REVEAL - Scorpio & Harlan (Fettered Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

answer?”
    “Yeah.” I can lemonade-sip anyone under the table.
    She waits a moment and then laughs. “Gee, Scorpio, do you want to talk about it?”
    Probably not. “Tell me about Milo’s new chair.”
    She flutters her eyelashes at me. “I can give you a tour later.”
    Easily one of the coolest things about Ari is her flexible, wide-open generosity. She’ll consider doing almost anything that might help someone else be a more fulfilled human being, and even though she’s making this offer as a joke, I also know she’d be willing to make it real in a heartbeat.
    I squeeze her hand. “Thanks.”
    She sobers, and her eyes are smart and wise and compassionate. “It’s gotten real, huh?”
    It has. I hear footsteps behind us, and know without looking that real has just arrived. Ari slides off her stool and picks up her paperwork and lemonade. “I have stuff to go take care of.”
    Harlan’s voice rumbles at my back. “Milo could use help testing the restraint mechanisms.”
    Ari snorts. “This time I’m locking him up first.”
    I laugh. I’ve heard that story. Being Milo’s alpha tester is a risky job.
    She slips away, and the footsteps behind me get closer. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”
    I slap his envelope down on the bar. “Really? You bring me porn at work and figure I’m just going to obediently drop a few pictures in your mailbox?”
    He shrugs, pours himself some lemonade, and slides onto a stool beside me. “Maybe.”
    Being this close to him is like holding an electric guitar right before the first chords rip. He’s always made me sit up and take notice, but it’s getting more potent. I’ve never had a problem appreciating a big, sexy bad boy—muscles and ink are both in my happy zone. But this is more than that.
    He sees me, pushes on me, and those are a totally different kind of electricity.
    He puts his hand on the envelope. “Did you look?”
    “Yeah.”
    He drinks his lemonade and doesn’t say anything.
    He also knows when not to push, and that makes it a lot harder to stay pissy. “I was at a wedding a couple of days ago. Brittany, our old receptionist. She hooked up with a grape farmer and now she’s heading off to Tuscany to eat spaghetti and have many babies and be stupidly happy.”
    He’s grinning. “Some parts of that sound pretty good.”
    I close my eyes. One smart-ass comment and he’s nailed it. “That’s just it. There are parts of that I want.” I sweep my hand around the club lounge. “And parts of this I want. And parts of the punk-rocker musician thing I did for ten years that I want. But none of them are mostly right, if that makes any sense.”
    I open my eyes to find him studying me, intense and serious. He lifts a hand and barely touches the nape of my neck. “Why’d you stop the music?”
    The man who sends me porn and makes my neck yearn probably deserves something more than my usual pat answer. “I loved making music. I played lead guitar, was a solid back-up singer, wrote some of the songs. My band was pretty good—good enough to keep ourselves fed if we worked hard at it.” Most musicians couldn’t say the same thing, so by our own standards, we were a success. “It was the in-between that was hard. We rode the good edges with the music, and too many of the bad edges when we weren’t playing.”
    Still with the intent eyes. “Drugs?”
    “That and a bunch of other stuff. Not my thing, mostly, but I watched a lot of friends self-destruct. There was nowhere good and fulfilling to go between the music. Nowhere to live that wasn’t an edge. Too much emptiness and too much bleeding.” I can feel the exhausted loneliness rising in my ribs just talking about it.
    His hand slides down my back. “So you found a way out.”
    “One day Emily overheard me sorting out gig logistics with some guy at a bar and offered me a job. I thought she was a raving lunatic.”
    Harlan’s cheek dimples. “But you took it.”
    I shrug. “The pay was