Authors: Georgia Cates
Tags: #romance, #adult contemporary, #m leighton, #samantha young, #georgia cates, #down to you, #on dublin street, #beauty from pain, #beauty series, #up to me
Beauty from Pain (43 page)
“I finished that back
piece that I’ve been working on since July. It turned
out better than I thought and the dude is talking about doing the
front. I’ll take it, because he’s a fat tipper.”
”Nice.” I was juggling the
phone and the coffee, trying to open the door to the car when a
female voice stopped me in my tracks.
“Hey,” I looked over my
shoulder and the brunette was standing a car over with a smile on
her face. “I really like your tattoos.”
jumped back and nearly spilled scalding hot coffee all down my
crotch as Shaw shoved the door open from the inside.
“Thanks.” If we were
closer to home and Shaw wasn’t already putting the car in reverse I
probably would have taken a second to ask the girl for her
number. Shaw shot me a look of contempt that I promptly
ignored and went back to my conversation with Nash. “Rome is
home, he got in an accident and Shaw said he’s got a few weeks of
R&R coming to him. I guess that’s why mom was blowing my
phone up all week.”
“Kick ass. Ask him
if he wants to roll with us for a few days, I miss that surly
bastard.”
and my head finally started to calm down. “That’s the
plan. I’ll hit you up on my way home and let you know what
the story is.”
I flicked my thumb across
the screen to end the call and settled back into the seat.
Shaw glowered angrily at me and I swore her eyes glowed.
Really, I have never seen anything that green, anywhere else in
nature and when she gets mad they were just
otherworldly.
“Your mom called while you
were busy flirting. She’s mad that we’re late.”
black nectar of the gods and started tapping out a beat on my knee
with my free hand. I was always kind of a fidgety guy and the
closer we got to my parent’s house, the worse it usually got.
Brunch was always stilted and forced. I couldn’t figure out why
they insisted on going through with it every single week and
couldn’t figure out why Shaw enabled the farce, but I went every
week even when I knew nothing would ever change.
“She’s mad that you’re
late. We both know she could care less if I’m there or
not.” My fingers moved faster and faster as she wheeled the
car into a gated community and passed rows and rows of cookie
cutter mini mansions that were built back into the
mountains.
“That’s not true and you
know it, Rule. I do not suffer through these car rides every
weekend, subject myself to the delight of your morning after
nastiness because your parents want me to have eggs and pancakes
every Sunday. I do it because they want to see you, want to
try and have a relationship with you no matter how many times you
hurt them or push them away. I owe it to your parents, and
more importantly, I owe it to Remy to try and make you act right
even though lord knows that’s almost a full time job.”
the blinding pain that always came when someone mentioned Remy’s
name barreled through my chest. My fingers involuntarily
opened and closed around the coffee cup and I whipped my head
around to glare at her.
“Remy wouldn’t be all over
my ass to try and be something to them I’m not. I was never
good enough for them, and never will be. He understood that
better than anyone and worked overtime to try and be everything to
them I never could be.”
car to a stop in the driveway behind my dad’s SUV. “The only
difference between you and Remy is that he let people love him, and
you,” she yanked open the driver’s door and glared at me across the
space that separated us. “You have always been determined to
make everyone that cares about you prove it beyond the shadow of a
doubt. You’ve never wanted to be easy to love, Rule, and you
make damn sure that nobody can ever forget it.” She slammed
the door with enough force that it rattled my back teeth and made
my head start to throb again.
It had been three
years. Three lonely, three empty, three sorrow filled years
since the Archer brothers went from a trifecta to a duo. I
was close to Rome, he was awesome and had always been my role model
when it came to being a badass, but Remy was my other half, both
figuratively and literally. He was my identical twin, the
light to my dark, the easy to my hard, the joy to my angst, the
perfect to my oh-so-totally fucked up, and without him I was only
half the person I would ever be. It has been three years
since I called him in the middle of the night to come pick me up
from some lame ass party because I was too drunk to drive.
It’s been three years since he had left the apartment we shared to
come get me, with zero questions asked, because that’s just what he
did.
It’s been three years
since he lost control of his car on a rainy and slick I-25 and
slammed into the back of a semi-truck going well over eighty.
It has been three years since we had put my twin in the ground and
my mother had looked at me with tears in her eyes and stated point
blank, “It should have been you,” as they lowered Remy into the
ground. It’s been three years and his name alone was enough
to drop me to my knees, especially coming from the one person in
the world Remy had loved as much as he loved me.
Remy was everything I
wasn’t–clean cut, well dressed, and interested in getting an
education and building a secure future. The only person on
the planet that was good enough and classy enough to match all the
magnificence that he possessed was Shaw Landon. The two of
them had been inseparable since the first time he brought her home
when she was fourteen and trying to escape the fortress of the
Landon compound. He insisted they were just friends, that he
loved Shaw like a sister, that he just wanted to protect her from
her awful, sterile family but the way he was with her was full of
reverence and care. I knew he loved her and since Remy could
do no wrong, Shaw had quickly become an honorary member of my
family. As much as it galled me she was the only one that really,
truly understood the depth of my pain when it came to losing
him.
I had to take a few extra
minutes to get my feet back under me so I sucked back the rest of
the coffee and shoved open the door. I wasn’t surprised to
see a tall figure coming around the SUV as I labored out of the
sports car. My brother was an inch or so taller than me and
built more along the lines of a warrior. His dark brown hair
was buzzed in a typical military cut and his pale blue eyes, the
same exact icy shade as mine, looked tired as he forced a smile at
me. I let out a whistle because his left arm was in a cast
and sling, he had a walking boot on one foot and there was a nasty
line of black stiches running through one of his eyebrows and
across the top of his forehead. The weed whacker that had
attacked my hair had clearly gotten a good shot at my big bro
too.
“Looking good,
solider.”
one armed hug and I winced for him when I felt the taped up side of
his body clearly indicating some busted or bruised ribs. “I
look about as good as I feel. You look like a clown getting
out of that car.”
“I look like a clown no
matter what when I’m around that girl.” He barked out a laugh
and rubbed a rough hand through my spiky hair.
“You and Shaw are still
acting like mortal enemies?”
“More like uneasy
acquaintances. She’s just as prissy and judgmental as always.
Why didn’t you call or email me that you were hurt? I had to
hear it from her on the way over.”
slowly make our way towards the house. It upset me to see how
deliberate he was moving and I wondered if there was more serious
damage done than the visible marks I could see.
“I was unconscious after
the Hummer flipped; we drove over an IED and it was bad. I
was in the hospital for a week with a scrambled noggin, and when I
woke up they had to do surgery on my shoulder so I was all drugged
up. I called mom and figured she would let you know what the
deal was, but I heard that, as usual, you were unavailable when she
called.”
reached out a hand to steady him as he faltered a little on the
stairs to the front door. ”I was busy.”
“You’re
stubborn.”
“Not too stubborn, I’m
here aren’t I? I didn’t even know you were home until, like,
fifteen minutes ago.”
“The only reason you’re
here is because that little girl in there is bound and determined
to keep this family together regardless if we’re her own or
not. You go in there and play nice; otherwise, I’ll kick your
ass broken arm and all.”
words and followed my battered sibling into the house.
Sundays really were my least favorite day.
Chapter 2
Shaw
door with a soft click and turned the lock. I collapsed
against the sink and ran shaking hands over my face. It was
getting harder and harder each and every Sunday to be Rule’s
chaperone to these family gatherings. I already felt like I
was getting an ulcer and if I had to walk in on him and one of his
disgusting bar bimbos again I wasn’t sure I was going to make it
out of his apartment without committing homicide. I turned
around to splash some cold water on my face and lifted the heavy
fall of blond hair off my neck. I needed to pull it together
because the last thing I wanted was for Margot or Dale to notice
something was off and even drugged up and in pain Rome was one of
the most observant people I had ever met. He didn’t miss a
thing when it came to either of his younger brothers and me by
association since I was technically lumped into the category of
surrogate little sister.
It was getting harder and
harder to spend time around Rule and not just because looking at
him reminded me of everything that I no longer had–which was the
problem Margot and Dale struggled with, not that the insensitive
ass had any empathy for his parents. My struggle came with
the fact that Rule was complicated–he was brash, mouthy, careless,
thoughtless, often cranky, and generally and insufferable pain in
the ass. But when he chose to be, he was charming and funny,
artistically brilliant, and more often than not, the most
interesting person in the room. I have been head over heels
in love with both sides of him since I was fourteen years
old. Of course I had loved Remy, loved him like a brother,
like the best friend and consummate protector he had been, but I
loved Rule like it was my mission in life. I loved him like it was
inevitable, like no matter how many times I was shown what an awful
idea it was, what a bad match we were, what a callous asshole he
could be I couldn’t shake it. So each and every time I had to
have the fact that he didn’t even think of me as more than a car
pool driver shoved in my face it tore a little bit more of my
battered heart apart.
My own family was such a
mess there was no way I would be half the person I was today
without all the Archers had done for me. Remy had taken me
under his wing when I was a friendless and lonely pre-teen. Rome
had threatened to beat up the first boy that made me cry because he
didn’t like me back. Margot had taken me shopping for homecoming
and prom dresses when my own mother was too busy with her new
husband to care. Dale had taken me to Denver University and
Colorado University-Boulder and helped whittle down the choices
logically and rationally when it came to picking a college. And
Rule, well Rule was a constant reminder that money didn’t get you
everything you wanted and that no matter how perfect I tried to be,
how hard I worked at being everything to everyone that it
still wasn’t enough.
I blew out a breath that
I felt like I had been holding for over an hour and took a piece of
Kleenex to wipe away the black smudges from under my eyes. If
I didn’t get down the dining room fast Margot was bound to come
looking for me and I didn’t have a reasonable excuse as to why I
was currently freaking out in the bathroom. I fished a hair
tie out of my pocket and pulled my hair into a low ponytail,
slicked on a sheer coat of gloss, and gave myself a silent pep
talk–reminding myself that I had done this a million other Sundays
and that this one was no different. Just as I was stepping
into the hall my phone rang and I had to struggle to keep back a
groan when I saw that it was Gabe calling again. I sent the
call to voicemail and wondered for the hundredth time in the last
month why I had ever wasted a second of my time on his pompous
ass. He was overly entitled, overly grabby, overly
superficial and more interested in my last name and the fact that
my parents were loaded than he was in me.
I wasn’t even interested
in dating him, wasn’t interested in dating anyone, but my parents
had forced my hand. As usual, under their pressure, I folded and
ended up spending more time with him than I wanted to. I
managed to tolerate him for a lot longer than I thought I would be
able to. After all, Gabe was way more interested in himself than in
me. It wasn’t until he had started pushing for sex–making me
uncomfortable by grabbing and touching things I didn’t want his
hands anywhere near–that I cut the cord. Unfortunately,
neither he nor my parents seem to get the message and I had been
inundated with calls, texts and emails for the last two
weeks. Gabe was easy enough to dodge–my mother not so
much.