Parallel Desire Read Free Page B

ridiculous, so stop it already."
    "He came in here looking for a man . You don't come in our bar, in our town, pulling shit like that." His overbite seemed to get worse, his mouth turning down at its edges until bloody spittle shot toward her. "It just don't go over, not around here."
    Shelby thought fast. "He's looking for his missing twin brother." She worked her face into a mask of semi grief, weaving her hands together in front of her chest as if she might break into prayer at any moment. "Gone so many months now. So very many." She shook her head wistfully, raking her eyes over Jake meaningfully. "It's terrible when someone you care about vanishes without a word."
    The attacker tugged his T-shirt down over a beer belly that protruded like a swollen upper lip. "I don't care who the hell he's looking for, not after what he called me. Y'all heard it." Thrusting his chest out and preening like a flkiisii , the fool gestured at his pals, who'd closed a small perimeter around her and Jake.
    Uh-oh. Warning bells chimed like midday mess call inside her mind.
    "Yeah? What did that boy say, now?"
    "Called me. Something I can't repeat, using that funny language of his." The surly redneck pointed his forefinger at her, wielding it like the stubby barrel of a sawed-off shotgun. "Couldn't pronounce it."
    "Called him a slav'nrksai. " Jake struggled to sit up, temporarily bobbing out of his drunken haze.
    Just freaking brilliant. Here the guy was lost in South Texas, in some after-hours honky-tonk, calling this dude by a particularly obscene Refarian expleti ve. Perfect. Perfectly perfect.
    "Jakob Tierny," she announced in her loudest, most annoyed voice. "You don't have a fuck's clue what you're doing, now, do ya, boy?"
    Closing one drunken, long-lashed green eye, Jake stared up at her with the other, wrestling to untangle his legs. "I'm all right." His voice was a slur.
    "Yeah—and that's why I told you that you needed a guide here in Texas." She gestured at his assailant, who looked ready to pounce on Jake again without the slightest provocation. "I did warn you about needing some qualified help."
    More than four months had passed since last December, when Jake had hauled ass out of their compound—without her offered guidance. And, man, had she ever offered it, practically insisting that he cart her along with him on this crazy-assed odyssey of his. But the stubborn fool had snuck off base in the middle of the night, leaving her with a packed bag—and a few shattered fantasies about what might have happened between them on the open road. She'd realized it wasn't personal, not for a loner like Tierny, and finally managed to put the whole dang thing out of her mind.
    Besides, from the look of things right now, he hadn't stopped grieving the loss of Hope Harper, not for one day since his hasty departure. He might have come down this way with the thinly veiled excuse that he was searching for the real Jake Tierny, in order to stop him from killing Hope a second time, but it was more than obvious that he was lost in a haze of drunken grief. He couldn't be with Hope, so chasing Tierny was obviously the next best thing.
    Knowing that Jake was still in love with Hope had made it obvious she should just forget him completely. That was, until their commander had asked her to go after him. She'd do anything her king requested, including following Tierny into the deepest bowels of Texas, and so she complied. Her mandate was to bring Jake back to their camp, and now she was here to follow through. She'd die before disobeying Jared Bennett. And she might die, actually, right here in this hellhole of a dive, if she couldn't disentangle Tierny from Redneck Man in five seconds flat. In fact, it sure looked like dying was the major part of Jake's plan.
    "So, Bruiser, you drive a truck?" she called over her shoulder, lifting her shirtsleeve to Jake's bloodied cheek. " You freak ," she added under her breath, scowling down at her crumpled