The Good Fight (Time Served Book 3) by Julianna Keyes Read Free Book Online

“What?”
    “What do you want, a burger?”
    She turns to see what Ricky’s up to and scowls. “I don’t need you to babysit me, Oz.”
    “No one’s babysitting anyone, Jade. I didn’t get groceries this week and I don’t want to eat alone. Where do you want to go?”
    She crosses her arms, painted nails tapping thoughtfully. “If I go out to dinner, you have to go out with Sheree.”
    “No.” Jade’s been hounding me to date Sheree for months, ever since she brought her by the office. She’s a nice woman, around my age, but there was no spark. She’d been perfectly nice. No rapping, no cock-grabbing, no strawberries.
    “Why not?”
    “Because,” I say, snatching up my towel and swiping it across my neck. “Give me six minutes to shower. I’ll meet you out here.”
    Her eyes narrow as she looks me over. “Is there someone else?”
    “What? No.”
    “Why not?”
    “Jade—”
    “Come on, Oz. I spend enough time here to see the women looking at you. Why are you asking me to have dinner instead of one of them?”
    Jade knows I’m not asking her out. She came onto me a few times when we first met and I’d made it clear it wasn’t going to happen. She hadn’t cared. Flirting is like breathing for Jade, and when one guy doesn’t work out, she moves on to the next. Plus now she’s got dear old Ricky.
    “Not my type,” I tell her. “Six minutes.”
    She rolls her eyes. “I’ll be here. We can talk more about your love life.”
    I flip her off and her laughter follows me all the way to the locker room.
    * * *
    I know I’m supposed to be benevolent and supportive of these charity races, but really, they’re a nuisance. I’ve got to wake up extra early, drive into the city, fight to find parking, then make my way through the crowd so I can hang out for an eternity with the other people in my speed group waiting for the gun to go off.
    Then we run. And that’s it. I don’t like music when I’m working out, so for the next forty-five minutes it’s just me and my thoughts. And it doesn’t take a genius to know who I’m thinking about.
    I don’t have Susan’s number and she doesn’t have mine, and I’m grateful for it. Because even though she’d made things pretty clear on Wednesday, I’d probably have called her. That said, there’s a line now, and I’m not going to cross it. I’m not going to show up at the hospital if I’m not driven there in an ambulance. The race starts at nine and the sun is just starting to burn off the thin layer of clouds that have kept the temperature in the low sixties, a nice break in what has otherwise been an unseasonably hot June. The route takes us along the lakefront and through Lincoln Park, thousands of moving bodies on track for the finish line.
    Despite my grumbling, this particular race is close to my heart. Pace Yourself is a national organization that offers services to people whose lives have been impacted by drunk driving, and though I was in New York when my mother and sisters were killed, the kind people of the New York Chapter gave me the support I neither wanted nor needed. Or so I thought.
    My dad died when I was a toddler, and by twenty-one I was officially an adult and an orphan. The guy who T-boned them was also killed, and though fighting was the thing I did best, the one person I wanted to hurt was dead. The anger and aggression turned itself inward, my grades suffered, and I stopped going to wrestling practice. Stopped caring in general. I drank too much, slept too much, kept to myself too much. Until Rian had enough of seeing his roommate piss away his life and hunted around online until he found the local Chapter of Pace Yourself. He called them, they showed up and they smothered me with kindness and support until I started going to class and practice just to avoid them.
    The ten kilometers pass quickly, helped along by cheering strangers on the sidelines. The finish line is a hundred yards ahead, crowded with runners who have