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Whatever the reason, he finally loosened his hold on me.
I saw his hand drop from my arm, and a scar made me gasp and whirl around.
“Y’all are getting sloppy,” the man holding my arm said as he forced me out farther into the clearing, this time using his hand planted in my belly as he did.
I whirled back around so I didn’t fall on my ass and saw the other man that’d caught my attention in the clearing but hadn’t held it.
The man from the diner looked up.
“Saw her,” he said. “Just knew you were there and were going to bring her in here.”
The man holding me scoffed and pushed me a little bit harder, forcing me to walk closer to the one man that I was avoiding looking at.
The mayor.
The really hot, naked from the waist up mayor.
The sexy, he has a whole lot of beautiful tattoos mayor.
The very ripped, very muscular, goddamn mayor.
The man that was so familiar to me laughed, and that laugh finally triggered the memory that’d been hiding just beneath the surface.
“Bruno?” I gasped.
I’d know that laugh anywhere.
I better. I was there the day he’d received the vocal cord damage that caused that husky laugh.
God, he’d changed so much. He had a beard. He was bigger. Bulkier. Taller. Hell, he was so different, but also the same now that I knew what to look for.
Bruno’s eyes snapped to mine, and his eyes focused hard as he took me in.
“Ines?” he asked, looking as if he wasn’t all that surprised by seeing me as I was at seeing him.
Ines.
God, I’d hated that name.
But my father refused to call me Six, and during school, he told everyone that they would address me by Ines or he’d fuck them all up. Not physically or anything, but financially.
“Bring her here.”
Lynn.
Mayor Hottie.
The man that’d been doing the beating.
The man that I couldn’t quite look in the eye.
I licked my lips nervously, trying to look anywhere but at Lynnwood Thatcher Windsor.
The mayor.
Holy shit, the mayor was hot underneath those suits!
And the tattoos screamed ‘not stuck up’ like I’d originally thought him to be.
A man with tattoos didn’t think the same as my father, who would rather be skinned alive than get a tattoo anywhere on his body.
He had them everywhere. A full sleeve of them up one arm and down the other.
One side was in black and white, the other in full color.
There was a plethora of artwork on each arm, and the artwork extended down the length of his arm, around his shoulder, and down his sides.
His belly was completely tattoo free, though.
It was as if he wasn’t quite sure how to merge them, so he’d stopped before they did.
It was awesome. I wanted to study each and every tattoo close up.
Which, I found out, was a distinct possibility when Bruno gave me a shove toward Lynn.
“You know,” I said conversationally to the man at my back. “I looked everywhere for you. You just up and disappeared. What the hell? Who does that to their best friend?”
“You were my best friend in middle school, Ines,” Bruno grumbled. “Things change.”
That made me sad because for him that might be true, but for me it wasn’t.
Even after all these years, I’d always remembered Bruno as my first best friend.
I looked down and away and sensed more than heard the man at my back go still.
I’d made him feel bad.
Whatever.
If he truly cared, he wouldn’t have hidden himself away from me.
And for some reason, I knew that was exactly what he’d done—hidden.
He hadn’t wanted me to find him, and that pissed me off.
So instead of dwelling on the fact that my best friend for as long as I could remember had been hiding from me for years, I decided to focus on the man that had bloody brass knuckles on his fingers.
“So you beat the shit out of innocent men in your spare time, Mr. Mayor?” I asked curiously, hiding my sadness with anger and sarcasm.
The mayor’s eyes took me in.
I was wearing short black shorts that were so holey that I was fairly sure you could see a lip through one of the holes. To round out the black holey shorts, I wore a black holey t-shirt that said ‘Black Sabbath’ on it. There were holes that you could see my bright purple bra through, though.
Which was immediately what Lynn’s eyes focused on, I was sure.
That or he was studying the B on Black. I wasn’t too sure. But if I was a guessing woman, I was thinking he was looking at my bra.
Unless the man was gay, then there was no telling what he was looking at.
“Not that it’s any of your business,” Lynn said, eyes moving from the hole to my face. “But yes, this man is a piece of shit.”
