Badd Motherf*cker: Badd Brothers (17 page)

There was a series of coat hooks at the bottom of the stairs, just inside the stairwell, and hanging from one hook was drab green raincoat with a deep hood. I slipped it on, zipped it up over my purse, and left the bar.

I was tempted to go back to Sebastian’s sailboat, but I wasn’t ready to be found yet—assuming he would even go looking for me.

So…I just walked.
 

And tried desperately to talk myself out of feeling hurt and rejected by Sebastian. It didn’t work, of course, but I had to try. It was better than just wallowing in it, right?
 

I was so fucking stupid.
 

It was true, and I knew it. There wasn’t even any point in arguing with myself over my own stupidity. Stupider yet, I’d known going in that this would happen.
 

Double dumb.

10

Sebastian

I heard the apartment door open and close, and knew Dru had left. Whether for good or just to think, I wasn’t sure, and tried to tell myself I didn’t care.
 

I pulled on a pair of jeans commando and left my room, found Zane lounging on the couch with a beer, watching some action flick on cable TV.
 

There was half a bottle of Jack in the cabinet above the fridge, and despite the hour, I needed it. Not even noon and I was already a mess over that woman. I dug out the bottle, a block of cheese from the fridge and a knife from the block, and sat down beside Zane on the couch, cutting myself a thick slice of Colby Jack and shoving it into my mouth.

Zane watched me twist the top off the Jack, just sort of staring at me oddly. I got the bottle to my lips, tipped it back, and then his hand flashed out and snatched the bottle from me, spilling whiskey all over my bare chest.

“What the fuck, dude?” I demanded.

He snatched the cap from me before I could react, twisted it back on, and tossed the bottle across the room. “The fuck are you doing, dumbass?”
 

“Drinking? Because I’m an adult and I can?” I pushed up off the couch, but Zane’s fist slammed into my chest and knocked me back onto the couch.
 

“No, you’re not. You’re a fucking dumbass. The dumbest dumbass I’ve ever met, and that includes the first-day washouts at SEAL training. You let that girl walk out the door and don’t go after her, you might as well cut off your teeny-weeny little boy balls, because you sure as fuck don’t deserve ’em.” He indicated the bottle of Jack with an angry wave of his hand. “And instead of manning the fuck up, you’re gonna hide in the bottom of a bottle like some wet behind the ear yellow-belly pussy? You’re a pussy. Fuck you, pussy-boy.”
 

I stood up, rage rising inside me. Who the fuck did he think he was?

I stomped across the room, snatched the bottle, and moved toward the kitchen. I’d planned to put it away, but Zane must’ve interpreted my action as intent to drink anyway.
 

He was across the room and in my face in a flash. “I can kick your ass, Bast, and you’d better not fucking forget it.” He took the bottle from me and set it far too gently on the counter, then returned to stand an inch in front of my face, his voice deadly quiet. “Thought Dad raised us better than to pussy out of the hard shit, especially by drinking.”

I let my anger show, then. “Do
not
bring Dad into this, you bastard.”
 

The door opened, and both of us turned to see who it was.

Baxter was standing in the doorway with Brock behind him. Both were damp from the rain and looking a little shocked. Zane and I quarrelled almost as much as Canaan and Corin did, but for us to show true anger at each other was very rare. Mostly we just bickered, since Zane was every bit as alpha male as I was and thought he was the more mature and responsible one most of the time, as if he was the oldest rather than me, which caused us to butt heads over pretty much everything.
 

The problem was Zane usually
was
the more mature and responsible of the two of us. He was by far the most serious of all of us, which was to be expected given his calling in life. He’d seen and done shit I didn’t really want to know too much about, stuff that had scarred him deeply, left permanent marks on his soul. It left him with little tact and no tolerance for bullshit, which meant he’d call me out and not spare my feelings in the process.
 

Like now.

Thus my anger: I knew he was right, and it pissed me off. And I was pissing myself off by being a stupid pussy, and Dru was pissing me off by being her amazing too-good-for-me self and making me feel like a fucking pussy, and the looks Brock and Baxter were giving me were pissing me off, just because they were my little brothers.
 

Needless to say, I was a lot of different kinds of pissed off.

“The fuck are you two knuckleheads looking at?” I snarled.

At six-two, Baxter was between Zane and me in height but closer to Zane in terms of raw bulk. Whereas Zane’s body was that of a warrior—lean, hard, and conditioned to handle the most gruelling of circumstances—Baxter, being a semi-pro football player, was overall thicker. He carried a little more body fat over his muscles, was conditioned for raw power and to absorb the brutal impacts of tackles. His hair was, like most of us Badd brothers, a deep, rich brown, thick and wavy, clipped close on the sides and left long and messy on top. Same dark brown eyes as all of us, but his reflected an easy-going, lackadaisical, party-boy personality.
 

He took his football career intensely seriously, though, and on the field Bax was an absolute monster, faster than his size belied and yet strong enough to break the hardest tackles with ease. I’d seen him shrug off hits from guys that stood six-eight and weighed four hundred pounds. He’d just brush their worst damage off like an irritation, and then take off like a rocket to nail the QB with the crushing force of a runaway semi.
 

Off the field, though, he took just about nothing seriously. He was a natural ladies man, every bit the player I was. He had an easy way of picking up chicks—and an easier way of ditching them. He drank like a fish, trained like a beast, and generally gave off an air of not giving a shit about much of anything except football, women, and booze. Which was true…mostly. He had his demons, like all of us, he just kept his buried deep and didn’t bother trying to sort ’em out, preferring instead to drink and fuck and bench press them away.
 

Baxter sidled over to me, a weird look on his face. He lifted both hands and curled his fingers into claws, pressed them to my chest, and slid them down a few inches.
 

Shit, shit, shit. Forgot about that—should’ve put a shirt on.
 

He moved around behind me then, and let out a chuckle. “Holy hell, brother,” he said, laughing outright, now, “either you tangled with a mountain lion, or you’ve got a prime piece of tail stashed around here somewhere.”
 

Another laugh, and his fingers were tracing what I assumed were Dru’s fingernail marks on my back. From the extent of his touch and the disbelieving laughter from him and the rest of my brothers—all crowded behind me, now—I realized the marks she’d left had to be pretty extensive.
 

“I mean…
damn
, dude,” Baxter said, awe in his voice. “She tore you the fuck
up
.”
 

Zane, of course, had to get his two cents in. “Yeah, and he let her leave, too.”
 

Bax spun me around, gaping at me like the bull-neck moron he was. “You
what
?”
 

“Like any of you assholes know shit about it,” I snapped. “You haven’t met her, and none of you fuckers have ever kicked it with a chick more than once, no more than I have. So I don’t wanna hear dick about it from any of you.”
 

Brock eyed me. “Was she good?”

I sighed and rubbed my face with both hands. “Most fucking incredible thing I’ve ever experienced.”

“Which, of course, means you should bail on her pronto, right?” Brock quirked an eyebrow, a gesture I hated; it was a Dad gesture, that lifted eyebrow.
 

Brock looked the most like Dad. Just slightly shorter than Bax at six-one, he was leaner, rangier, more inclined to spend his time in the cockpit of his stunt plane than in the gym. Same brown hair and eyes, but Brock kept his hair neatly cut and swept off to one side like a GQ model, a few strands left to dangle near his left eye. Being my own brother, I had no problem admitting he was a pretty sonofabitch. It was annoying, honestly. He had a dry sense of humor, a sharp insight, and a tendency to ask the hard questions, usually at the worst times, too. Like now.

I slugged his shoulder. “Shut up, Brock.”
 

He just laughed, and glanced at Zane. “He’s got it bad, doesn’t he?”

Zane jerked a thumb at the Jack. “That was his idea of dealing with it.”
 

Brock clapped me on the back. “Good idea, big brother: drink her away. Makes perfect sense. That’s clearly the most logical way of dealing with those pesky emotions. Works every time!”

“Smartass,” I growled.

I should have known better, because the second the words left my mouth, all three of my brothers spoke in unison:
 

“Better than being a dumbass!”

That was Dad’s favorite phrase to use, and hearing it from them all at once only pissed me off all the more.
 

“Fuck all’a you motherfuckers. I don’t need this shit.” I stalked back to my room, shrugged into a shirt, stuffed my bare feet into my boots, and then pushed past my idiot brothers to the stairs.

“Where’re you going, dickwad?” Baxter asked.

“Hell if I know. Wherever you bastards
aren’t,
” I said, stomping down the stairs.
 

Brock was the one to follow me; I ignored him for the moment, but of all the present brothers, he was the most level-headed and thus likely to actually get through to me. The only other brother I’d ever really listen to when I was pissed off was Lucian, simply because he was the strong silent type. He rarely spoke more than a handful of syllables at a time, but when he did, he tended to cut to the marrow of things with well-chosen, hard-hitting words.

My raincoat was gone, which I assumed—hoped—meant Dru had borrowed it and was out there somewhere.

Fuck it. Just a little rain, not gonna hurt anything.

I was just going for a walk to cool off, I tried to tell myself. I was
not
looking for Dru.
 

“So, where d’you think she went?” Brock asked.

“I don’t know.”
 

“You don’t know? You don’t know where she’d have gone after you pussed out on her?”

“I just met her, Brock. Literally, the night before last. Nothing to puss out on.”

“And yet you’re already this hung up on her?”

“I’m not hung up on her, asshole.” I didn’t have to be looking at him to see the quirked eyebrow. “Put that fuckin’ eyebrow down before I knock it off your pretty boy face.”
 

“Super hung up, then.”
 

“Shut
up
, Brock.”
 

“What’s her name?”

“Dru.”

“She pretty?”

“Stop you in your tracks hot, man.”

He kept pace with me as I stomped up the docks. “And the sex…you said it was the best ever?”

“I think my heart actually stopped for a second, near the end there.”
 

“See, you say your heart stopped, but I think you’re just out of touch with your feelings. You’re mistaking your physical heart stopping for your
metaphysical
heart reaching out for her.”
 

 
I stopped in my tracks and stared at Brock. “Where the
fuck
do you get this shit?”
 

He shrugged. “Books.” A sly glance at me. “Tell me I’m wrong, though.”
 

I knew better than to bullshit this particular brother. “Shut
up
, Brock.”
 

He just laughed. “See? Super hung up on a girl you just met last night. A girl who also happens to be able to stop you in your tracks just by existing, gave you the best sex of your life and clawed you all to shit it was so good…and then you bailed on her. And now you’re wandering the Ketchikan docks refusing to admit you’re looking for her, and I’m guessing you don’t have the first clue about what to say even if you actually found her.”

“Shut the
fuck
UP
, Brock!”
 

Goddammit, but he was right. I hated it when my brothers were smarter than me…which was most of the time.
 

He caught all that, and didn’t even know the circumstances about why she was in Ketchikan in the first place. He’d really rip into me if he knew that.
 

I shuddered at the thought.

And, of course, Brock saw me chewing on things. “What aren’t you saying?”
 

I glared at him. “God fuckin’ dammit, Brock, why can’t you just leave it alone?”
 

“Because you don’t want me to. You’d have tossed me back into the bar if you didn’t actually want to hear what I have to say.”
 

He was right, as usual, so I just grunted. “Asshole. When’d you get so fuckin’ smart?”

“Problem isn’t your intelligence, Sebastian. It’s that you’ve never had a chance to grow up emotionally.”

I stopped in my tracks and whirled on him. “You’d better explain that shit
real
fuckin’ fast, Brock.”

Despite being three inches shorter, thirty pounds lighter, and four years younger, Brock didn’t seem intimidated by my anger. He just clapped me on the back and kept walking along the docks, the water on our left, Ketchikan on our right.
 

“You were what, seventeen when Mom died? That messed all of us up in some way, but I think it fucked you up the most. You had to take her place in the bar, yeah, but Dad was so depressed for so long you had to be a surrogate parent to most of us.”