Page 15 of Badd Ass
“Up for a short hike?” I asked her.
“In the dark?” She asked, looking up from her phone; she was texting someone it looked like, probably checking in with her friend so someone knew where she was. Smart girl.
“Sure,” I said. “I grew up here, and I’ve been up this trail a zillion times. Just…trust me, yeah?”
She blinked for a moment, and then shrugged, extending her hand to me. “If you turn out to be a serial killer, I’ll be really pissed.”
I just laughed. “The only thing that’s gonna get murdered is your pussy, Mara.”
She slapped my shoulder. “Yeah, I’d try and keep that in check if I were you, Rambo.”
“You mean that line doesn’t make you horny?” I asked, leading her toward the stairs.
“Shockingly, no.”
“Huh. And here I thought it’d have you throwing your panties at me.” I grabbed her hand in mine and led her up the stairs, shining the light on the treads ahead of us.
She stopped and hooked a thumb in the waist of her jeans—another pair so skintight they may as well have been leggings—tugging so she could pretend to peer down into her pants. “Um…nope. Still there.”
“Damn, it worked for Bax. I’ll have to ask him what I did wrong.”
“You take pick up advice from your brothers?”
I laughed. “From Bax?” I snickered. “He’s the one you pulled the glass out of at the wedding.”
She shoved me back into a walk and we headed up the stairs. “The one who drained an entire bottle of Jameson to impress the girls?”
“That’s the one.”
“Hmmm, maybe don’t take pick-up advice from him, if that’s his tactic.”
There were quite a few stairs so I went slow, unsure how fast she’d be able to take them. I waited until we were at the top to answer.
“Bax is a great guy. He’s a bit rough around the edges, I’ll admit, but he’s got a great heart. And you’d be surprised how charming the guy is, when he wants to be.”
“Sounds like you’re pretty close,” she said.
The forest was close and damp, my flashlight a white spear illuminating a tiny swath of the path ahead of us. Mara, like I’d hoped she would, pressed close against my side, staring around us at the forest as if worried a bear might amble out of the woods at any moment. On other hiking trails further away from downtown Ketchikan, that’d be a legitimate concern, but here? Highly unlikely. No point worrying her with that, though. I just enjoyed the feel of her soft curves pressed up against my side as we picked our way along the narrow trail.
“Eh, we’re getting there,” I said. “I joined the Navy right out of high school and made the SEAL team not long after. Didn’t get a lot of leave time, so I haven’t seen my brothers a whole lot, until recently.”
“Did you, like, quit the SEALs, or what?”
I could tell she wasn’t sure how to ask what she really meant. “I had to retire, for family reasons.”
“Somebody got sick?”
“Sort of,” I said. “My dad died. Mom’s been gone for a good ten years, but Dad’s death was a surprise. He…ah, he left a bit of an odd will. He left us all a bit of money, but the only way we can get it is if all eight of us brothers came home. Bast—Sebastian, the guy that got married, the oldest—he was already here. He never left, but the rest of us were sort of scattered to the four corners of the earth. And Dad wanted us back together, I guess. So the stipulation in his will was that we’d get the money if we moved back to Ketchikan and help Bast run the bar. We have to stay here for a minimum of a year and put in full-time working hours at the bar.”
“I’m sorry to hear about your parents.”
I shrugged, unsure how to respond. I was still dealing with Dad’s death in some ways, and wasn’t sure how I felt most of the time. “Yeah, thanks.”
“So, tell me about the rest of your brothers.”
I glanced at her as we continued walking. She’d bolted the second she woken up this morning, and hadn’t seemed interested in sticking around for so much as a how do you do. Now she wanted to know about me and my brothers? My spidey-senses were tingling.
“Well, Sebastian is the oldest. He’s the original player of us all. He’s been working that bar since he was a teenager. I mean, we all worked the bar as kids, because it was a family business, but Sebastian just took to it naturally. When Mom died, it put a lot of the work on Bast’s shoulders. Dad…didn’t deal well with Mom’s passing. He sort of died inside, I think, and never really recovered. Bast took over pretty much everything after that.” I laughed, thinking of Bast’s many, many conquests in that bar. “The guy is the smoothest motherfucker on the planet. Tourist chicks just threw themselves at him by the boatload—literally, because of the cruise ships.”