Free Dirty Sexy Secret (Green County Book 1) by Nazarea Andrews

and teasing.
    Eli used to meet Amy here.
    Gabriel and I would get high here, after Archer joined the Marines, and I stopped giving a fuck what people thought about me.
    I wonder if Archer realizes how much I spiraled, when he left to serve and protect.
    Even though I understood it. The reasons behind it. Better than Nora and Eli, I understood—I still hated it.
    I shouldn’t have come to the fucking park. There’s too much open space, too many memories and regrets.
    That’s fucking Green County, though.
    All the memories and regrets.
    The kids on the park are giggling and laughing, two little girls being watched and teased by a dark-haired, little boy, but it’s sweet. The boy is careful, even as he heckles and pushes the girls, coaxing and gently bullying them until they’re at the top of the highest slide.
    The youngest slides down with no hesitation, all shrieks and skirts and laughter.
    So carefree and innocent it actually hurts, even as it pulls a smile from me.
    But the other two.
    The little blond girl is watching the slide with these big, wary eyes, like it’s a trap she refuses to trust, and the boy is crouched at her side, talking to her patiently. Coaxing but not pushing.
    Waiting.
    The littlest girl scrambles back to the top, and slides down three times, while they perch there, until the girl finally, finally nods, and slides down, her eyes squeezed shut and her voice twisted up in a shriek.
    When she lands at the bottom, she’s up and dancing, her entire body an exclamation point of excitement as the boy at the top shouts and screams encouragement.
    Fucking Green County. It never changes. It’s always going to be sugar sweet and childhood and Eli and Archer. Even now—alone and furious—I’m shoved into my memories of them. Of how Archer would coax and wait, so damn patient, for me to come to him.
    “Hazel?”
    I stiffen. Let a smile twist my lips up, and it looks real, even if it feels fake as fuck. Turn to face the owner of that low gruff voice.
    I don’t need to see him to know that it’s Michael. Don’t need to look to know that John is only two steps behind him.
    Here’s what I know about the twins: they’re close. Almost too close, even for a place as dysfunctional and backwards as Green Co. can be. I’ve known them most of my life, since I was thirteen and we were in high school together.
    And I think I’ve seen them separated twice.
    Once was when Michael got himself arrested for beating the shit out of a football player from the next county over.
    And that brings me to my second point: they’re volatile.
    Michael is all cold ice, and careful judgment. He’s the one who will watch with sharp black eyes, waiting for you to fuck yourself up just enough that he can destroy you, all without ever lifting a finger.
    John, on the other hand.
    He was all brute strength and quick anger. He was action and force, where Michael would wait. John was impatient. He didn’t care that waiting meant you’d be even more screwed in the end. He wanted quick and dirty and bloody, and I’d seen the ugly bruises on the kids he beat the hell out of, the men he tore to pieces, often enough that being here, without my brother and Archer, alone in public with the twins—well, I’m a sane girl after all.
    But there’s something about this that bothers me, and that is the third thing I know about them.
    “Where is Hanna?” I ask, softly.
    Because if I have rarely seen the twins without the other, I’ve almost never seen them without their sister, eight months younger, a girl as delicate and lovely as they were cruel and violent.
    I liked Hanna even if I did think the too close relationship and the way Michael and John watched her bordered on a creepy that made my stomach turn when I thought too much about it.
    “She wasn’t feeling well, so she stayed home,” Michael says smoothly, a hand touching John’s elbow. “But she’d love to see you. You should come by, in a few days.”
    I study him, and