“Yep,” April said mildly. “I’ll always be here.”
An hour dragged by. It felt like three. There were more beers, more stories and more laughter as Tessa opened gift boxes full of sex toys, lacy lingerie, and edible undies. As darkness fell, strands of lights blinked on above the patio, which was now crowded with people. April tried paying attention to what Tessa was saying, but the sound of other conversations pressed down on her.
The tipsier her friends got, the more alone she felt. Her old restlessness crawled around inside her. Odd things came into focus. The aftershave of the man standing behind her. The sweat at the nape of her neck. The vibrator on the table by her elbow.
She mumbled something about needing the ladies’ room and then made her way through the crowd. All the noise and music and perfume and heat made her almost desperate to go home. Everyone was here tonight, even people she hadn’t seen in a while. For the second time today, she smiled and waved like everything was okay.
She turned a corner and stopped short. Her heart pounded in her chest, a hard, relentless rhythm like the music. Sitting on a bench directly in front of her was Brandon McBride. There was a woman on his lap.
When he locked eyes with April, every part of her burst into flames.
Chapter 3
Brandon McBride felt a familiar tug, one that had a keener edge to it than usual, one that should have warned him if he’d been paying attention.
But why do that?
Life was a here-and-now kind of deal. You had your wits, your muscle, your buddies, your wheels and the open road. If you were lucky, there might be a woman waiting for you at the end of it. Hopefully, a woman who wasn’t too drunk and didn’t want to kill you.
What could he say? Temptation was everywhere and he wasn’t the man to say no. Not when there were hot little numbers like this social worker running around.
He liked how she looked in that dress. What was that word his friend Long Jon used for women like her?
Prim.
Brandon was so busy watching the social worker flush pink, then white, and then pink again, he almost forgot about the woman on his lap. Funny, he remembered the social worker’s name—it was April, right?—but not the name of the woman sitting right on top of him. She had one boob pressed against his chest and a lot of dyed blond hair. What was it—Sheryl? Shaylene? She’d pounced on him the minute he, Mattis, and Long Jon climbed off their bikes.
April continued to stare at him, her hand covering her mouth as though she’d said something inappropriate. But girls like April never said things that were inappropriate. They went to church on Sunday and wrote thank you notes on little pieces of colored paper and baked casseroles for sick relatives. They had nice boyfriends, and on Saturday nights they had sex with those nice boyfriends and faked their orgasms.
Brandon let his gaze wander appreciatively over the rest of her and figured any woman who actually had orgasms was probably thinking about him.
But April was going to cause trouble for his brother. A feisty thing like her would probably drag the courts into it, too, and Brandon had damn good reasons to want to avoid them. Better to stop this bullshit before it got rolling.
“Let me up,” he told the woman on his lap.
“Why?” The woman bristled. “So you can hit on that girl in the pink dress? Do you know her?”
The woman wouldn’t budge, so he set her aside negligently, like a child, and grabbed his bottle of beer. “Don’t worry, darlin’. There’s plenty to go around.”
She glared up at him, her lush, pretty mouth even poutier than it had been ten minutes ago when she suggested they go somewhere quiet and he’d said, Slow down. I haven’t even had my first beer yet.
“You really think you’re God’s gift, don’t you?” she said.
He grinned. “That’s because I am.”
While the woman crossed her arms and sulked, he turned around to talk to April, only April was gone. No use running, kitten. She could play it off as much as she liked, but he’d seen the longing on her face, a tight, buttoned-down longing that usually meant once the lid was off, she could turn feral.
He liked feral.
Right now, April was making him hunt for her. Brandon scanned the crowd. A few women threw him looks of invitation, which he filed away for later. On a hunch, he went around back where the smokers usually went—not that his April was a smoker. His April probably had a bedspread full of adorable stuffed animals. Brandon had found that if you jerked a bedspread off just the right way, you could send those things flying.
There was a big tree out back with a bench underneath it. No smokers here tonight, but he did find April.
She looked so prissy sitting there with her knees pressed together and her hands clasped tightly in her lap. The whole pink gingham thing was a nice departure from that suburban mom crap she’d had on earlier. Brandon closed the distance between them, enjoying the fact that she hadn’t seen him yet.
If he’d been thinking with his brain, he might have steered clear. But he didn’t feel like doing that. Not with all those fascinating contradictions to figure out. Not with that body, ripe with promise, to go with the ice princess facade.
Not with his brother’s future on the line.
He noted the look of alarm when she saw him. Of all the expressions he was used to seeing on women’s faces—flinty, flirty, inviting—he didn’t expect to see fear in April’s enormous blue eyes. She was younger than he’d thought. Twenty-two, twenty-three, tops. Fresh out of college.
Five years ago, when he was twenty-three, Brandon had been doing eighteen months in the Banderas Men’s Correctional Facility for knocking over a gas station.
“What’s a good girl like you doing in a place with me in it?” The corners of his lips twitched despite an attempt to keep a straight face. “Social workers don’t actually go out and have fun, do they? Don’t you have lives to ruin?”
She quickly looked away, giving him her haughty profile. “You were a rude jerk today. You called Ryan a mall cop.”
A rude jerk. Was that the best she could do?
He braced one hand on the tree trunk beside them and regarded her lazily. Her pale blond hair shone like a candle in the dim light. Unlike his bronze-colored, one quarter Choctaw skin, hers was milky white. She reminded him of one of those china dolls his grandmother collected, except that April’s face looked wary and intelligent, not empty. She was clearly uncomfortable around men.
“How long you been with Raymond County?” he asked.
She pulled her chin up, which told him everything. So April hadn’t been working there long and felt defensive about it. That meant he could either compliment her, flatter her vanity or make her feel like the amateur she clearly was.
“I’ve been with Raymond County long enough to know you’re no fit guardian for your brother,” she said. “Matthew needs to be in school, not on a skateboard.”
“One fuck up of a home visit and you know all that?” he drawled. “Boy, you are good.”
She pressed her lips together in suppressed fury. It was fun watching her try to keep it together. “Are you familiar with family law, Mr. McBride?” she said.
“I’ve been in trouble with the law, if that’s what you mean.”
“I’m talking about the law that gives social services all the authority they need to do what’s right by your