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“Oh,” he said. “Good. I’d hate to dislike you.”
I snorted.
“You couldn’t dislike me if you tried,” I countered.
That was true.
All of us SWAT kids grew up together. The kids of Luke, Nico, Michael, Foster, Miller, Bennett, James, John and my father were more like siblings at times than we were friends.
“I feel like I’m not even in the same circle that y’all are in sometimes,” Nathan said as he walked up to the hostess stand, hands in his swim trunks pockets. “Like y’all talk on this level that the rest of us can’t even get to.”
“Agreed,” Hayes said. “When they’re working together during training, it’s like they know what the other is thinking before it happens. Then I’m standing there with my thumb in my ass…”
I snickered. “We spent hours and hours playing in the strip club, also known as the training facility. Trust me when I say, we’ve grown up close. I think it’s safe to say that we know each other well.”
Hayes hooked me around the neck and pulled me into his body. “Not too well, I hope.”
The hostess finally arrived, then guided us back to the room that they’d procured for the evening.
“I don’t know any of them like that,” I whispered back, keeping my voice low so the others didn’t hear.
Not that they were paying attention.
They were looking at the hostess chick’s ass and being none too subtle about it.
Hayes’ eyes, though?
They were downcast and staring straight at me.
I felt my face flush all over again.
“I like that you wore your hair down,” he rumbled, making me swallow hard at the lust I heard in his voice.
That was lust, right?
Or was I just reading more into it than was there?
When we arrived at the back room, I was very happy to find out that I wasn’t over or underdressed.
The first person I saw was Booth and his son, both in sweatpants.
“Were sweatpants a requirement?” I asked, grinning wickedly when Booth’s son saw me and ran at me like a little banshee.
Booth looked over his shoulder and grinned, going back to his conversation with Louis in the next moment.Chapter 9Sometimes you just have to knock a motherfucker’s teeth out.
-Hayes to Ares
Hayes
“Hey, darlin’,” Ares said as she scooped Booth’s son up into her arms.
“My name’s not darlin’.” He narrowed his eyes.
Booth’s son was named after Booth’s father, Nico. Nicolas Asa Pena. He went by Asa, but he wanted everyone to know that he was named after his grandpa, so he had two acceptable names. Nicolas or Asa. Never anything else, even if it was a term of endearment.
Ares obviously knew this because she continued to grin wickedly at the small boy.
Asa quickly dropped her like a hot potato the moment that Bourne came through the door soaking wet.
“Uncle Bourne!” Asa yelled loudly. “You’re here!”
Bourne swooped down and picked the kid up, burying his face into the kid’s neck and kissing him loudly.
“I am, my man,” he said. “Where’s your daddy?”
Asa pointed behind him to where Booth was now staring down at something that Louis was showing him.
“He’s there. Looking at a gun safe. He says it’s so big that he and I could fit inside of it,” Asa declared.
My lips twitched as I watched the two walk past where we were standing.
“That kid loves his uncle,” she said softly.
Bourne met up with Booth and handed Asa over so he could grab a seat on Louis’ other side.
“You say that like it’s a surprise,” I said, pulling her toward the chair that was across the table from Louis, Bourne and Booth.
Malachi walked in moments later, even more soaked than Bourne had been.
“Wet out there?” Ares teased as he sat down.
Malachi’s smile was swift. “No. Why would you say that?”
I grinned at my friend.
Though, just like him, my grin didn’t meet my eyes.
He narrowed his eyes at me, seeing the same thing in my eyes that I saw in his.
Yet, neither one of us called the other on it.
Deny, deny, deny.
See, a while ago, Malachi and I had been on the same damn team, along with another one of our friends, Luca, that had been ambushed and captured. We’d been prisoners of war for a very long time. A year at least. Hell, to be honest, the days were kind of hard to count since we never saw the outside of a jail cell in all that time.
We had to rely on each other’s counting, and even then, sometimes that wasn’t accurate.
Luca was no help since he’d suffered quite a few head injuries causing him to have permanent memory loss.
Malachi, like me, had just been tortured.
We didn’t forget what happened to us, though.
Sadly.
I remembered every goddamn excruciating detail and wished to hell for a brain swipe every time I closed my eyes to go to sleep.
When neither one of us said anything, Ares cleared her throat.
