Honkytonk Hell: A Dark and Twisted Urban Fantasy (The Broken Bard Chronicles Book 1) eden Hudson (best book club books txt) 📖

“There was a song we listened to on his mp3 player yesterday—”

“‘Harper’s Song,’” she guessed.

The painful melody drifted through my mind and scoured my throat. This must be the kind of blind jealousy Scout was feeling. I had to force the words out—“He used to love you.”

“Nothing happened between us,” Harper said. “Tough’s always been like my brother and Jax was always my whole heart.”

I glanced toward the front room.

“Jax loves you a lot,” I said. “I think he might be a real warrior in disguise.”

That made Harper smile.

We stood there for a while, listening to the film noir music from Jax’s game and the guitar tripping along upstairs in a snarky-sounding song. Then something else from yesterday came back to me—Tough laughing when I walked in on him listening to “Harper’s Song,” like it reminded him of something funny and a little bit stupid. If I was going to go the optimistic, possibly-mentally-ill route, I should keep that in mind.

And I should go see him.

“Are we done here?” I asked.

“Will you please go to the Dark Mansion?” Harper asked. “For his sake.”

“No.” I actually sounded like someone who could get her way for once. “Not tonight anyway.”

Then I turned and headed for the front room.

“Nicely handled,” Jax said.

“Thanks,” I said, jogging up the stairs.

Tough was lying on his bed just like I’d found him the day before, no shirt and picking that tattooed acoustic guitar. It ought to be a sin for a man to look so good with a busted lip, a black eye, and a hundred cuts, scrapes, and bruises across his face and chest. No mp3 player today, but there was an open notebook beside him and a pencil strapped across the guitar strings with a rubber band.

“Hey,” I said.

When Tough opened his eyes and saw me, he smiled, beautiful even all beat up like that. Then he put his pick in the unhurt side of his mouth and leaned the guitar against his nightstand. A teal and magenta box was lying on the stand next to a half-empty forty sweating in the afternoon heat. Tough sat up, grabbed the box and underhand-lobbed it to me.

Despite my serious lack of coordination, I managed to catch it without looking too stupid. I turned it over. Skintimacy Condoms—100% Hypoallergenic for Your Most Sensitive Skin!

“Pretty presumptuous,” I said.

He unwound the pencil from the neck of the guitar and flipped a page in the notebook sitting beside him. He wrote something and turned it around so I could see.

I literally don’t know the meaning of the word. Most folks round here just say cocky.

I unlaced my boots and kicked them off.

“Guess you don’t know the meaning of the word ‘literally,’ either,” I said, climbing up on the bed beside him.

Tough scribbled something else in his notebook.

I know what multiple orgasms means. Want a demonstration?

Colt

With soft, burning hands Mikal wiped the sweat and saliva and tears from my face, unbuckled the restraints, and cleaned the gouges my fingernails had left in my palms. Then she carried me to the shower and washed me with hot, soapy water. I wanted to push into her touch, to soak up the comfort like gauze soaks up blood.

Fuck, I was so weak. How long had it taken me to give up? A few minutes? An hour? I wanted to put a .45 in my mouth and empty the magazine.

Mikal’s lips grazed my temple and I relaxed.

Good dog, my burning angel said.

Tough

“You’re late,” Tiffani said when I got to the bakery.

I checked her clock. Ten to seven. I shrugged. Only by twenty minutes, and anyway, I’d figured since she had the super-smeller, she would prefer I take a shower before I showed up smelling like sweat and sex and the best fucking afternoon of my life.

Ha—literally fucking.

“This is serious,” Tiffani said.

I shrugged. I got that, but I couldn’t think about just how serious it was. If you let yourself focus on how much something is going to hurt, all you’ll do is make yourself sick.

“What?” Tiffani said. “You think I drink some of your blood and you drink a little of mine and you’re a vamp? Easy as pie?”

That was exactly what I thought.

“That’s not how it works.” Tiffani closed the last big-window blind in the bakery and turned back to face me. “I need to drink most of your blood because you’re going to drink most of the blood-like stuff inside of me. The volume of vampire venom has to be greater than the volume of human blood for the crow magic to work.”

I nodded. Drinking was something I had a real talent for.

Tiffani shook her head at me and leaned her hip against a table.

“Don’t think you’re going to slurp, slurp, done, either. It’s not easy to drink. It burns like hell going down and it’ll start poisoning you before you get enough, but you can’t stop drinking. Too little and you’ll come back as a zombie and I’ll have to kill you for good. Understand?”

I gave her the double thumbs-up.

“Can we wait ten years to do this?” she asked. “Vamping turns you into a more intense version of yourself and your self is an asshole.”

It’s probably a good thing I couldn’t talk because I would’ve told her she didn’t wait, so I’d take my chances, too. What did she want me to do—sit there and let her change her mind because she didn’t think I could handle voluntarily drinking a couple gallons of poison?

I tapped my chest and mouthed I. Can. Do. It.

“You know you’re not going to get your voice back doing this,” Tiffani said. She pointed at my black eye. “Most of those bruises