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Who was my brother? What kind of a person was he? And how had he changed from the young man who’d stood in front of me and told me to kill my baby?
Could I ever get past that?
I doubted it.
We’d been through so much together, and as a pregnant teen who was alone, all I wanted was my brother to help me through what was the scariest time of my life. But he hadn’t been. He’d made that clear.
And why did he want to buy Dahlia’s bar? Him or our father. Why did he want it? What was so special about it? What was so amazing that he had to harass her for it?
So many questions I’d probably never get a straight answer to, no matter how many times I asked them. Mostly because there was nobody who could tell me the answer.
Dahlia’s card burned a hole in my car door. That’s where I’d dumped it after leaving the cocktail bar. I’d whipped it out of my purse, stared at it for the longest time until my phone alarm trilled at me, and dropped it into the door.
Now, as I drove over a pothole, it rattled in the emptiness. Tsh-tsh-tsh against the plastic inside of the door like an irritating fly buzzing around your head.
I ignored it. I wasn’t interested. Not right now. How could I possibly process all the things she’d told me when I had a job to do?
Tonight, I’d get it done. In. Locate the hookers. Get out. I wasn’t interested in playing Adrian’s girlfriend and having him get all close to me. I’d had enough of that. The sooner I achieved all the things I needed to, the better.
I was going to handle the night with a military-like precision.
If I told myself that enough, maybe I’d start to believe it.
Chapter Twelve
Adrian
She was distracted.
Hyper-focused on her job, yet at the same time, distracted, for all the fucking sense it made. It was almost as if she was a lightbulb, working on a switch.
On for five minutes, off for ten.
If I had to watch her jab her straw into the cherry in her glass one more time, I was going to lose my fucking mind.
Perrie sighed and tucked her hair behind her ear. We’d been in this bar an hour, and I was running out of patience with her inability to hold her focus for very long. Mostly because when she did, you could see the cogs in her mind working as she laid everything out before her and assessed the people around us.
I didn’t know what had happened—maybe it was me—but something was under her skin.
I could tell, because she was fucking under mine.
Ever since she’d skipped out on our conversation in Polka’s to use the restroom in an obvious escape ploy, I’d done nothing but think about her.
Think about the sadness in her eyes.
The anger when I’d shown up at her house.
The way her breath had hitched when I’d touched her lip to wipe away a lingering bit of sauce.
The way I’d kept my thumb on her mouth for a little too long, because if I hadn’t, I’d have kissed the hell out of her right there and then.
The way I wanted to do nothing but spin her around on this goddamn barstool and do just that—kiss her.
Annoyance was definitely preferable.
Kissing her was the line. The big, black, fucking line that screamed with neon lights. The one I couldn’t cross. Not now, and not ever.
I’d been there. I’d done that. Leopards like her never changed their spots, and that meant I’d never do it again.
“Can you focus?” I snapped when she jabbed the cherry with her straw one final time.
“I’m trying,” she ground out, dropping the straw into the glass with frustration. “I have a lot on my mind today.”
“Get it out, then.”
She rolled her eyes, muttering something under her breath. I could have sworn it sounded an awful lot like she was calling me a flip-flopping bastard, whatever the hell that meant, but it wasn’t clear enough to call her on it.
Ignoring it instead, I leaned against the bar and scanned the room. I’d never admit it, but I was tiring of this job. Of the late nights, of never getting a full night’s sleep, of spending more hours inside smoky, dank casinos and bars than I did anywhere else.
I missed when I was just a cop doing my normal job. No matter that I had a private interest in getting these people off the streets of my city, I still missed not having to spend all my time here in places I hated.
If only I were brave enough to step off the task squad.
But no, my fucking hero complex kept me here.
The same damn thing kept the woman in front of me out of jail.
