I paused mid-step and turned to stare at Laric, whom I hadn’t seen in the shadows until now. “Ummm, yes. Everything is fine. I’m just… the day was long.”
The day was more than long.
I’d had to deal with crisis after crisis at the store, my little sister had texted me saying that she was ‘taking a mental break’ from me because I was ‘exhausting her’ and my other two siblings had gone out on a lunch date without me and also without asking me if I wanted to join them.
Which, honestly, hurt the worst.
Why did they always go out without me? I mean, yes, I worked a lot. But if they scheduled it in a time that I could the store was slow, then I would be able to go with them. Instead, they just blamed it on my lack of time and went without me, and that was upsetting.
To make matters worse, when I’d confronted them about it, they acted like me being upset that they never invited me was new to them.
It shouldn’t be new. I always, always, always told them that I wanted to go. And that it made me sad that I couldn’t.
Most morons would see that they should do it at a time and location—even if it was at my damn store—that I could attend so I wouldn’t feel so left out.
“You look like you could use a drink,” he teased as he stood up.
My eyes went to the dog at his side, one wearing a service dog camo vest that declared him as such.
The dog was a mutant.
He was the biggest chocolate lab that I’d ever seen in my life.
He was also, might I add, glued to Laric’s side and didn’t look like he wanted to come close to me at all.
I frowned.
“I could,” I admitted. “How do you transport them around? And isn’t this a different dog than the one that you had a few weeks ago?”
Laric nodded as he gestured at me to precede him inside.
“It is,” he confirmed. “That’s what I do for a living, train dogs. I have a new one sometimes every week.”
And that was what we spent the majority of our time talking about, up until the point where we got on the subject of Zach.
“You run at the track a lot?” he asked. “Zach does, too. I can’t stand running in circles, though.”
I tilted my head slightly to the side, wondering if I could get some information out of Laric about his club brother.
Likely, I couldn’t.
But I was just so curious about Zach that I wanted to at least try.
“I do,” I confirmed. “Zach’s there a lot. He garners a lot of… attention.”
Laric laughed. “Women feel safer at a track. It’s in the middle of town. There are bathrooms. You can park close. And when you walk, you don’t wind up miles from your car. And Zach’s an attractive, unattainable young man. Women love that bad boy that they can’t have.”
My brows rose. “You’re not that?”
“I’m a bad boy, sure.” He shrugged. “But I never said I didn’t want a woman. Just don’t want one that’s sweet on one of my club brothers.”
My mouth fell open.
“Thought you were hiding that, didn’t you?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I… no, not really. I just… it’s complicated. And before you ask why I didn’t bring him with me to the wedding, I asked. He said no. Like, straight-up no. And then left. So I don’t think he feels the same things for me that I feel for him.”
Laric’s eyes lit with amusement.
“How much do you know about Juniper?” he asked curiously.
I shrugged. “I saw her at the store the other day when Zach gave me stitches in my hand,” I held up said hand for him to see. “And I know that he killed someone because of her. But that’s all.”
Killing someone for another person meant deep feelings to me. And likely, Zach still felt those deep feelings, despite him telling the woman that he didn’t.
You didn’t just do something like that for another person and all of a sudden decide that you no longer had feelings like that anymore.
“Juniper is a bitch,” Laric started. “In the six months that Zach has been here, I haven’t heard a damn thing about her from him. He doesn’t talk about her at all, and I’ve seen him drunk plenty. When you get drunk, that’s when you talk about the shit that bothers you. And I’m telling you, Juniper isn’t one of the things that left his mouth. His career? Yeah, that’s been spoken about. How he misses it. Did you know that he used to be elbow deep in vaginas all day? Old vagina. New vagina. Clean vagina. Dirty vagina. Babies coming out of vaginas. He misses it. But seriously, Juniper never once was mentioned.”