Spite Club (Mason Brothers 1)

Another weird question, but suddenly I was. I really fucking was. It was like he was hypnotizing me. I shouldn’t do this, not even a little. I should tell him to take a hike.

I should go home and get back in bed and pull up the covers and handle this like an adult. I should get some sleep so I’d be ready for work in a few hours. I should be rational and work through it and partake in self-care and do whatever you were supposed to do when your boyfriend cheated on you. I should work on getting past this and healing. I should get through this and come out better and stronger than before. Giving in to base instincts was not going to help with any of that.

I looked at Nick. It was two in the morning. I was pissed. And he was ridiculously hot.

Bad idea, Evie.

Shut up, Old Evie said.

“I’m starving,” I told Nick.

He nodded back. It was like he understood everything.

“Me too,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Two

Evie

His full name, it turned out, was Nick Mason. Half an hour later we sat in an all-night diner, ordering food from the pasty waitress. Millwood was a trucker’s town, a factory worker’s town—or it had been until the gentrifying started—and all-night places weren’t all that rare here. Even now, a trucker sat at a table nursing a cup of coffee, and another one wolfed down a piece of pie before hitting the road again. Outside, the rain had turned into wet mist that beaded in your hair and on your clothes without really turning into rain again.

The waitress didn’t hand us any menus, so I asked her, “What is the kitchen making right now?”

She shrugged. “Grilled cheese sandwich. Three bucks.”

My stomach growled so loud we all heard it.

“Done,” Nick said, and the waitress walked away.

I stared at the man across the booth from me. In keeping with the surreal nature of tonight, he was good-looking even in the fluorescent light of a diner at two a.m. Gray eyes with short dark lashes, high cheekbones, a sculpted mouth. Life was very fucking unfair. He wasn’t even trying to look that good. His hair was damp and mussed, his stubble an exact shade of hangover, and there was a hole just below the collar of his T-shirt. He looked like a model, if a model had rolled off the back of a truck or woken up in the drunk tank—or both. He stuck the straw in his ice water in the corner of his mouth and watched me back.

“Well, that was a scene,” I commented.

“Sorry,” he said. “I had to do it.”

I traced my finger down the side of my water glass. “How did you find me?” I asked. “I mean, you said how you found Josh. But how did you find me?”

“The internet.” He put down his water. “It wasn’t advanced detective work. I’m not that smart.”

I nodded. I was probably on Josh’s Facebook page, from the times he’d posted when we went out for dinner or with friends. Which we would never do again. “I’m sort of in shock,” I said. “I didn’t, um. I didn’t know. At all.”

“No?” Nick said. “I did. That is, I knew she was fucking someone. I didn’t know who.”

Fucking someone. So much coarser than cheating, but it meant the same thing. “Things were going so well,” I said. It hit me again, that punch in the gut of hurt. “I thought they were. But I guess not.” I closed my eyes as yet another detail occurred to me. “I have to work at the bank with him. Oh my god, I’m so humiliated.”

“You love him?” Nick asked.

I opened my eyes again and looked at him. “What? I don’t—I mean, I hadn’t really… It wasn’t…” Love? Had I even asked myself that? And why was I talking about it with this guy? “Do you always ask personal questions?”

“Just wondering if you’re going to cry, that’s all. If you do, I might bail.” He put down his water glass. “You want to talk about the weather right now, Evie?” he said. “For real?”

Intense. That was what he was. Intense. No one who worked at the bank—and I mean no one—was intense. Even Old Evie, in her wild days, hadn’t met a guy like this. If you were going to spill your guts to someone, it may as well be a gorgeous stranger in the middle of the night. But I didn’t say any more. Instead I said, “How long has it been going on?”

“A week? Two?” Nick picked up his spoon and spun it deftly over his fingers, then put it down again. “I could tell something was up. Jesus Christ, my girlfriend fucked a bank guy.” He rolled his eyes.

“Hey—I dated him,” I said, stung. “And I’m a bank… person. What does Miss Bare-Assed Gina do?”

“She’s a massage therapist.”