Twist My Heart by Brooke Taylor (ebook audio reader .txt) 📕

an entire convention of Squatchers. One of my COs used to name the missions I was on things like Operation White Yeti and Ape Man Cometh.”

He paused to pick up the framed photograph of his family from the bookshelf and rubbed the dust off on his hip. With a grimace he set it back down, this time upright.

“Dad really embarrassed me sometimes. At times I hated him for it, but he was my dad and he was tougher than most anyone, even some of the baddest of the brass I worked under. And, well, who couldn’t use a Squatch Knocker?”

He lifted his spoon toward the baseball bat engraved with the same words resting on the fireplace mantle. I couldn’t help but snicker.

“Or, if you’d rather…” Nik crossed over to the bar and pulled out an etched drinking glass. As he put a hip up on the bar chair across from me, he set the glass down on the counter, twisting it so the imprinted Bigfoot image faced me. “I can fix you a Squatch on the Rocks?”

I let out a laugh. “Is it wrong for me to want one?”

“Yes. Very wrong. But you’ve had a head injury, so you’re forgiven.” He put his elbow on the counter, then propped his head on his fist. Warmth had returned to his gaze as it connected with mine. “My mom would go nuts over your eyes. Her birthstone was topaz, so anything amber-colored she considered to be good luck.”

“I doubt she’d think I was good luck.”

“She’d insist on it. She’d also make you the most amazing cinnamon rolls.”

Hearing the words made my stomach growl. “Better than the diner’s?”

“Oh man, those were like sugary dirt balls compared to hers. Mom’s rolls were as big as dessert plates. My little sister ate four once and we had to take her to urgent care. She said it was totally worth it.”

“What was your sister’s name?”

“Cora. She would think it was pretty cool you let all those dogs loose at Animal Control. Especially since almost all of them got adopted out because of it.”

“Really?” I suppose it did sound a little bit cool. Still, I didn’t condone the brutal way I’d—she’d—treated the employee.

“She’d be all over Titan. She really wanted her own dog. When she was about four or five, she thought our Pappy’s dog was named Who, because he used to always say, ‘Who’s a good girl?’ We explained the dog’s actual name was Bisky, short for Biscuit. Cora was disappointed and said when she got a dog, she’d name it Who.”

My hand flew to my heart. “I love it.”

“It’s a terrible name. Whenever anyone asks her what the dog’s name is, she’d have answered ‘Who’ and then it would have become a whole ‘who’s on first’ skit.”

“What?”

“What’s on second.”

“I don’t know.”

“He’s on third.”

I started to growl, realizing he was playing me. As much as I wanted to see the smile he was stifling, I could tell talking about his family was something he hadn’t done in a very long time. “Tell me more about Cora.”

Flashes of silver danced in his eyes. “I used to call her my corazon. One day when she’d just started school, she came home with her fists balled up and stomping her feet. She marched up and poked me in the chest and said ‘don’t you ever call me that again! I know what it means, jerk!’ I was like, what the heck? Corazon means—”

“Heart, in Spanish.” The knowledge popped in my head the way a few things had begun to.

“Yeah. I usually said it kind of fast and in this really bad Mexican accent. I guess when she repeated it, some kid thought she said calzone and told her I was calling her a folded-up piece of pizza. Which, while delicious, she still took as an insult. I wanted to beat the tar out of the little brat. Shit, how old would he be? Like twenty? He could take a punch now.”

I laughed, but Nik looked like he might seriously find the boy and get payback. His love and desire to protect his sister, his corazon…his heart, were as easy to see now as they’d been looking at the younger version of him in the photo. If anything, they’d grown. But just as he hadn’t been able to protect his sister from a kindergarten brat’s taunts, he hadn’t been able to protect her from dying in a car wreck.

“Your heart tattoo is for Cora,” I surmised aloud as my mind flashed back to the gorgeous ink on the left-hand side of his chest. It had looked more like a dagger at first since the heart itself was welded steel with flames at the top and sharpened to a point at the bottom.

He nodded, but didn’t elaborate. The other tattoo I’d caught in the hotel room appeared equally disguised, blending into larger, ornately engraved plates of armor covering the bulk of his upper body on his right side. Hidden in the intricate pattern on the back of his shoulder were etched bones, like a fossil. “And what about the skeleton? Looked like a frog?”

“It’s for my mother. She had bowlegs and a green complexion.”

I winged a nearby dish towel at him, which he snapped out of the air with lightning-fast reflexes. The playful upturn of his lips burned a swath of warmth through my core before his smile faded.

“SEALs are also known as frogmen. We’re amphibious, fighting from both land and sea. Many of us have some variation of the bone frog tattoo. The skeleton honors the fallen who continue to watch our six…our backs. You’re observant. You probably only saw it briefly, and as I recall I was up against a wall and you were trying to keep Titan from killing me at the time.”

“You’re welcome, by the way. And what? Did you assume I was in a blind haze after seeing your abs?”

“This is the second time you’ve mentioned them. Women like six-packs.”

“So why do you have eight? More