She hugged Angelique and Missy tight.
Why couldn’t she just be normal? Was that too much to ask?
Brick scowled down at the steak on his plate as though it had mortally offended him. They were all seated at a table on the patio outside the pool house. All of them except her.
“This is a strange town,” Sterling said. He’d gone out to shop for food for dinner.
“Strange how?” Elias asked as he dug into his large plate of food.
“Three different people propositioned me, and that was before I even got inside the grocery store.”
Sterling could have graced the cover of any magazine and he was always getting hit on. So, he didn’t see why it was such a great surprise.
Where was she?
“How long ago did you send that text?” he growled at Elias.
The other man just raised an eyebrow then purposefully took another bite of food and ate it slowly.
Asshole.
Then he picked up his phone. Brick tightened his hands around his knife and fork. He’d told Sterling to buy steak since he was worried about how pale she was.
“Ten minutes ago.”
“What did you say to her?”
“I said that we were eating dinner and there was plenty if she wanted to join us.”
“And what did she say?”
Elias sighed. “She said no thanks but to help ourselves to anything we needed.”
“Why the hell did you let her go upstairs? She shouldn’t be walking on that foot.”
“I can’t make her do anything. And unless there’s a direct threat to her, I also can’t order her to do anything.”
Fuck that.
If he’d been the one watching her . . . but he wasn’t. He’d given that job up. And now he was griping at Elias because he wasn’t doing it the way he wanted him to.
He was absolutely being an asshole.
“What’s so weird about women propositioning you?” Elias asked Sterling.
“They all had to be over eighty, and one of them was a man.”
Elias grinned. “That is a new record for you.”
Sterling shook his head. “And there’s something else. There was this woman yelling at someone in a big red truck.”
“How is that odd?” Brick asked, confused.
“She was wearing a T-shirt that said: Why be the bigger person, go slash their tires.”
Elias’s grin widened. “I already like her.”
“I haven’t got to the weird part yet. She was on roller skates, and she had a helmet on that had images of monsters on it and two googly eyes at the top. When I stepped out onto the road, she nearly ran me over then told me I was getting in the way of her righteous revenge and to go back to pretty boy school.”