Jay Crownover - Riveted

I felt his broad chest rise and fall where I was squeezing him. He heaved another deep sigh and pulled back so that he could shake his head in the negative. “Not tonight.” He growled from low in his chest and roughly dragged his hands over his face. “I need a minute … or ten.”

There was a delicate clearing of a throat and we both shifted our gazes to where Poppy was pressed against the front door like Wheeler could grow razor-sharp claws and mile-long fangs to eviscerate her at any moment. Her eyes were twice their normal size and her teeth were buried so deeply into her bottom lip I was surprised she wasn’t drawing blood.

“I’m going to go.” Her voice quivered and her hands were still shaking.

I felt Wheeler tense where I was still holding on to him, and I watched his eyes narrow as they locked on Poppy. His gaze was normally a mellow light blue that looked amazing with his reddish hair and the dimples that dug into his cheeks. Tonight it flared like the blue at the base of a flame and those adorable indents in his cheeks were nowhere to be found.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt anything. It’s been a shitty night on top of an even shittier week and I’m not thinking too clearly at the moment. I didn’t mean to barge in and make an ass out of myself.” And that was why I loved Hudson Wheeler with every single bit of my heart and soul. His world was crashing down around him. He was drowning in an ocean of his own bad choices (and I would call Kallie a bad choice to her face for this bullshit) and misery, but he still had the wherewithal to gentle his tone and rein in his temper so that he didn’t further terrify the young woman plastered against the only exit. He was a good guy … no, a great guy … and Kallie was a world-class moron for screwing around on him … again.

“It’s fine. You’re … um, fine. Dixie, I’ll see you later.” She leaned down to pet Dolly one last time and then slipped out the door shutting it silently behind her. She moved like smoke and vanished just as fast.

I pulled away from the man that was set to be my brother-in-law and tunneled my fingers through my wild hair and squeezed my head. “That’s my new neighbor.”

He grunted and threw himself down on my well-worn couch. The springs protested under his weight and then groaned again when Dolly climbed up next to him and put her head on his denim-clad thigh.

“I know her. She’s Salem’s sister and Rowdy grew up with her back in Texas. He brought her by when she needed a new car. I tried to sell her a ’64 Bonneville that needed a little work. She would’ve made that car look gorgeous. She ended up with a Toyota Camry. It was a goddamn travesty. A girl that looks like that should have a car that stands out, not something safe and predictable.” I forgot that Wheeler knew a bunch of the boys that frequented my bar because they were family, some by blood and some by something more, with my boss, Rome Archer. Rowdy St. James also worked at the tattoo shop that was responsible for the majority of the ink that covered Wheeler from head to toe. I should have realized he would have run across Poppy at least once or twice since she’d come to Denver, even if Kallie tended to keep him on a tight leash.

I lowered myself onto the only available seating left in my small living room and kicked my feet up so that they were resting on my coffee table. “Poppy isn’t really the standing-out type and she can do with a little safe.”

His gaze shifted to mine and his mouth pulled into a frown. “That’s a damn shame, too.”

I agreed with him, so I didn’t say anything else.

After a solid hour of sulking I finally got up and took Dolly out for her nightly ritual. I dug up some sheets and blankets to make a temporary bed for Wheeler on the couch, a temporary bed that was going to be as uncomfortable as hell considering his long legs, and eventually found my way to my own bed.

I wanted to cry for all of it. For Wheeler’s broken heart, for my sister’s stupidity and blindness to what she had thrown away, for Poppy’s obvious emotional scarring and her fear of other people, for Joseph and his creepy relationship with his insane mother, and for me. Unrequited love sucked. I hated it.

No tears fell as I climbed under the covers. Like I always did, I told myself there was bound to be a light at the end of the tunnel … there had to be because I refused to live my life in the dark.

Keep your face always toward the sunshine and shadows will fall behind you.

—Walt Whitman

You’ve been awfully quiet tonight.”

The southern drawl was lighter than mine, more lyrical and smooth. The Blue Hills of Kentucky rolled thick and unmistakable in Asa Cross’s twang as he looked at me steadily from behind the massive oak bar he was currently in the middle of wiping down.

“I talk when I have something to say.” No one would ever accuse me of being the chatty type. When I did choose to speak the Mississippi Delta was deep and locked thickly around all my words. My drawl was much slower than the blond bartender’s and far less practiced. Asa used his inflection and his southern charm to work whoever was sitting on the other side of the bar like they were one of his marks in a long con. He turned up the south in his voice to make hearts flutter and to fool drunks into thinking he was far less sharp than he was. His Kentucky-flavored tone was nothing more than a tool he used to his advantage whenever he needed it, while my unhurried inflection reminded me of a home I hadn’t seen in far too long. That was one of the reasons I never had much to say. Every time I opened my mouth the sound of my voice, like molasses over gravel and deep as the Mississippi River, took me back to a place I had been actively avoiding for over a decade.

I’d spent a little over ten years serving my country in various capacities while enlisted in the army. I’d been around different types of men from a million different walks of life. In all that time I’d never met anyone as hard to unravel as the man standing across from me. He had eyes the exact same color as the aged whiskey on the shelf behind him, and they were picking me apart with a perceptiveness that made me uneasy. I wasn’t used to being so transparent. Whatever shield I had up, whatever ironclad curtains I had pulled around me, Asa Cross saw right through them.

“You are usually quiet, but tonight you didn’t say a single word. You look like you have something on your mind.” His eyebrows lifted and that smirk on his face turned into a grin that I wanted to put my fist in. He wouldn’t be half as pretty as he was with missing teeth and a bloody nose. “Dixie had a date tonight. I figure you were worried about her since she’s been spending time with those internet guys over the last few months, and the bar is never the same on her nights off.”

My back teeth clicked together in aggravation and a low growl escaped my throat. My hands curled into fists at my sides without me being aware they were doing it and I could feel a furious heat climb up the back of my neck.

The idea of Dixie, sweet, sunny Dixie, out there with God only knew what kind of troll she was going to find on the internet made me want to destroy everything. I wanted to break the bar top in half. I wanted to throw chairs through windows. I wanted to smash all the meticulously placed bottles displayed behind Asa into smithereens. I wanted to dropkick the remaining few stragglers nursing their last-call drinks out the door and I wanted to get my hands on whoever had taken Dixie out tonight and throttle him within an inch of his life.

Logically, I knew there were decent, normal individuals using the internet to find love and sex … the sex being more likely. There were millions of people online dating and while I thought that was okay for them I refused to think it was an option Dixie should be utilizing. I hated the idea of her dating at all, but there was something about her meeting strangers, meeting men that hadn’t had the opportunity to see her in person before taking her out, that really rubbed me the wrong way.