House of Payne: Rude Read Online Free

next to—or if they would admit her for an overnight stay. He wouldn’t have been surprised if they had decided to keep her. She’d looked like shit. The first sight of her, lying so still on a gurney with an oxygen mask strapped to her face had just about stopped his heart. Then she’d opened those large, espresso-dark eyes filled with such pain, it sparked a dangerous fury inside that went so deep it had no end.
    Unless he could make someone pay.
    He hadn’t been kidding when he’d tried to leave in order to track down that worthless fuckwad he’d seen with Sass a few months back. Jonas. That was his name. The pretty boy who paid as much attention to the sculpted line of his waxed eyebrows as he did to Sass, except when posing for selfies with her, when he’d slop his greasy tongue all over her neck or ear. That alone called for a rearranging of his face and potential ripping out of said tongue. At the very least Rude had been looking forward to hunting that little man-bitch down. But she’d caught onto his arm and wouldn’t let go.
    Sass might be fun-sized, but she could be fierce when she wanted to be.
    When she’d walked out of the ER a little after two in the morning, he’d gotten out to talk with her, trying to be magnanimous by not pitching a thoroughly justified fit over how she’d gotten him kicked out. But she’d walked straight to her car, tugged the door open, paused just long enough to flip him the bird, and drove off without uttering a single word.
    Of course, when she had that kind of sign language working for her, there wasn’t that much left to be said.
    But that didn’t mean he’d said all he wanted to say, he thought, jaw knotting as he pushed the button to her apartment. No way. Not by a long shot.
    “Yes?”
    He quirked a brow at her fast response. “I thought it’d take you a lot longer to answer, Sassy. Guess you’re moving around a lot better this morning, yeah?”
    There was such a long beat of silence that he figured he’d have to knock the rust off his lock-picking skills to get inside, before the intercom hummed to life. “Rude?”
    Honest to God, there wasn’t anyone on the planet who made him inwardly swear more than this woman.  “You know it’s me. Who else calls you Sassy?”
    “No one who wants to live.”
    Nice . “You gonna let me in?”
    “Let me think. No.”
    It was almost sad, how she continued to not surprise him. “Then I guess I’ll go and have breakfast with Anthony, Gino and Frankie, like I’d originally planned.”
    “Great. Buh-bye.”
    “Since you get along with all my siblings, I’m sure they’ll want to hear about what happened to you, so naturally I’m going to tell them the whole sorry tale. Frankie loves you to death, so she’ll probably blab to Izzi about it. Izzi and Gino are a lot alike, and neither one of them ever grew out of the tattletale phase. No doubt Izzi will tell Mom and Pop about you getting busted up by some unworthy jackhole, but even if she doesn’t, Gino will. Approximately one hour from now you’ll be hearing from them as they freak out from thousands of miles away, their time with their newest grandchild ruined because you wouldn’t—” The door buzzed and he caught it up fast before she could change her mind. “Let me in,” he finished under his breath.
    Rude, two. Sass, zero.
    He liked the sound of that.
    “Stop using your parents against me.”
    The words echoed to him as he made his way inside the century-old building. It was a beautiful, elegant place just on the edge of Millennium Park. It had classic Gothic bones and leaned toward the Old World definition of a private gentlemen’s club, complete with wood paneling on the walls and buff marble flooring. Only a few yards from the entrance was a wide, brass-accented carpeted staircase that swept up to a large landing some twenty feet up, alight with a wall of stained glass. From that large landing, twin stairways branched off on either side like