Crash by Nicole Williams Read Free Book Online Page B

laughter.
    “Listen, I dig your spunk and your take no prisoners attitude, I do,” Jude said, turning to face me, “but you don’t mess with people like this.”
    “People like this or brothers like this?” I said, so much nervous energy bouncing out of me from the highs and lows of the past ten minutes I didn’t know what to do with it.
    Jude sighed.
    “Those are your brothers?” I actually said a quick prayer it wasn’t true.
    “In a way,” he replied, closing his eyes.
    “In what way?”
    Opening his eyes, he reached for my hand. “In the way that doesn’t matter.”
    “Then screw them,” I said, letting him take my hand when I knew I shouldn’t have before I had some clarification as to who or what he was. “I should have flipped them off again. They’re all bark.”
    “No,” he said firmly. “Please, Luce. These are the kind of bastards that have no bark. They sink their teeth into you without any damn warning.” Grabbing my arms, he pulled me close, looking at me like he could force his words to absorb. “Don’t mess with them. If you see them coming down the sidewalk, cross the street.”
    This earned an eye-roll from me. Surely he was exaggerating. I didn’t doubt the doofus triplets had done their fair share of pot and defacing public property, but they weren’t ballsy enough to do the stuff that would earn them hard time if they were caught. Coward was stamped across every one of their foreheads.
    “Shit, Luce,” Jude said, crossing his arms behind his neck and spinning towards the beach. “This is exactly the reason I told you to stay away. So you didn’t find yourself eyeballs deep in my shitty life.”
    Now his words of caution were starting to make sense. Why he said I should stay away from him if I was smart.
    The thing was, if staying away from him made me unsmart, I never wanted to be smart again.
    “Jude,” I said, looping my fingers through his belt.
    Turning around, he looked at me with weary eyes. “Yeah?”
    “Kiss me.”
    And, after a moment’s pause, he did.

I didn’t have a clue what time it was by the time Jude and I were finally able to pry each other away from one another, but as I tucked myself into bed that night, I knew the sun would be making its debut in a few hours max. That meant I’d have to get through a killer three hour ballet practice on two hours of sleep.
    I didn’t care. Every minute of sleep lost was spent losing myself in Jude’s arms.
    Forcing myself to close my eyes and turn off my overheated mind, I opened them a heartbeat later. Rambo went off like a hurricane warning.
    I jolted out of bed and ran to the window. Rambo wasn’t a barker; he growled, smiled, and gave an occasional yap, but I’d never heard him go off like this. It was like either him, or someone close by, was about to have the life strangled from them.
    I couldn’t make out much other than the gleam of his kennel and what could be shadows winding in the wind or people moving around the perimeter. Lifting the window to get a better look, a wall of flames exploded up and around Rambo’s kennel.
    It wasn’t something I thought about. It was purely a gut decision. Crawling out of the window, I scooted down the roof. The only thing on my mind was saving Rambo from another fire. One I could actually save him from.
    How or whom had started the fire wasn’t even an afterthought; I just had to get to him. To save him.
    Swinging my legs over the edge of the roof, my feet landed on the porch rail, and then it was a mere jump to the ground. I’d done it a dozen different times, but I didn’t think this instance qualified as sneaking out of the house.
    Rambo’s barks had stopped at the inception of the flames, and I wasn’t sure if that was because he was scared barkless or dead. It seemed wrong to hope for the former.
    Grabbing the hose around the side of the house, I cranked it on and sprinted down the yard. The hundred yards to the beach where the kennel was took an