. But unlike the four of us,shedidn’t get sent into the broken and fucked up foster system of Fortune City. Oh no. She had a loving grandmother who took her in and, from what I can tell, she’s lived a mundane and uneventful life ever since.
I hate her a little for that. For how safe she must have been, while the rest of us suffered.
Loved.
I hate her even more for how helpless she is. Weak. None of my research prepared me for what a fragile little thing this girl was going to be. If I’d known I’d be spending the evening rescuing a damsel in distress who couldn’t even walk across a room without causing a scene, I would have stayed at home with Viper, where I belong.
Goddamn those fucking idiots. Goddamn this fucking girl.
When I kneel in front of her, she shifts a little on the bench, and the slit in her dress parts even further, falling open to reveal the entirety of her left leg from ankle to thigh. I refuse to let myself look too long.
“Oh God, that was so embarrassing,” she mutters, covering her face with her hands. “I can’t believe I just tripped in front of everyone like that. Do you think anyone saw?”
“I thinkeveryonesaw.” I slide the fabric of her dress a little further aside to get a better look at her ankle.
Her fingers part, and she stares at me in horror before dropping her hands to her lap. “That-that’s not comforting! You’re supposed to sayno!”
I glance up, slowly raising an eyebrow at her. “I’m supposed to lie?” I ask.
The only answer I get is a scowl. She crosses her arms under her breasts, glaring out into the dark of the garden. Terrific. I pull at the buckle of her left high heel. “Maybe if you wore shoes you could actually walk in, this wouldn’t have happened,” I mutter.
That earns me an irritated huff, at least.
“Why is it always the handsome ones that treat people like this,” she mutters to herself as she starts to shift away from me. “Going around just manhandling people.”
My fingers pause in the middle of unbuckling her shoe, and for a moment, I feel my carefully curated mask slip. Handsome? No. Ashton is the handsome one. We might share some of our mother’s features, sure, but most people don’t look past him to bother seeing me. He and Alec are the handsome ones, the ones women flock to.
The ones who get noticed.
“And why is it always the pretty ones that are absolute brats?” I retort, removing her shoe and setting it aside. When I start to remove the other one, she recoils.
“Careful!” she whines. “Oh God, I think it’s broken.”
This girl and herwhining. I remove her right shoe with slow, deliberate care, and hold her gaze as I wrap my fingers around her ankle. “Does this hurt?” I ask, giving it a squeeze.
She sucks in a sharp breath and shuts her eyes. “Ow, ow, ow!Yes!Obviously!”
I let her ankle go. It’s a struggle not to roll my eyes. “Then it’s not broken.”
“What do you mean?” she asks in a high-pitched, indignant voice. “I told you thathurt.”
“And if it were broken, you would be screaming right now,” I explain, giving her a deadpan look over the frames of my glasses.
Her lip curls, and I don’t miss the flare of anger that crosses her face. “And who made you the expert on broken bones?”
“Empire University, when they signed my medical degree.” I reach into the pocket of my slacks and pull out a single-dose packet of pain relievers. This girl’s lucky I even bothered to bring any tonight, lucky I planned ahead for the almost inevitable headache this evening was sure to bring me. I hold the packet out for her between two fingers. “Here. Take these.”
She stares at it like I just offered her a vial of poison.
“It’s acetaminophen. An analgesic,” I explain. At her continued confusion, I add, “It’sTylenol. Take it.”
She hesitates a moment longer, and with an irritated sigh, I rip it open myself and grab her hand, tapping both pills out of the packet and into her palm.
Her skin is soft under my touch. I let my thumb slide over the pulse of her wrist just once, savoring the feeling of it.
