It’s still dim in here, still welcoming in that specific way, but it smells faintly of lemon cleaner, and there are actual framed pieces of art on the wall. They’re all stylized drinking glasses and bottles, nice enough to look at, but they don’t try to make this place anything but what it is. A dive bar, if a cleaner and safer one than it used to be.
Even the clientele seems different, though it’s still too early in the day to say for sure. But the few people already here are wearing clothes that suggest they’re stopping by for a drink on their way home from work.
Things really have changed.
I try for a smile at Renée. “Is the back room open?”
She grins. “I knew you looked familiar. Broderick Paine, right?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s been a while. For you, it’s open.” Renée jerks her thumb at the doorway in the back. “You want me to come back and get your orders, or do you need privacy?”
“Privacy, please. I’ll grab our drinks and take them back myself.”
Her grin widens as she takes in Monroe and Shiloh behind me. “Go on ahead, then.”
The women slide past me and head toward the doorway. Shiloh looks nervous and jumpy. Monroe is all wicked smiles and a loose-limbed stride that somehow manages to scream sex without her doing anything overt. I give our drink orders to Renée, wait for her to fill them, hand her some cash, and follow the women into the back room.
Shiloh and Monroe have their heads close together when I push through the door. The room is exactly like I remember it, if a thousand times cleaner. My shoes don’t stick to the floors as I cross the half-circle booth that takes up most of the space. It’s been reupholstered sometime in the last decade with leather, and the tabletop has been replaced with shiny wood that isn’t cut all to shit. The last time I was back here, there was a knife sticking out of the center of the table.
Monroe grins. “Right on time. I was thinking we’d have some fun and play a game.”
I carefully set the glasses down and eye her. “A drinking game?” I am fully on board with seducing Shiloh, but I’m not going to touch her if she’s drunk. I would assume Monroe is the same; if she hadn’t also been buzzed out of her mind the other day, I don’t think they would have hooked up in the bar’s bathroom. In fact, I’m certain of it. Monroe is too damn protective of the people in her sphere to take advantage of someone like that.
“No, silly man. Drinking games are best done with shots and a determination to get into trouble. This is just a fun little game for friends.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Why don’t I believe you?”
“I couldn’t begin to say. That sounds like a you problem.” She holds up a hand, her expression the very picture of innocence. “Don’t you want to play with me?”
Shiloh makes a choked sound. “You’re so much sometimes, Monroe.”
“You aren’t the first person to say it.” She tucks a strand of blond hair behind her ear. “It strikes me that neither of you had a proper childhood.” She pats the spot next to her. “Stop looming and sit down.”
“I’m not looming.” But I sit, curious on where she’s headed with this. “I had a childhood.”
“You had Bauer Paine as your father, a dead mother, and five younger brothers that you mostly raised.” She snorts. “You had to grow up fast.”
Monroe isn’t exactly wrong. My mother died a long time ago, and my father was hardly the poster child for good parenting. Abel did his best, but he always had his eyes on the role of leading the faction. It inevitably fell to me to supervise my younger brothers. Considering my brothers, that was a full-time job.
It's still a full-time job, even if I’ve been shirking my duties since coming back to the city.
She leans against me as she turns to Shiloh on her other side. “And don’t even try to tell me that you had anything resembling normal teenage years.”
I tense, but Shiloh just shrugs. “It was normal for me.”
I don’t like the shadows that flicker across her face when she talks about the past. She survived horrific things at the hands of her parents. We’ve touched on the subject enough for me to know that, even if I don’t know all the gory details. Her parents were religious and abusive, and they hurt her terribly. I clear my throat, determined to bring the conversation around. “You’re the Amazon heir. You can’t honestly tell me your childhood was normal.”
“Normal enough.” She tilts her head back to lean against my shoulder. “I’m sure most children don’t have weapons training and the various things my mother required of me, but Amazons take childhood very seriously. There was plenty of fun, too.” She gives a sexy little wiggle. “We can work on recreating other memories later, but today I was thinking of a tried and true experience.”
Even though I’m technically in on this, my stomach goes a little hollow. “What experience?”
The satisfaction in her voice is nearly overwhelming. “Truth or dare.”
Chapter 21 Monroe
This is all technically part of a plan for Broderick and me to seduce Shiloh, but there’s a reason I decided to go about it in this way. Truth or dare is a silly game, and it was sort of a rite of passage within my friends when I was a teenager. I want to share that experience with these two people who are rapidly becoming…important to me.
Neither of these two had much in the way of “normal” childhood experiences. Best I can tell, Broderick was second father to his brothers. It’s no wonder he’s got such a stick up his ass after being responsible for so many people for so long. And I’ve been
