Brazing (Forged in Fire #2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

wiry thing when we were babies. I mean, we weren’t exactly babies. We were adolescent Hicksville rebels who thought we knew everything. I did. There was no way this gorgeous creature in front of me could be her. But it was her.
                  When I’d set her up with Jake back in school, I’d done it to give her a boost. She was always a sweet thing, pretty sassy—smart as hell—everyone thought so. But her dad was a coal miner, just trying to do the best he could by his family. Coal miners worked their asses off but didn’t bring in a lot of money. She always wore clothes two or three sizes too big for her and some of them made for a grandmother rather than a teenaged girl. We never faulted her for it. Poverty in our town was as rampant as milk drinking.
                  Tate Halloway—who would’ve thought?
                  Her hair was wild now. Before it was an almost bleached out red—nothing as vibrant as the tendrils that floated over her chair now and tickled my jean-clad knees. I could see the back of her neck too, her freckles had now multiplied and taken on a ‘loud and proud’ stance all over her—a far cry from her previous, ‘maybe I have freckles, maybe it’s just dirt’ appearance. In school, she wore Coke bottle glasses that made her eyes look like they were being studied under a twenty-four-hour microscope.
                  It was like everything pretty about her was being hidden beneath a grandmother’s disguise.
                  Not wanting to keep the info to myself, I dead-legged West in the thigh who then bit on his fist to keep from yelling at me.
                  “What,” he whispered through a clenched jaw.
                  “That’s Tate Halloway.”
                  “What?”
                  “That’s Tate Halloway.”
                  “What?”
                  All that contemporary hymn singing had apparently deafened my brother. I jerked the pen out of West’s pocket—because he was extra nerdy like that and scribbled her name on the bulletin I’d yet to read.
                  He shrugged like he could give a shit, but I just continued to give him the biggest stare down ever. I watched his face evolve from ambiguity to knowing as he contorted his body to try and get a look at her face. Then he turned to me with wide eyes and a huge smile.
                  No one could ever say West was a quick one.
                  I spent the rest of the service studying Tate instead of the bulletin in front of me. I couldn’t believe I acted like such an ass in front of her last night. And it certainly explained why she was so snippy with me. The last memory she probably had of me was when I set her up on a date and Jake stood her up—not that last night gave her anything better to remember me by.
                  I hoped I didn’t puke on her.
                  Everyone around me bowed their head. I’d been observing her through the whole damned sermon.
                  While everyone was deep in prayer, I scooted past them—up the stairs and out of the hall. Pounding the pavement as fast as my overhung legs would take me, I kept glancing behind me to make sure she wasn’t following me. I had to run from her and avoid her at all costs.
                  First and foremost, she knew about Jesse and would ask me about her.
                  Second, I knew her kind and didn’t even want to begin to touch that fire.
                  Third, and this was probably what I was running from the most—I had a feeling that if Jesse had ruined me—that this girl could surely kill me.
                 
     
                  Ignoring her wasn’t that hard.
                  That was a lie. The girl was