Romance on the Edge 01 - Hooked

her forearm.
    “Heaven help me, neither can I.” He buried his head in her neck. “I wish to God that I could.”
    Another raindrop smacked the side of her face and then the heavens shuddered on a sob.

    “Where the hell have you been?” Earl asked, followed by a hacking cough that turned Aidan’s stomach. “You’re wetter than seaweed. Don’t you have sense enough to get in out of the rain?”
    “Give it a rest, old man.” Aidan grabbed a beer and twisted the top off, taking a long swallow. He normally didn’t drink, but his heart was breaking and the pain was about to kill him. Seeing Sonya loving Garrett, in a way that she’d never loved him, had Aidan needing to drown out the image seared in his memory.
    “Ooh, the boy’s getting a backbone,” Roland commented from a dark corner of the lantern-lit cabin.
    “Yeah, of a jellyfish.” Earl chuckled at his own joke. Aidan took a deep drink and tried to wipe his thoughts of Sonya and Garrett clutched together against the side of that Jeep. Why couldn’t she have ever let go with him like that?
    “So, what had you out in the rain?” Earl asked. “In dire need of a shower?” This time both Earl and Roland cackled.
    “I’m sure it has something to do with that pretty drift boat captain on shore leave next door.” Roland elbowed Earl. “Don’t you think?”
    “Gotta be. Only a woman could tempt a man to stay out in the rain, when he should have the good sense God gave him to come in out of it. So, things square with you and Sonya?”
    “You could say that,” Aidan muttered, taking another swig of the beer and dropping into a chair. The liquid was bitter against his tongue, but the more he drank, the more he found the taste palatable.
    “About damn time. You gotta date set?” Earl asked, a smile twisting his normally stoic face, making him resemble the Joker in Batman.
    “A date?” Aidan asked, confused. “For what?”
    “A wedding, boy.”
    It was Aidan’s turn to laugh, though the sound held no humor. “There’s never going to be a wedding between me and Sonya.”
    “Don’t tell me you screwed things up again.”
    His whole life was nothing but a series of screw-ups. None as big as the screw-up he’d made of his relationship with Sonya. “Yep, I sure did. Fucked it up big time, Pops.” He finished the beer, thumping the bottle down on the splintered table, and without a second thought, reached for another.
    “Watch your mouth, boy.” Roland indicated the loft where Aidan knew Lana was not sleeping, though it was quiet as church up there.
    “Why? No one else does around here.” He toasted Earl and Roland. “Just following the examples given.”
    “If you followed my example, you’d make Sonya change her mind,” Earl said, his lips twisting into a cruel line.
    “What?” Aidan scoffed. “Like you did with her mother?”
    Earl’s chair scraped against the scarred-plank floor as he leaped his feet. “Shut the hell up. You will not talk about Kyra.”
    “Why not?” Aidan shrugged. “You have no problem discussing Sonya, but not your own failed attempts with her mother?”
    The fist came out of nowhere, slamming into Aidan’s cheek with the force of a sledgehammer. Shit, he’d forgotten the lights-out power of Earl’s right hook. It knocked him out of his chair and flat onto his back on the floor, his beer spilling into a puddle next to his head.
    He should get up and hit the bastard back, but it was just so much more comfortable here on the floor. Besides, the colors swirling in front of his eyes were pretty.
    “Get up, you sorry excuse for a Harte,” Earl said.
    Aidan made out his blurry image looming over him. Now why would he get up for more of what he’d already received? See, he had learned a thing or two.
    “Earl, leave the boy alone,” Roland said, though his voice seemed to come from far off in the distance, instead of across the small room. “Can’t you see he’s messed up over Sonya? When’s the last time you saw the boy help himself to a brewski?”
    “What he needs to do is put Sonya in her place.” Earl kicked Aidan in the side, seeming satisfied with the grunt of pain that escaped. He walked over to his chair and retook his seat. “Damn kid never learns a thing. Too much like his sorry bitch of a mother.”
    Aidan continued to lie on the floor with no desire to get up. His only thought before blackness took him was that he wished he’d been able to finish the last of his beer before it