CHAPTER 5
A male bee’s testicles explode during sex, killing him. That means if you see a bee flying around, he’s a virgin. Fucking nerd.
-Text from Laric to Bruno
BRUNO
I had a headache.
It was about five-foot-three, a hundred and twenty pounds, and had hips that I’d once daydreamed about wrapping my hands around.
Now, seeing her anywhere was like an ice pick to the temporal lobe.
“Please can we talk?” Briana begged.
I sighed. “Briana. Seriously. There is nothing to talk about.”
“But…” Briana started, but she was interrupted when Belle, who I hadn’t seen near me until now, came out of the clothes rack to my right and walked right up to me with a package of underwear in her hand.
“I couldn’t remember if you wanted boxer briefs or tighty-whities.” Belle held up a package right in front of my face and got so close to me that she placed herself between me and Briana, who’d just showed up and placed her body in my personal space. “What about these? Too big? Too small?”
I looked at the package of black ‘tighty-whities’ and said, “Those are technically black, so you can’t call them tighty-whities. They’re probably more appropriately called briefs.”
She pulled back and turned the package around, confirming my words.
“You’re right.” She paused. “Damn.”
I grinned and hooked my hand around her hip, taking advantage of our closeness to pull her closer to me.
Her pupils dilated, and the confidence in her demeanor went from one hundred percent to almost nil in a matter of seconds.
She blinked, her eyes going to my hand, and I wondered if I should remove it.
But then Briana hissed. “Didn’t take you long to move on, did it?”
Belle turned, then placed her delectable ass against my dick, and I had to will my body to stay under control.
I dropped my hand and fisted it at my side just as Belle said, “Extreme circumstances brought us together.”
“It’s only been a day.” Briana paused. “This has been going on a lot longer than a day if you’re already buying him underwear.”
Briana did have a point.
“Umm,” a hesitant voice said from somewhere beside us. “I’m really sorry to do this, but your yelling is disrupting other customers. We’re going to have to ask you to take it outside.”
I jerked my chin in the direction of the doors. “Go on ahead, Briana. I have a few things left to get.”
Briana, pissed as hell now and obviously thinking that this was way more than it was thanks to Belle’s words, stomped off indignantly.
Belle turned back around and took a giant step backward.
Yeah, she was uncomfortable with my touch.
Shit.
Had something happened to her?
I knew that one of the first times that I remembered seeing her was when we were in middle school—at the time, I’d been a freshman and she’d been a few years younger—and she’d actually punched me in the throat and threatened to do it harder if I ever touched her again.
I wondered if she remembered me.
Which had my mouth running before I’d even had a chance to think about what I was saying.
“Do you remember punching me in the throat when we were younger? I was probably thirteen or fourteen and you’d just nearly been clobbered by a bunch of football players,” I explained.
Belle’s head twitched as she sifted through her memories.
Then her eyes widened as she said, “You tried to help me up.”
I nodded.
“That was a bad day for me,” she admitted. “I’m sorry.”
I hadn’t realized.
I mean, I knew that the football players had been assholes. They’d seen a young girl—and Belle was young. She was all of ten or eleven at most, that I knew for sure because it’d been the talk of the school—a young kid arriving at the high school to be placed as not a freshman, but a sophomore. And, they’d decided to be giant assholes to her instead of thinking about the girl as young, in a new school, and scared.
Me being the kid that always—and I do mean always—was getting the same treatment that they’d given her that day, I knew how bad it could get and be.
Belle hadn’t lasted more than two days, though.
After her parents had learned that she was being practically tortured all day and not learning a damn thing, they’d pulled her and put her in a school that was made for students exactly like her—smart as fuck.
She’d graduated with honors from what I’d heard.
“So you remember me?” I guessed. “You remember everything else, too?”
There was one other thing she’d seen that day.
One other instance that had been the thing that had made me think that’d been why she really turned me down for a date.
Belle smiled.
“You think it upset me to see you beating the absolute shit out of my abusers?” She rolled her eyes and tossed the underwear she’d been holding to the shelf that was holding a pair of jeans beside her. Then she frowned, picked it back up, and tucked it underneath her arm. “That was the highlight of my eleventh year.”
I gestured to the underwear. “You gonna buy those after all?”
She frowned. “No, I’m going to go put them back on the rack where I found them. It bothers me to have things out of place.”
Then she just… left.
I started to follow her—and did for the most part—when I got a call.
“He’s coming your way,” Sin said in my ear. “Black t-shirt now. He took off the sweatshirt.”
I picked him up immediately, heading right for a woman with a baby strapped to her chest, and three young kids running wild around her.
The littlest of the young kids was standing directly next to Belle, looking up at her and reaching for a long, bouncing curl that was playing with the small of her back.
I’d wanted to do the same damn thing.
But, sadly, I had a job to do.
Hanging back in the sock aisle, I kept my eye on the chaos around me, my gaze going from the kids, to the mom, to the man that was looking suspicious as fuck hanging out in the lingerie.
Neither Belle nor the frazzled mom noticed the man.
Which was his entire damn job. Be inconspicuous, follow young moms around, and relay that information to his buddies outside.
From there, those buddies would make their move while the mother was trying to control chaos and get her kids into the car.
Then, when she least expected it, the man would nab a kid—two if he was lucky—and run.
Child trafficking at its finest.
We’d heard that two children had been nabbed by neighboring bulk stores in the area, and then we’d gotten the call about the man about an hour ago.
Hunt had been doing some research online when a social media article had popped up and practically condemned a suspicious looking man.
Everyone had played it off as if it wasn’t a big deal, even the police, and Hunt had gotten us on it.
Sin and I had been the only ones available to go immediately, leaving us to walk around the damn store for the last hour trying to find this guy.
Finally, Sin had spotted him.
Which led to now, me watching him watching those kids.