Liam “Lee” Nightingale could hot-wire any car going, had both a Mustang and a motorcycle, started smoking when he was thirteen, was rumored to be able to get a girl pregnant by just looking at her and was also voted Best Smile. He’s six foot two and gives the impression that faded jeans had been divinely created just for him. Lee also has thick, dark brown hair with just enough wave and chocolate-colored eyes with a heavy rim of long lashes. Lee was good-natured as well, but in an entirely different way. Without any effort at all, (mostly by crooking his finger, casting a glance or, if a girl was playing hard to get, he’d pull out The Smile), Lee nailed everything that was female, had long hair, big boobs, a fine ass and was breathing.

Every female, that is, but me, no matter how hard I tried and let’s just say I tried real hard.

I, too, have big boobs, a helluvan ass, long, russet hair (with just enough wave) and was, as far as I could tell, not the walking dead.

I’d been throwing myself at Lee since I could remember.

I should have picked Hank. If I’d have picked Hank, I would now be married with children, probably very happy and definitely getting it regularly.

But I like them bad.

I’m a rock ‘n’ roll chick, that’s just the way it is.

Ally and I decided when we were eight that I was going to marry Lee so I could be her “real” sister. She was going to be my maid of honor, we were going to live across the street from each other in houses with white picket fences and Lee and I were going to name our first daughter after her.

We even made a blood pact on it by sticking our thumbs with safety pins and mashing them together. We spent the next twelve years attempting to make that fantasy a reality in every way our somewhat devious and definitely outrageous minds could dream up.

It was my bad luck (considering Lee’s moral code was a bit sketchy) that I fell into Liam Nightingale’s Ethical Rule Book at Rule Number Two (with Rule Number One being “Thou shalt not nail your brother’s girlfriend”), I was “Thou shalt not nail your little sister’s best friend”.

I also grew up like a member of the family which made me practically his little sister by default and, in my last effort to throw myself at him (when I was twenty and he was twenty-three), he’d told me exactly that. It was pretty f**king embarrassing, but then again, so were all of my other attempts and that never stopped me.

Still, for some reason, that last one really hurt. Lee wasn’t cruel or anything he was just… final.

The Great Liam Chase ended right then and there, at least for me. Ally still has (very) high hopes. Not to mention Kitty Sue, who I think has always wanted me to fall for one of her sons and it’s been pretty clear that her druthers would put me with Lee. Probably because she thinks we deserve each other.

I resigned myself to seeing Lee at Christmas, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, every birthday celebration, most family parties and barbeques, over at Hank’s when we’re watching a game and the like (unfortunately, this means I see Lee a lot). Usually, there are always enough other people around to run interference.

If, on the odd occasion that he’s at his parents’ house for dinner (these days it’s less odd and more like Kitty Sue is getting a bit desperate and becoming far more obvious at playing matchmaker) and I’m also invited, I make my excuses (mostly lies) and leave as fast as my boots will take me. This usually pisses off Ally and Kitty Sue but they hadn’t thrown themselves at the guy for over a decade and been rebuffed repeatedly and then had to live the rest of their lives seeing that guy at dinner and on holidays. It’s mortifying, let me tell you.

Not to mention, Lee went from Bad Boy to Badass in half a decade. By the end of that decade he was Badass Extraordinaire. You didn’t mess with Lee. I may have been a bit of a wild child, but I knew enough about playing with fire and getting burned and Lee Nightingale had gone from a bonfire to a towering f**king inferno in ten years.

Don’t get me wrong, Liam Nightingale still has killer good looks only slightly marred by a small, crescent moon scar under his left eye. He also still has a killer bod that looks great in jeans, great in sweats, great in suits, great in anything. He also still has a killer smile on the odd occasions he flashes it. And finally, he also still likes women with lots of T&A and lots of hair (and I was still a woman just like that).

But he’s also dangerous.

I don’t know how to explain this, he just is, trust me.

* * * * *

These days, I still go to rock concerts. I still listen to music way too loud. I still wear my red hair long and wild in a tangle of waves that fall in a deep V down my back. I still have some serious T&A. Let’s just say, my body is my gift and my curse. A body like mine isn’t difficult to maintain, just feed it loads of crap to keep the curves but keep in shape because you’ve got to lug it around everywhere.

These days, though, my parties have real, home cooked hors d’oeuvres and bowls of cashews and nobody passes out in my bed or pukes in the backyard anymore.

These days I’m also the owner of a used bookstore located on Broadway (not the Broadway in NYC, the other Broadway, in Denver, Colorado, US of A).

My grandmother left me the store when she died. It would seem a rather staid profession, owning a bookstore. You’d think I wore tortoise-shell glasses and had my hair back in a bun. This isn’t true about my bookstore or me, by any stretch of the imagination.

You see, my grandmother was a hellion, she’d raised a hellion in my Mom, Katherine, and she and Dad carefully oversaw raising the third-generation hellion that was me.

My bookstore is on the southeast corner of Broadway and Bayaud. Not the greatest neighborhood, not the worst. In the times of my grandmother, the ‘hood had been in decline, now it’s on an upswing.

My inheritance came with half a duplex one block down on Bayaud in the Baker Historical District. I live in the east side of the duplex, a g*y couple live in a west side, another g*y couple live east of me and another behind me. This is why Baker is safe, it’s populated mainly by g*y couples, DINKS, hippies and Mexicans. When I, a single white female who looks like (and is) a rock ‘n’ roll groupie of the highest order, moved in, they all called each other and said “there goes the neighborhood”.

My bookstore is named Fortnum’s. There was no reason for this except Gram had gone to Fortnum and Mason’s in London the year before she opened it and she thought it sounded high brow.

There’s nothing high brow about Fortnum’s.