Acting Brave (Fenbrook Academy #3) Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’d assumed she was a hooker. Unsurprisingly, she’d gotten mad.
    “Anyone could’ve got that wrong,” I said tightly.
    “No,” said Hux. Even now, the memory of it made him rock with laughter. “Just you.”
    We blasted through an intersection. I eased off on the gas a little, because it wasn’t like there was any real emergency. It would be thirty minutes of nodding sympathetically to the poor guy who’d had his place ransacked and then telling him to keep an eye on the pawnshops.
    “I just don’t get it,” Hux said, for about the five hundredth time that summer. “I mean, I know she’s smokin’ hot. If I was twenty years younger—”
    “You’re not twenty years younger,” I said pointedly. Hux—Pete Huxington, but everyone called him Hux—was old enough, wise enough and annoying enough to be my dad. And, okay, warm and generous enough, too. But not right at that precise moment.
    “Hell, even so,” said Hux. “ I’d sure like to make a movie with her.”
    “Hux!”
    “What? I’m just sayin’, some Hollywood heartthrob’s gonna get to do a bedroom scene with her. What’s that Italian guy’s name? Favio-something. Him. And everyone’ll be like, ‘Oh, are they acting or is it real?’ Then she’ll marry him and get one of those combo-names, like Brangelina.” He paused and took a bite of a donut. “No, wait. Not with Favio. She’d be ‘Famine’.”
    My knuckles were white on the steering wheel. “Is there a point?”
    I swerved around a corner and the donuts slid across the box on Hux’s lap. He hooked one on a finger and took a full quarter out of it in one bite. He’d long since grown used to my driving. Plus, for Hux, nothing interrupted donuts. We could have been in a full-on guns-blazing high speed pursuit and he’d still have found time for an original glazed. “My point, Kowalski, is that you need to shit or get off the pot.”
    “You’re the master of romance, Hux.” We turned onto Brybecker and I started searching for the address.
    “You’re...what? Twenty five?” he asked.
    “Twenty four.”
    “Whatever. Too young to be fixated on some girl you’re never gonna ask out. Do it, or forget about her.”
    I pulled up outside the house. “I can’t,” I said. “And I can’t.”
    Hux sighed and clambered out of the car, then patted his gut with something between sorrow and pride. “All your angst,” he told me. “That’s what it is. I’m comfort eatin’ on your behalf. How is that fair, huh? You mope and I put on weight.”
    He drew me into a headlock as I got out and we horsed around for a moment, one eye on the house in case the owner came out and demanded to know why two of NYPD’s finest were acting like school kids. But that was Hux all over: older, wiser, and still a kid at heart. He’d mentored me through the academy after my dad died, and then we’d partnered up when I graduated. He drove me crazy, but I loved him.
    “Come on,” he said at last. He climbed the steps to the door and knocked. “Let’s get this over with. Then you can get back to Jas—”
    The bangs were so close together, they sounded like one noise. Everything else in the street seemed to go deadly silent in their wake. Hux took a stumbling step backward down the steps, and then another, and then he tumbled backward onto his ass. That’s when I saw the holes in the door, and the blood soaking through Hux’s shirt.
    The door burst open. A guy jumped down the steps: my height but half my weight, his clothes hanging from a skin-and-bones body, the gun still in his hand. He gave me one wide-eyed look of terror and sprinted away.
    I was still rooted to the spot. I drew my gun just as he disappeared around the corner. Every nerve in my body was jangling, my chest clenching painfully tight around my heart. I was overwhelmed with a sense of wrongness. Hux couldn’t get shot! He was Hux! I was the idiot who fucked up all the time and did dumbass things like getting shot.
    I ran over