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I nodded, as usual my thoughts returning to Lily. “Maybe I do.”
“I heard you had a girl. I saw it on television.”
“What do you mean you saw it?” I’d purposely ignored the bullshit with the reporters.
“You didn’t know?”
“Know what?”
He laughed. “There’s some great video of the two of you embracing. She’s one beautiful girl. What’s her name, Lily? You made the freaking national news. Hometown hero and his girl. The caption is a lot better than that. Impressive. The only bad thing was they had to bring up the shit on Sapphire Ridge again. Assholes. At least they didn’t blame us for Belle’s death like usual.”
There was no reason for my blood to run cold, but it did. “Yeah, it’s Lily.” Or was it?
He was right in that it was time to let the past die, buried under the same rubble the Belle had been. Now there was another dark moment to deal with, protecting someone I was already falling in love with.
I glanced toward the mountains, ice forming in my veins. If Lily was running from someone, an open invitation had just been sent.
And this time, I’d die in order to keep the woman I loved safe.
CHAPTER13
Lily
“Turn off the news,” I said to no one in particular. The bartender glanced in my direction, shrugging her shoulders.
“He’s a hometown hero but he wasn’t always considered a good guy,” she said casually, as if I should just get over it.
Today’s breaking news focus had been on some fire almost twenty years before. I’d seen just enough to know both he and some of his friends had been interrogated for a purposely set fire, and the loss of a life. The ugliness weighed on my mind, but I refused to see Maverick as anything but the hero I knew him to be.
“Just turn it the fuck off.” I was angry. For him. For me. For life being such a pain in the ass.
“Sure. I’ll turn on the basketball game. The regulars prefer that anyway.” She gave me a sour look but didn’t argue.
Huffing, I turned, not expecting to see Scorpion standing in front of me.
He glanced at the television then back to me, moving closer. “Don’t believe everything you hear. People need absolute trash to talk about, nothing more.”
“Is it true what they said?” I asked, although I wasn’t certain I wanted to hear the answer.
There was something about the way he shook his head defiantly that made me feel better.
“There was an accidental fire on one of the local mountain ranges and a girl couldn’t be rescued. Sure, the sheriff’s department, the press, and just about everybody in town pointed fingers, but it was a crock of shit. That the piranhas have brought it up now pisses me off.”
“The sheriff’s department? Isn’t the sheriff a friend of his?” I hated to admit I was curious.
Scorpion leaned against the bar. “The incident was almost twenty years ago. At that point in time, Gage was part of the Bad Boys.”
“Bad Boys. Wolfman. All these names attached to people. Were these Bad Boys true delinquents?”
He grinned like a kid. “No more than the group I ran with. That’s why we know each other. A bunch of stupid guys who thought they were kings way back when. Fortunately, at least for most of us, the military sucked that out of us.”
“That’s why you’re so tight. You served together.”
“In the same outfit, the Marines, but we still went our separate ways.”
“I’d love to hear what happened on the mountain,” I told him, my skills had fishing for information likely obvious.
“No can do, lady. You’ll need to hear that from Maverick. If he’ll tell you. The difficult time they went through nearly crushed them. They all withdrew from society, their friends. Then they escaped. We all did in a way. Speaking of Maverick. Why aren’t you at the big party?”
