Dannika Dark - Seven Years

“I seem to remember you having no problem reliving yourself behind a church.” Austin looked away, no doubt to hide his smile.

“Hey, you said you’d never bring that up again. That was supposed to go to the grave.”

Then I looked around at where we were and snorted.

The back of my arm burned and my joints were stiff. Austin jogged up beside me and pulled a piece of bark from my hair.

“What were you doing out here?” he asked.

“Making sure I didn’t leave a mess behind.”

“I cleaned that up,” Austin replied matter-of-factly.

I broke my stride and studied his thick brows that framed the clearest eyes I’d ever seen. “Why did you let me drive home drunk? I could have been killed.”

He folded his arms and I stole a glimpse of his tats. They disappeared beneath the sleeves of his shirt.

“I didn’t. You think I’d let you drive off in that condition?” He huffed with irritation and shook his head. “I didn’t want to rifle through your purse to find out where you lived, so I left you in front of your mom’s house.”

“How did you get back home?”

“Meet foot one and foot two,” he said, pointing down at his shoes. “Let’s go somewhere with air conditioning.”

“I have to do laundry. You get one rinse and spin to tell your story and then I have errands to run.”

Without another word, we got in our separate cars and he followed me to the Laundromat. Austin said he’d join me in a minute and took off toward a convenience store across the street where I sometimes grabbed a hot dog and soda. The laundry bags weighed a ton, but the handles at the top allowed me to drag them across the polished floor. I put in the first load and pumped a few coins into the washer.

Minutes passed and I hopped up on one of the machines to read a magazine.

“Let me see your arm,” Austin said, coming up on my left. He held a bottle of peroxide in one hand and a box of bandages in the other.

“Huh?” I spun my left arm around but couldn’t see anything.

“Your arm is bleeding, Sherlock. Lift it up and let me have a look.” He set the supplies down and raised my left arm over my head. That’s when I could see the scrape on my upper arm. It was deep and pretty gnarly-looking.

“So, are you going to tell me your life story, or are you stalling again?” I prodded.

“Christ,” he said under his breath.

“What?”

He shook his head. “I forgot to buy cotton balls.” He set the brown bottle of peroxide on the washer.

Before I could make a suggestion, Austin peeled off his shirt, wadded it into a ball, and doused it with peroxide.

I was pretty sure I would never buy another cotton ball again if this was the alternative solution.

Austin brushed my long hair away from my shoulder and eased between my legs. While he dabbed at my cut with his T-shirt, I got a bird’s-eye view of his torso. He smelled musky and everything about his body was different from the man I remembered. Not bulgy steroid-looking arms like Beckett, but solid. Then there was that sexy six-pack down below, and I tried not to look because I felt Austin watching me out of the corner of his eye. I lifted my gaze and focused on his tattoos instead.

Nope, that wasn’t helping either.

They weren’t so much on his bicep as they were on his shoulders, with tribal patterns sharpening down his upper arms and branching onto part of his chest. The last time I’d seen him, he was twenty-three and leaner. Austin was always tough by nature, just not in stature. He had always been the guy you didn’t want to mess with, and his nose was slightly crooked from one of his many fights.

Time had changed him, and in all the right ways.

“So?” I pressed.

“Is this where we’re having the talk?” he asked, dropping his arms and tearing the wrapper from a bandage. His blue eyes flashed to mine as a warning. If I said yes, there was no going back. We were going to have some kind of important talk in a Laundromat.

I’d never seen Austin wear jewelry or watches, so I leaned in and admired his necklace again.

He grinned and looked down. “You like it? It’s a family heirloom—a talisman that brings good fortune. My dad gave it to me about a month ago.”

“Does your family still live here?”

“My parents moved away years ago, but my brothers—we’re back for good.”

I quieted and Austin tapped beneath my chin with the crook of his finger—something he used to do whenever I was moping.

“Mom was really hurt when you took off,” I said. “She thought of you like a second son, and it destroyed her when Wes died and you left too. It was like she’d lost two kids.”

He put his hands on the washer and leaned forward. “Wes didn’t die in an accident; he was murdered.”

I gasped. My heart rate took off and the room closed in. “What did you just say?”

“Wes was tangled up with some bad people. I tried to keep him away because he was getting too deep into my world. He tried to cut a deal with the wrong man—someone you don’t make deals with—and when he didn’t follow through, they put a hit on him. They staged it like an accident, but I tracked down the piece of shit who did it.”

“Wes was murdered?”

I shoved against his chest and he stepped back, rubbing his jaw. “That’s why I left town—to track down his killer. It took me six months to find him and…”

“And what?”

He folded his arms and lifted his chin. “And I took care of him.” His brows popped up when he said “took care of,” and I knew what he meant. “Not long after that, I was offered a job as a bounty hunter. I made a career out of tracking down the worst kind of men. It was too dangerous for me to stay here.”

“If you took care of him, then where was the danger?”

“I took care of the killer, not the man responsible for putting the hit on Wes.” Austin rocked on his heels and briefly grasped his talisman before dropping it again. His cheeks were red from the heat and he rubbed his jaw, looking around. “Sorry, I can’t explain everything to you here.”

“Cat and mouse. I see how this is going to be.”

I tried to hop down, but he stepped so close I had nowhere to go. Austin flattened his hands on either side of my legs. An electric charge hummed between us—or at least it felt that way. Maybe it was just me, or the vibration of the nearby appliances, but something felt so very different about Austin and I couldn’t put my finger on it.

He leaned in close. Hard. His chest pushed out and we were nose to nose.

“I didn’t say I won’t tell you everything, I just can’t do it here.” His eyes motioned to the people sitting nearby.

And then it happened. A shift in the way he looked at me. His clear eyes softened and his nose twitched as if he smelled a perfume I wasn’t wearing. His eyes hooded and I leaned away, uncertain of how I felt about him looking at me like that. Austin was my brother’s best friend.

But then again, Wes wasn’t here. And we weren’t teenagers anymore.

A couple of young women by the door giggled and broke the silence between us. Austin backed up, tossing his bloody shirt into a nearby trash can.

“You just going to walk around like that?” I asked, as he was the only half-naked man in the Laundromat. Not that the two women by the door raised any complaint.

He answered my question by sitting down in one of the plastic bucket chairs in front of me, casually spreading his arms across the back of the seats and widening his legs. Whenever he was in one of his thinking moods, Austin’s brows pushed together and formed a crease in the center of his forehead.

When we were younger, it made him look pensive and angry. Now it just made him intimidating.

“So, are you married?” I tapped the back of my flip-flops against the washer and watched his Adam’s apple undulate as he swallowed. The hum of the machines gave us a little privacy.

“No. I never settled down,” he admitted.

Then he flicked a hot gaze up to me and I shivered.

“Casey got married,” I blurted out.

Now he looked interested. Slightly. Casey was the girl he’d dated off and on in high school. I had a feeling they still hooked up after high school, although I had no proof, just friends who’d seen them together in random places.

“Good for her. She got kids?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I just heard she married a year after… Well, not long after you left.”

Austin was never one for small talk; he had always preferred deeper conversations. So his uncharacteristic silence put me on edge. Something was on his mind, and by the way he kept looking at me, it wasn’t about Wes’s death.

“Why were you crying?” He didn’t move an inch. Just kept his eyes locked on mine.

I cocked my head to the side.

“At the pizza place,” he said.

Oh. That.

“My ex showed up. I flipped out a little.”

The ropes of muscle in his arms tightened, as did his jaw. “You’re divorced?”

“No, I never married.”

Now Austin looked pissed. He leaned forward and scraped his fingers through his hair, staring at the tacky pattern on the floor tiles.

“How’re your parents doing?” he asked, switching topics.

“Mom’s great. She doesn’t work as much as she used to. I’m sure dad’s great too. Wherever he is.”

His head snapped up. “What do you mean by that?”

“My dad left us.”

He stood up and erased the distance between us. “When?”

I laced my fingers together. “About four years ago. I don’t know.”

“He left?”

“Yep. One day he packed up all his shit and told my mom he’d had enough. It came out of the blue because I don’t remember hearing them argue that much, but I wasn’t living at home at the time. Who knows what was going on; she never talks about it.”

“He left his wife and daughter unprotected?” Austin repeated through clenched teeth.

I narrowed my eyes. “Yeah. Sound familiar?”

A low growl vibrated in his throat. “I had no choice. It was the only way to keep your family safe.”

“Look, I’m tired of playing this game,” I said, pushing him away. I hopped down from the washer and felt trapped because of that damn laundry. I was tempted to pull out every last sopping-wet towel and just go home. But instead, I paced. “You’re the same, but you’re not the same. I know it’s been years, but have you been in prison?”

Austin stirred with laughter and tiny crinkles pinched the corners of his eyes. There he was—the guy I once knew. The one whose laugh was contagious because you rarely heard it, and it gave him such a sweet expression. With his right arm, he leaned on the washer and I turned my back to him.

Damn, that lean.

“No, I’m not a convict. I’m the same guy, just older and a little fatter.”

I snorted. Hardly. I didn’t see an ounce of fat on his well-proportioned, nicely tanned—

“Lexi?”

I spun on my heel and folded my arms. Austin tilted his head and spoke softly. “I want my hug. I’ve got a lot of baggage, and you look spooked, but we need to mend the rift between us. I can’t undo the past, but I want to make it right with your mom. Fuck your dad, because he can rot in hell for leaving you the way he did. Had I known, I would have come back sooner.”

My knees weakened a little. There was fierceness in his declaration—an honesty in his voice I couldn’t ignore. As pissed off as I was, I owed him the benefit of the doubt as much as he owed me an explanation.

With my arms still folded, I shuffled forward and leaned into him.

Austin wrapped his arms around me tight and kissed the top of my head.

“I missed you, Ladybug,” he murmured in my hair.

In the span of a rinse and spin cycle, I’d managed to get Austin caught up on seven years’ worth of gossip. Who was married, who was divorced, who was gay, who had five children, who lost all their money on a gambling trip, and who was arrested for public indecency in a museum. Austin’s eyes were brimming with amusement; I always had an animated way of telling a good story.

We slid into our groove just a little bit more, although in many ways, Austin still felt like a stranger to me.

I offered him one of my warm T-shirts to put on, fresh from the dryer, but he smirked and held it up to his broad chest. Unless I wanted the stretched-out version, Austin was going shirtless.

Not that I had any complaints.