It sucked.
And each time that I heard the sound of flesh hitting flesh, it reminded me of him.
Of the guy that I’d never been able to find, even after hiring a professional to do it.
Needless to say, the sound of punches hitting skin, and cries of pain, didn’t send happy pangs through me, but dreaded ones.
Swallowing hard, I tiptoed through the trees, my eyes going everywhere all at once.
A branch snapped and slapped me in my face, causing me to curse.
Moving the branch, I glanced into a clearing and froze.
Before me sat a rather large opening in the trees. In the middle of that opening was a concrete circle with drains in it. Above the circle hung what looked to be a beam of some sort with chains dangling down. And dangling down from two chains was a man. A naked man who looked to be big, bulky, and freaked way the hell out.
Then again, I would be freaked out too when the freakin’ mayor was beating the absolute shit out of me.
Something grabbed me around the upper arm, and I gasped, spinning on my heels to see who it was, but the iron grip on my arm kept me from so much as turning an inch.
“Walk,” the voice belonging to that unyielding grip ordered.
I had no other choice but to walk or fall on my face, because he was moving.
I gasped when my foot caught on a tree limb and I started to go down, but before I could so much as begin to go horizontal, there was another arm holding me up.
“Watch your step,” he growled, dropping my other arm almost as soon as he’d touched it. “Could you not wear logical hiking shoes?”
I wore hiking boots.
Kind of.
They were sparkly Doc Martens in a shade of deep purple. They were boots. They protected my feet. And they were sparkly.
They were perfect.
This guy just didn’t realize that they were.
“I wore the shoes that I always wear,” I countered. “I’ve hiked in these so many times that they’re worn in just the way I like them.”
“Sure you have,” he grumbled.
“No, really,” I said. “I’m a videographer. I’ve filmed shit all over the world in these shoes. Hiked through the rainforest. The outback. These shoes have seen every single continent there is to see.”
He didn’t have anything to say to that, and I wasn’t sure if he saw the magical powers of the shoes, or if it was because we’d finally caught the attention of the men in the clearing.
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.”
“Really?” I asked. “What’d he do?”