Read Convict: A Bad Boy Romance for Free Online Page B

front of the stage, and I stare at her as she leaves. She’s wearing shorts and flip-flops, the long muscles of her legs practically an arrow to her perfect ass.
    For just a moment I imagine standing behind her, sliding one hand up her warm skin, and slipping my fingers under the hem of her shorts.
    Then she walks up to a tallish, skinny guy and hands him one of the beers, and they clink them together. He’s wearing a tie-dye t-shirt, he’s got dark hair in a top knot, and he’s wearing flip-flops.
    I’m one hundred percent certain I could kick his ass. Fuck, if I hit him I don’t think he’d get back up, just lie on the floor and moan. I wouldn’t even have to hit him hard.
    I force myself to turn back to the bar. It doesn’t work like that here. I can’t just hit people and get what I want.
    Besides, I don’t think I would get what I want. If I punched Luna’s date, I have a feeling she’d be way more pissed than impressed.
    I glance across the bar. The blond is back and suddenly way less attractive. I sigh.
    Then I walk over.

4
    Luna
    S omeone pushes past Raine , and he jerks out of the way, sloshing his beer onto my feet.
    “Dude, come on ,” I say.
    He looks down.
    “Shit, sorry,” he says, looking at my toes. He goes into one of the many pockets in his shorts, and after a moment, comes up with a crumpled tissue.
    “I’ve got this?” he says, offering it to me.
    I look at the tissue, and try very hard not to imagine where it’s been or what it’s been used for.
    “How the hell are you a nurse ?” I say, one my favorite rhetorical questions to ask him. “Don’t tell me you go around offering patients gross old tissues and spilling beer on them.”
    Raine grins.
    “I keep my beer in a sippy cup when I’m on duty,” he says. “Hospital regulations. Come on, Loony, I’m a professional.”
    I almost tell him not to call me Loony, but if being Raine’s older sister for twenty-four years has taught me anything, it’s that telling him not to do something is the number one way of ensuring that he does it.
    Professional or not, Raine is still kind of like a puppy, all giant hands and feet with no concept of where his own body begins and ends. Especially when he’s had three beers.
    He puts the tissue back in his pocket, and I glance over my shoulder again, looking for Stone and trying very hard not to look like I’m looking for Stone. For some reason, he makes me feel like the uncool, dorky middle school girl again, the one who wore baggy jeans and t-shirts every day while the other girls all learned to apply lip gloss and mascara.
    I figured mascara out eventually. Hell, I’m wearing some right now. But even so, when he talks to me I have to fight the urge to look over my shoulder so I can find the girl he’s really talking to.
    Men who have green eyes and sideburns and one dimple, who are tall and built like marble statues, but really sexy, muscly ones? Those men don’t talk to me. They talk to girls who manage to act like girls at least once in a while.
    Besides, I don’t see Stone anywhere. He probably left.
    “Hey, so, like, this is our last song,” says the singer, pushing his hair out of his eyes.
    I applaud, along with everyone else.
    “I wrote this one night when I was out in the mountains on a spirit quest?” he goes on, ending every sentence with a question. “And it was just so peaceful out there, just me and the trees and I felt this intense, like, belonging with everything? Even the worms and the mosquitos?”
    You mean, you went camping and got high as balls , I think.
    “But, like, the world is really all one,” he goes on. “And I wrote this that night because I wanted to respect the one-ness of all life, even the weird ones. This is called Dirt Worm Love .”
    I clap again. On stage, my other brother Skye makes eye contact with the other band members, then starts playing. They’re actually not bad, at least if stoner rock is what you’re into. I’ve always