Page 27 of Lucian

“Her address.”

• • •

A day later, Lucian sat in his Lexus LFA, nervously rapping his fingers to the red leather steering wheel. The shoddy neighborhood and crappy apartment buildings surrounding his vehicle left little to be desired.

This wasn’t his first rodeo spending time in this kind of neighborhood.

What was he going to do, now? Knock on her door, apologize, and then what? Apologize for what, exactly?

What he even doing here?

Jordyn made it perfectly clear a week ago she wanted nothing to do with him.

Something inside wouldn’t die, though.

“You okay?” Dante asked from the passenger seat.

“I don’t know,” Lucian answered honestly. Gio laughed in the backseat, leaning forward to flick his cigarette butt out the window. “If you burn my seats, I’ll kill you.”

His car was his baby. It didn’t get driven nearly enough. Gio had a serious lack of respect for the beauty that was cars.

“Listen,” Dante said as he turned to face his brother. “This isn’t difficult. Figure out what you need here. That’s what Dad said, right? So, go see if she’s home. If she is, have a chat. It’ll either be abundantly clear there’s something there, or not.”

Lucian frowned. “And if she isn’t home?”

“We come back another day. It’s not like we’re regular nine to fivers, here.”

“How would you know about anything being there?” Lucian asked. “What in the hell does that even mean?”

Dante shrugged. “You’re asking the wrong man. I don’t make time to find love, I make an effort to find a good fuck.”

“Classy,” Gio mumbled around a freshly lit cigarette.

“Like you’re any different,” Dante replied, unaffected. “Deny it, I dare you.”

Lucian quickly decided this conversation was going nowhere.

“This could be bad,” Lucian muttered, shooting a glance at the apartment building which may or may not house a woman who just wouldn’t get off his damned mind. “She said it herself, I probably got her in shit as it was. It’s complicated. She’s mixed up in bad people.”

“We are the bad people. You are aware what we do for a living, right? How many people have we whacked, again?”

Dante had him there.

Lucian flipped him off. “Not what I mean.”

“I know what you mean, idiot. Quit stalling. I promised Mom I’d take her to dinner with Jessica later.”

Lucian cringed. Their mother had some sort of crazy idea Dante was in love with this Jessica chick. She was not wife material, but no one wanted to break their mother’s heart by telling her the truth. “Christo, Dante. You need to put a stop to that before it continues. The next thing you know, Mom will be picking out wedding colors and nursery schemes. Once she starts doing that nonsense, she’s in it to win it and you’ll be screwed.”

Forget wife material. Dante wasn’t husband material.

“Tell Mom I let Jess suck my dick at the last get-together we had,” Gio put in from the back. “Problem solved.”

“Seriously?” Dante asked, staring in the review mirror at their youngest brother.

Gio shrugged. “What? She offered. It wasn’t like she was particularly good at it, so I forgot about it.”

Jesus.