Brazing (Forged in Fire #2) Read online

  I grudgingly decided against vehicular manslaughter and pulled up next to the drunken version of my childhood crush. One glance at his partner-in-bad-decision-making revealed one of his brothers, although I couldn’t tell which one. They looked too much alike for me to miss the familial similarities, but he had enough brothers that I couldn’t be sure which one was stumbling alongside him.

  “Y’all need a ride?” I called out to the two boys since they had not even acknowledged the bus-sized Buick pulled up alongside them. Sure, this might be the ugliest car in the entire state, but she was my baby and I loved her to pieces!

  “Yes!” the brother screamed at the same time Bridger yelled, “Go away!”

  The brother looked at Bridger and gave him a two-handed shove. Or tried to. He missed connecting his hands to Bridger’s body, but the momentum carried him forward until they smacked heads really hard. I mean… really, really hard. I heard the skulls cracking together from where I sat, behind the wheel with the radio up.

  Now they were both hollering and holding their heads, leaned over at the waist. If they didn’t settle down, the whole neighborhood was bound to wake up and then they’d be arrested for public intoxication.

  I smiled at the idea of Bridger behind bars.

  No, I wasn’t really that cruel.

  I would have been happy if he just got a ticket and had to take a six-hour class.

  When they finally settled down, I threw the car into park and unlocked the car. “Come on, one of you probably has a brain bleed after that. I’ll give you a ride back to your place where you can die in peace.”

  The brother looked up at me and grinned stupidly. The boy was like six sheets to the wind and I knew he would not be this happy tomorrow. I just hoped he didn’t have any important papers to write or homework to struggle through. “Thankssss,” he slurred at me. “We ap-eciate the hops-pitality.”

  I couldn’t help but smile back, he was kind of adorable like this. “My pleasure.”

  “We don’t needs a ride,” Bridger declared mutinously, and it should be said, drunkenly. He stood up and crossed his arms, but then his hand went right back to his head as if pressing his fingers to his temple could take away the pain.

  I really tried not to feel justified that his brother had head-butted the same part of his body I’d been fantasizing about driving my Blue Beauty over, but I failed.

  And I was a confident enough person to be content with my failure.

  “Come on, Twiddle Dee and Twiddle Dum, before campus police hauls you off to student jail for disrupting the peace.”

  The brother pushed into the backseat where he face-planted on my long, leather bench seat and immediately started snoring.

  I looked at Bridger, and with all seriousness, said, “Now, you have to accept the ride because if you don’t tell me where y’all live, I’m going to take him home with me and take advantage of his inebriated moral compass.”

  Bridger looked like he was going to be sick. “Don’t you dare. He doesn’t need some female like you messing with his head.”

  “Some female like me? You don’t even know me!” Although, to be honest, I was really hoping he would interject right now and say that he did, in fact, know me. With every ounce of over-exaggerated enthusiasm I could muster, I went on, “I could be the best thing that ever happened to him! This could be a night that he remembers, er, kind of remembers for the rest of his life! Obviously he is just waiting for me to rock his unconscious world!”

  “Oh,” he said dryly. “You’re joking.”

  “About every part except that he truly is unconscious and I truly don’t know where you live.”

  “Fine,” he mumbled and then crawled into the front passenger’s seat. Literally, he crawled in. The Blue Beauty was big enough for even his huge frame to spread out in.

  He sat down and slapped at the seatbelt for a minute before successfully latching it in place. He looked around the car, looked at me strangely and then looked around the car again.

  “There’s something really familiar about…”

  “Yes?” This was it! He was going to remember me!

  “This car.” He slapped the dash with drunken precision. “I can’t put my finger on it, but I feel like I know this car.”

  I snorted. He felt like he knew the car. Well, there was the romantic gesture I had waited my whole life for.

  “How about your address? Do you feel like you know your address?”

  “Seriously,” he mused. “A man doesn’t forget this color blue. Like Jeff Daniel’s suit in Dumb and Dumber. Makes you want to get dressed in a top hat and ride a Moped to Colorado.”

  “Oh, good lord.” He knew the car because it belonged to my grandmother for most of his life. And my grandmother was the preacher’s wife in his small town. Of course, he knew this car. Everybody in that town knew this car. She’d given it to me when I’d gone to college and my granddaddy had taken her license away on the grounds that she was ruining his reputation with her road rage. But I wasn’t going to give him hints about my identity. If this boy couldn’t remember me, his loss. I would just chalk this good deed up to my daily “Pay it Forward” campaign and move on with my life.

  I pulled up in front of his dorm, located on the opposite side of campus from mine and turned off the engine.

  “Darlin’ don’t bother. This is not the start of a beautiful friendship. This was a ride home.” He didn’t even wait for me to reply. He just jumped out of the car and went to collect his brother from the backseat. “You should get better at taking hints.”

  “And you should get better at saying ‘Thank you.’” If he was going to be snippy, so was I.

  I ignored his warning and exited the car. I opened the opposite door from Bridger and started pushing on his brother’s shoulders. Bridger wasn’t the only one in a hurry to end this evening.

  The sooner I left the Wright brothers behind, the sooner I could write Dr. Gunthry a letter and let her know that her middle school counseling sessions, while at the time had felt stupid and pointless, had proved her right on one very important thing: He might have made me feel stupid for years of my childhood, but I was definitely the one getting the last laugh.

  Being the least idiotic of the trio, when I pushed on the passed-out Wright brother, he actually moved. Bridger had been tugging on his legs, but he could barely stand on his own. So when the brother slid successfully out of the backseat, he hit Bridger like a bowling ball at the end of the lane and the two of them when down as if I’d released a perfectly-aimed ten-pounder.

  Strike!

  I slammed the door shut and ran around to the other side of Blue Beauty. “Are you alright?”

  The brother that had been knocked-out was wide awake now and the two of them were trying to untangle themselves with limbs that were slow-moving and unresponsive. I watched for several minutes, debating how morally corrupt it would be to take a video of this with my cell phone and post it all over the internet.

  Finally, they were able to stand up and brush themselves off. Leaning on each other, they made their way to the key-carded front door. Bridger pulled out a set of keys and his keycard and let his brother in before turning around to reluctantly acknowledge me.

  “You’re right,” he said simply and leaned against the open glass door for support.

  I took a step toward him. It was that damn natural magnetism again. I couldn’t help but be drawn to him, even when he had previously proven to be a giant pain in the ass.

  “About what?” I asked as sweetly as I could. I wasn’t always the southern belle my mother had hoped to raise. Actually, I was more like Esmerelda from The Hunchback of Notre Dame transplanted into the heart of the South with the kind of red hair that didn’t belong on any living creature. I tried to shove a chunk of it behind my ear in a move that I hoped was both sexy and sophisticated. The hair bounced back as if my ear was some kind of trampoline and fell in front of my face again.

  “I should say thank you,” he told me
honestly.

  Our gazes locked at that moment and the sharp emerald color cut straight through me. He was a boy. That color of green shouldn’t be wasted on him and those long, thick lashes should make him look feminine. But both of those features enhanced his rugged good looks and heady masculinity.

  My childhood crush was all man these days and I swallowed from a sudden stirring of nerves.

  He could keep me here with the way he was looking at me. I could stand here forever if he didn’t blink.

  “You should thank me,” I agreed.

  He flinched at my words or maybe at my closeness. I hadn’t realized I’d taken another step toward him. We were only a couple inches apart by now and I could smell his wild night on the autumn breeze; beer, sweat and something underneath… something I wanted to inhale until my eyes rolled into the back of my head.

  He opened his mouth like he was going to respond but then closed it when I took one last step into him. He couldn’t get a word out with my body brushing against his and my total lack of concern for his personal space.

  This boy had messed with me for years, I couldn’t help the sick thrill that came with the success of a little bit of payback.

  Besides, I wanted him to remember me. I put my face right in front of his and dared him not to get it.

  “Th-thank you,” he finally said with eyes narrowed and a tight jaw.

  I lifted my fingers and gently smoothed them over the angry bump on his head from where his brother ran into him. “You should put some ice on that before you go to bed.” He nodded slowly. My smile grew and my fingers pushed into his bump aggressively, just enough so that he winced a little, but I knew that he would remember this moment tomorrow. “You’ll want to thank me for that, too.”

  “Th-”

  I slid my hands from his bump to his lips, pressing my fingertips against their fullness. “Not yet,” I told him. “You’re not allowed to thank me for that until you remember my name.”

  I gave him one last flirty smile and then turned around and flounced off. I could feel his eyes burning into my back the entire walk, but I refused to turn around and look at him again.

  I did steal one more glance once I’d restarted the engine and clicked my seatbelt into place. He was still glued to that open door, staring at me like a codfish with his mouth open so wide. I waved at his brother you had his loopy face plastered against the glass of the side panel, and he waved back shooting me an even sillier grin.

  I drove away with my own version of happiness spread out across my face, but I could not figure it out.

  Bridger Wright was not someone I wanted to see again. Not ever. Whether he remembered my name or not, I hoped he kept his grumpy attitude and all-grown-up body far away from me.

  My days of panting after him just so he could make me feel like crap were over.

  I was grown up, too. And happy. And smart. And my hair was less orange. And my freckles were less bright.

  I was enjoying the quintessential college experience. Well, mostly. With just that one small hiccup. The point was, I wasn’t going to let him affect it in any way.

  And that would be true, just as soon as I could stop smiling.

  For now, I’d go back to my dorm and tell Carter the hilariously-stupid story Bridger had given me after all.

  Chapter Three

  Bridger

  I was probably the only person on the planet who went through this—but I completely panicked when I woke up after drinking and my entire mouth felt like it had been dried out with a blow dryer. My damned tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth. I finagled my jaw this way and that and pried my tongue down from where it was Velcro-ed, trying to get some kind of liquid in there so I don’t feel like I’ve swallowed a case of cotton balls—or sand paper.

  Even opening my eyes hurt. Eyeballs weren’t supposed to hurt. They just sat there in their little eye socket cubbies, tethered by tentacles to your brain. Maybe it was residual brain pain.

  Maybe I’m still a little drunk.

  It had been a long time since I was that drunk. All I remember is dragging West somewhere and then being picked up by a red haired girl in a big ass blue car. I thought someone with some sense had already gathered those sky colored monster-mobiles and sent them to car heaven—those that weren’t currently being driven by grandmothers and a lone college girl named…

  What the hell was her name?

  What the hell was my name?

  “Bridger,” a groan resounds from the other side of the room. I didn’t dare open my eyes. I didn’t have to. It was West and if I felt like this, then he must really feel like shit.

  Bridger, that was my name.

  I grunted—it was the only response I could manage in this state.

  “…urch.” He moaned out and even his baritone voice made my temples churn a new level of pain. There was one of two things he could be saying and I didn’t really like the idea of either one. The first of which could be lurch. I was down with lurching. In fact, it was really the main thought on my stomach’s mind. Do stomachs have minds—no.

  And I knew that if my brother had any sense at all he wouldn’t be saying the other word. That word was like a curse word to me most of the time. That was where I met Jesse. And Jesse was trouble. So now I associated everything trouble with that place.

  Shit, I was still thinking about Jesse. Hangovers sucked.

  Noises of drawers opening and shutting made the walls of my head vibrate, sending waves of incurable pain to my temples. Then the closet sliding door screeched against the railings above and below it—I thought maybe just the sound had ripped the skin off of my face. Then West started saying something again as he made more noises. It sounded like he was brushing his teeth, using my ears as the sink.

  “What?” I grumbled out. My chin hit a hard, cold surface as I bellowed out the syllable. That’s when I realized I was on the floor—somewhere—on my stomach. I flopped myself around until my chin was in the air and something wet was on my heels.

  I think my feet are in the shower.

  Or I pissed on my feet.

  Either was a good possibility.

  But I was too lazy to even get up and see what it was.

  “Church!” West yelled and the word and all its nefarious meanings echoed with knives through my aching head. Surely our level of stupidity from the night before warranted a free pass from the religious routine.

  “No!” I yelled back, fully intending to hurt him the way he’d hurt me. But instead my own yelling made me grab my head and curl up into the fetal position.

  “Yes!” He was now in the room with me—wherever we were. It smelled like West’s dirty socks, which to me, meant we were back in our dorm room.

  “Sit up,” he told me and it took me a full ten minutes to get my head off the floor. He handed me a Gatorade and some white pills and stood there while I downed the whole thing. West didn’t even look like he’d been talking to Audrey Hepburn in the bushes all night. There wasn’t even a speck of dirt in his hair or teeth from him being ass up in a flower bed. Maybe I dreamed that. How did my little brother manage to keep up appearances so well?

  Asshole.

  I stripped right there and held onto doors and every willing piece of furniture until I reached the shower. The cold water brought me from cloudy to aware in just a few seconds. I soaped up, grouching the whole time about how that body wash that’s supposed to wake you up really just makes you feel like you’ve accidentally put Icy Hot on your balls.

  But I supposed Icy Hot on your balls would make anyone wake up.

  Quickly.

  “Ten minutes,” West announced.

  “What are you an effing cuckoo clock?”

  “Nine minutes and fifty-six seconds,” he yelled right outside the shower door.

  Asshole.

  Fumbling and having to do everything twice, I finally got some semi-decent clothes on appropriate for church. We went to a small church on campus run by a chaplain. It wasn’t even a church
building. It was simply a lecture hall used on Sundays for sermons and worshippers. It was a contemporary service, nothing like the ones in my hometown. The pastor in my town was known as Preacher. I’m sure he had a real name, but I couldn’t think of it. He only answered to Preacher anyway.

  The walk to the lecture hall did me good. West was smart enough to keep his trap shut on the way. I was a slow waker anyway. I liked to wake up, check my emails, look over notes from the day before, eat a few slices of leftover pizza and find coffee—all before speaking a single word. It was my way. I never understood the need for people to talk in the morning. It’s not necessary unless someone wakes up in an emergency situation—like they have an appendage missing—or the zombies are coming.

  If it were not either one of those, then they should keep their pie hole zipped.

  The other thing I hated more than talking in the morning?

  Being late.

  This day had gone from hussy to whore in no time.

  We had to sit in the second row all the way down in the front of the lecture hall. Those were the only seats left in the place.

  All I could think about was homework. It ruled my world. That was my curse for trying to be a business major. I’d pursued the same pipe dream that Stockton had, only to find that of late—I hated it. And since Stockton had now formed his own company, the temptation to quit school and pursue what I was really good at was so close I could taste it. But I was determined to at least finish out the semester.

  Stockton was trained by my father as a blacksmith, focused on the bigger, some would say manlier, projects—gates, machetes, knives.

  I was equally trained in those things, but our father also trained me in the little things.

  The silversmithing side of what he did.

  While I did most of my training under my own father, while Stockton was beating down iron with his hammer, I was tinkering with chainmail and delicate items.