Inked in Lies (The Fallen Men 5)

My skin rippled with gooseflesh under the light tough, and I shivered slightly as I moved closer to Jake who wrapped a possessive arm around my shoulders.

“Yeah,” I said, then cleared my throat because my low voice was even raspier than normal. “Yeah, maybe.”

“Some Suntastics,” he said, eyes softening as our gazes locked.

Suntastic Yellow Sunflowers.

The blooms we’d talked about the night Ellie died.

My heart seized in my chest, and I hated him, hated him, for playing me so skillfully. Just because he knew me better than anyone didn’t give him the right to use my vulnerabilities against me.

I hiked my chin into the air and looked down at him as he leaned into Jake. “I might wait. Jake doesn’t want me getting fresh ink before the wedding.”

Something ugly flashed across Nova’s pretty face before he could hide it behind his affable expression. “Oh, yeah?” He looked down at his ringed hand and watched the skull flex on the back of it as he spread and fisted his fingers. “Jake doesn’t want a lotta things you seem to like a helluva lot.”

“And Jonathon seems to forget Lila’s got a mind of her own,” Jake countered, and I was relieved he could hold his own. “If she wants more ink, I have no doubt she’ll get it. Maybe it’s the tattoo artist she’s not so hot on anymore…”

Nova’s smirk was mean, sharp as a blade held to Jake’s throat. It reminded me that just because he was beautiful didn’t mean Nova couldn’t be deadly.

“Oh, I’m a hard one to hate,” Nova drawled easily. “Aren’t I, mi girasol?”

My sunflower.

I scowled at him. “Jake doesn’t speak Spanish. Don’t be rude, Nova.”

“Oh.” He pressed his hand to his heart in mock apology. “I woulda thought your future husband would learn the language of your childhood.”

“There isn’t much about my childhood before you worth remembering,” I snapped before I could think.

And then I paled because saying it that way––before you––made it seem too personal, too specific to Nova when I’d meant the Booth family as a whole.

Jake was still beside me, too quiet.

I looked up to find him glaring at Nova, his classically handsome face wrinkled with displeasure.

Across the room at the bar, Boner, Bat, Ransom, and Kodiak had all turned their backs on the cute bartenders to watch our spectacle shamelessly. I glared over at them, but Boner only shot me a thumbs up with a goofy grin.

“Nova,” I said, suddenly tired, so exhausted my bones felt like they weighed a metric ton, and my heart didn’t want to expend the energy it needed to beat. “Just go, would you?”

His energy, always ceaseless like the sun even behind cloud cover, ebbed as he picked up on my mood. He studied me with low lidded eyes for a moment then shifted to lean casually back against the booth.

“Nah,” he said. “I’m thinkin’ if you’re gonna marry this guy, I better get to know him, huh?” He turned his head to snag the gaze of Olivia as she dropped beers off at a table close by. “Liv, darlin’, bring us a couple rounds of whiskey shots, will you?” He turned back to us with a smooth, sly grin. “Let’s do a cheers to the happy fuckin’ couple, yeah? We haven’t had time to celebrate the engagement, and now’s a good a time as any.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but Jake was rising his beer in tandem with Nova, and when he spoke, there was some kind of masculine dare in his voice I wasn’t male enough to decipher.

“To Lila and me,” he agreed with an indisputable edge as the two men clinked glasses.

“To the happy couple,” Nova amended, and unbeknownst to my fiancé beside me, his hand found its way to my bare thigh and squeezed the sensitive spot above my knee.

I jumped slightly, but Nova didn’t relent. Instead, he patted my knee almost condescendingly as if I was a good girl, and I just didn’t know it yet.

“Drink up, Li,” he urged in a throaty purr.

And when Jake nudged me slightly with his elbow to obey, I did as they asked.

I tipped my mostly full glass of pale ale to my lips and drained it dry.

If there was such a thing as liquid courage, I needed it then in fucking spades.

LILA

Two hours later, our tabletop was littered with empty glasses, spent limes collected in a dirty bowl, and salt granules stuck in the gluey stick of spilled beer.

I was laughing too loudly, too much.

But I was drunk, and Jake was drunk enough not to comment on my ‘too much’ nature.

Plus, Nova was there being Nova, so charming that even Jake, who hated him, was being amenable, laughing and cracking smiles for the first time in the many I’d brought him to hang out at Eugene’s Bar.