Rebel

She ignored the innuendo. “Why are you working here?”

“Picking up some hours. Bills, you know?”

No, she didn’t know. Money she’d always had, and would always have traded any day over the last twenty-five years for real parents. But she did know all about financial struggle through Lexi, so she nodded.

She introduced everyone around the table. The men shook hands.

“I’m on at Stilettos tonight,” Roméo said to Rubi. “A lot of people have been asking about you. You should come by and say hi.”

As soon as the club’s name was hanging in the air, dread settled in her gut. She lowered to her seat, her gaze searching out Lexi’s, and Rubi found her friend already staring at her with the same alarm in her eyes that danced in Rubi’s gut. But then…this might be a good thing. A way to illustrate to Wes that she wasn’t really what he thought or what he wanted.

“Stilettos?” Rachel said. “Really? Isn’t that a sex club?”

Roméo seemed to find this amusing, his grin growing. He shrugged, as if that didn’t fully describe the club—which it didn’t. “That’s what it’s known for, yeah.”

“Sounds good,” Rubi said. Couldn’t hurt to get rid of some of this pent-up frustration. “I’ll stop by.”

Rachel gasped and reached across the table to cover Rubi’s hand. “Can I come? You can pretend you don’t know me.”

Rubi laughed. “You? Really?”

“Yes, me,” she said, sitting back with a scandalous little smirk. “I told you, I’m not as innocent as I may look—a little like Wes, here.”

“Stick close to Rubi if it’s your first time there,” Roméo said. “Once you learn the ropes—so to speak—you’ll be fine. And a hit. You may not be as innocent as you look, but that makes what you’ve got going extra hot.” He glanced around the table casually, as if this were a normal conversation. “Do you know what you want, or do you all need a minute?”

“Just a minute,” Rubi said.

When Roméo moved on to another table, Rubi forced her gaze to stay on the menu. Her stomach burned with discomfort. She didn’t need to see Wes’s face to know his outward ease had vanished. Tension radiated off him like electromagnetic waves.

“Rubi?” Lexi’s voice pulled her distant gaze from the menu. Roméo was back, setting down her cosmo. Jesus, how long had she been lost in her own head? “Do you know what you want?”

A new freaking brain. One without these hang-ups.

Rubi smiled at Roméo. “Salad.”

He smirked. “Honey, we’ve got twelve different salads.”

Crap. She scanned quickly and found one with candied pecans. When he turned away with their orders, Rubi picked up her cosmo and had to force herself not to down it in one gulp.

“You hang out at a sex club?” Wes asked, his voice deep…and irritated.

Rubi’s throat tightened around her drink, and she had to force herself to swallow.

“It’s only a sex club in the back,” Lexi was quick to point out. She turned that angelic smile on Wes. “I’ve been there. Out front, it’s just like a regular club. You know, a bar, dance floor.”

“You’ve been to Stilettos?” Jax asked, a strange smile on his face as he looked down at Lexi. Her pale cheeks burst into color.

“I took her,” Rubi said, clearing her throat when her voice emerged raspy. “A tease, really. She’d promised me a thank-you drink for recovering one of her crashed programs, and I took her to Stilettos. She didn’t know what kind of club it was.” Rubi took another sip of her drink and raised one shoulder. “That was the same night you broke out of your comfort zone and met Jax. Remember? Not all bad, I guess.”

“But you don’t stay in the front at Stilettos,” Wes said, his voice filled with accusation. “Do you?”

“Dude,” Jax said, voice a low undertone. “Not the place.”

“Lighten up,” Rachel added. “You’re one to talk, Mr. Speed Demon. Like you don’t do anything crazy on a daily basis.”

Wes ignored them, his expectant gaze locked on Rubi’s face.

A combination of frustration, regret, and anger swirled in her gut. She paused before answering, just an extra second to get her emotions under control. The more she showed, the more he’d think she cared. And that would not help the situation.

She twirled the liquid in her glass, took a breath, and forced her gaze to meet his. His eyes were as dark as she’d expected, the color of an impending storm ready to break. “Why don’t you just ask me what you really want to know, Wes?” When his jaw tightened without answering, she asked what he wouldn’t. “Do I have sex with strangers at the club?”

His eyes darkened beneath a hooded brow of anger.

She smiled, trying to act like his judgment didn’t hurt, but she was pretty sure she’d only managed a smirk. “Not that it’s your business, but, no, Wes. I don’t have sex at Stilettos.”

His expression remained a cross between anger and disbelief. Rubi tipped her drink back and finished it off.

Wes’s cell rang. He scrambled to pull it from his pocket and glanced down at the display. “Sorry, it’s my mom.” And pushed back from the table, answering with a soft, “Hey, Mama.”

His tone, so filled with concern and love, squeezed a strange pleasure-filled pain into Rubi’s chest, but she set it aside as she watched him wander to the edge of the patio. “Is he moody today, or is that my imagination?”

“He’s tense,” Jax said. “His brother just had surgery.”

Rubi’s gaze darted back to Jax, but she didn’t really see him. Too many thoughts were jumping around her brain. Why hadn’t he told her? Was that the basis of this strange behavior? Her mind darted to the contraption they’d been messing with in the trailer, one she’d thought was a harness.

Before she could ask any questions, Wes returned.

“How is he?” Jax asked.

“She says the surgery went well.” He looked relieved, sounded calm. Seemed the edge was off his mood. “The surgeon said they got most of the scar tissue and that in a few weeks his mobility should improve a lot.”

Jax grinned and reached across the table to meet Wes’s fist in a bump. “Great news, man.”

“What kind of surgery?” Rubi asked. She couldn’t deny she was hurt that Jax, Lexi, and Rachel knew all about it, but she didn’t. She spent almost as much time with him as they did.

“Spine,” was all he said before Roméo came with their lunches. Once they’d all been served, Wes took the side of ranch dressing from his plate and set it next to Rubi’s salad. Then put a few fries on the rim of her salad bowl.

He grabbed another fry, popped it in his mouth, and chewed before saying, “He’s a Marine. He was on his third tour in Afghanistan when an IED exploded inside a building where his unit was doing recon and lodged a shitload of shrapnel in his spine. Today was his second surgery.”

“Oh no,” she said softly, absently picking the candied pecans from the top of her salad and collecting them in her palm. “I’m sorry.”

Wes acknowledged the utterly inadequate reply with a nod and took another pull on his beer, but hell, what did you say to news like that? Stress of that kind could completely explain Wes’s rash behavior. He’d mentioned his parents in passing, but never siblings. Granted, given their table had a three-out-of-five family-failure rate, it wasn’t a big topic of conversation when they were together.

“Younger or older brother?” she asked as she set the nuts on a corner of Wes’s plate, then picked up a fry, dipped it in the ranch, and bit it in half.

“Older,” he said, ignoring his burger and using one fry to move around the others, but not really eating. “By four years. He’s married with two little girls.”

Nieces. The thought made Rubi smile. Her view of Wes settled into place. He had a family that loved each other, worried about each other. He called his mother Mama and talked to her in a voice filled with warmth. Yes, this was Wes. She might lust after the golden Adonis in her fantasies, but this was the Wes she’d come to truly adore over the last two months.

“So that thing you were working on this morning was for him?”

“Yeah.” He tossed a pecan into his mouth. “But I’m not sure it’s going to support him. He’s my height, but he’s a big guy, maybe thirty more pounds than me. And he’s not going to have any strength for a while. He’ll be like dead weight until he heals and rebuilds muscle.”

Wes looked at Jax. “My dad is the only one in my family who’s strong enough to help him walk, and he’s in the middle of harvest. I know this is a bad time with the film, but I may need to go back every couple of weeks to help out.”

“Anything you need to do, man,” Jax said. “Family comes first. We’ll make do.”

He released a relieved breath. “Thanks.”

“Is there any way to make it stronger?” he asked Jax.

Jax wiped his mouth after taking a bite of his burger. “Can he stand on his own?”

Wes nodded. “It’s moving his legs he can’t manage.”

“Stronger metal on the thighs?” Lexi asked.

“Yeah.” Rachel nodded at Lexi, then Jax. “Maybe a double design, more like those harnesses you use for falling and climbing where the straps go all the way around the leg?”

Jax shook his head and took a drink of his iced tea. “Too much chance of hurting him if he falls.”

Rachel nodded and poked at her own lunch, deep in thought. Rubi recalled the apparatus as she forked up blueberries and the others continued to drum up ideas for strengthening the design. She wasn’t much good with machinery, but…

“Rubi,” Lexi said drawing her attention. “Didn’t you do some work for a tech lab?”

She nodded, thinking back to the robots and prosthetics she’d helped program, trying to fit that into this scenario.

Lexi glanced at Wes, then back at Rubi, a glint of suspicion in her bright blue eyes. “Why are you so quiet?”

She lifted a shoulder and feigned rapt attention in collecting as many blueberries as possible on her fork tines. “Just listening. Thinking.”

Wes’s lips curled on one side, and he glanced at her with a mixed look in his eyes she couldn’t quite read. “I kissed her stupid.” Wes’s low voice burned a path down the center of her chest. “Or so she said.”

Rachel’s fork hit her plate, her brown eyes flying wide.

Rubi stiffened and cut him a look. “Wes, that’s no one’s business.”

“Just answering the question.” He ate another fry. “So what do you have up your sleeve, Rubi? Any ideas?”

She lifted her fork and stared at the tines, thinking—and avoiding the others’ expressions at the news. “You could make the hinges at the hip stronger. Or…maybe add hinges at the knee and make them all stronger. I imagine the rig would have to handle more of his weight until his muscles strengthen, then less when he doesn’t need as much leverage to move them.”