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“We’ve only been here an hour, man.” Holt adjusted his glasses. “Slow down, or I’ll have to carry your drunk ass out of here…again.”
“The way I see it, you owe me at least ten more of those nights,” Steven said, keeping his voice light even though Holt was pissing him off. A
fter all, Holt had no room to talk. A year ago, he’d been drinking heavily and spending all his free time in bars, and Steven had been the one telling him to slow down.
So what the hell ever.
Lauren watched him from across the room, so he waved. She smiled and returned the gesture, but turned back to the prick occupying her time. Anger rolled through his veins when the asshole leaned in closer to speak into her ear, and she flushed in reply, but he ignored the unwanted emotion. It was just Lauren, not some girl he was trying to fuck.
If she liked flirting with the jerk-off, then so be it.
He turned back to Holt, who watched him with a smirk. “What now?”
“Nothing.” Holt rubbed his jaw and shook his head. “Nothing at all. Hey, how’s Lauren doing with that Brian guy?”
Brian. Shit, he hated that guy. He was using Lauren, and the sooner she saw it, the better. Plus, when he laughed, he sounded like a damn otter. Kind of acted like one, too. “Ask her yourself. I don’t give a damn how he is, or how she feels about him. He’s just another guy she’ll date, then realize isn’t good enough for her, and I’ll be the one comforting her after he’s gone—until she finds another asshole to try and fix.”
“Easy man.” Holt shoved his glasses into place with his pointer finger. “Your jealousy’s showing.”
The hell it was. He and Lauren had been friends for over twenty years—and that was it. Friends. They’d never crossed the line, or even discussed crossing the line. She’d never once acted as if she ever thought about more. He would’ve noticed.
But everyone else was convinced they were soul mates.
They weren’t.
Just because he had yet to like a man she’d brought home didn’t mean he was jealous, or that he secretly loved her. It meant that she had horrible taste in men.
That was fact, not opinion.
“Whatever you say, man,” Steven said, dragging a hand through his hair. A classical song started in the background, and people milled to the dance floor—including their boss, Cooper Shillings. He scowled at them and cocked his head toward the dance floor. Shit. He hated dancing. Give him a gun and a desert over a tux and a ballroom, anytime. “Cooper’s giving us the look.”
Holt sighed, grabbed his soda, and tugged on his bow tie. “Guess it’s time to dance, huh?”
“Guess so.” He picked up his whiskey and held it out to his buddy, grinning. “But first? I’ll finish this. To leave it here unfinished would be alcohol abuse.”
His best friend stared back at him, looking 100 percent not amused. “You forget I’ve done this already.” Then he leaned in, nostrils flaring. “Drinking to drown the pain doesn’t work. Nothing does.”
“It worked pretty damn well for you, didn’t it?” He tipped his head to his sister—a former one-night stand of Holt’s. “You found her in a bar, while drinking.”
“Yeah.” The other man watched Lydia with devotion and love as she made her way across the room to him. “But that was pure luck.”
“Well, we can’t all be so lucky, can we?”
He might be drinking and fucking too much, but it was the only thing that dulled the screams that haunted him daily. The only thing that dulled the guilt that he’d lived, when the rest of his platoon hadn’t, and it eased the anger over that fact—fuck, the anger. Every time he remembered what happened over there, he wanted to shoot someone.
So he took a different kind of shot instead.
If he’d known what they truly were walking into, if he’d had even a damn inkling of the type of danger they’d faced, his men would be alive today. If his superior officer hadn’t led him to believe he was bringing his men on a routine mission that held no danger, when in fact it was an ambush, his men would still be here, and he wouldn’t have gotten shot—and put out of the game permanently.
He fucking hated liars.
Every single one.
He glanced over his shoulder. Lauren walked beside Lydia. Something about the way she moved tonight made it impossible to look away. Damn it, she was intoxicating, with her hips swaying seductively as she made her way across the room to him. Her dark hair fell over her shoulders and tits, and she was easily the prettiest woman here.
She was his one constant, in a world full of chaos.
And she would never lie to him.
