Brazing (Forged in Fire #2) Read Free Page A

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