My nipples were hard, my pussy throbbing as his hard dick pressed into my stomach. The heat of his bare chest burned through my shirt, and I was suddenly desperate to rip off my clothes and feel his heat on my bare skin.
He tugged at my lower lip with his teeth, then kissed his way along my jaw, and I tipped my head back with a sigh, relishing the burn of his lips along my neck, across my chest.
He cupped one of my tits over my shirt and rubbed his thumb over my erect nipple, then dropped his head to take my tit in his mouth right through my shirt.
I laced my fingers in his hair, shocked by how silky the strands were in my fingers, and braced myself for the heat of his mouth.
Which was right when the vacuum roared to life.
Beck drew back, his hand still on my tit, his eyes glazed with the same brand of lust that was humming through my veins. “What the…?”
“Looked like you needed a hand,” Dane said over the roar of the vacuum, his gray eyes hard as flint.
I’d been so consumed by Beck’s kiss, by his hands on my body, that I hadn’t even seen Dane enter the room.
Talk about being caught in a compromising position.
“A hand?” Beck let go of my tit.
Dane walked past us to the stairs. “With the vacuum.”
I dropped my head onto Beck’s shoulder, my face burning as Dane continued up the stairs.
13
DANE
I was still fumingwhen I drove away from the house the morning after I found Beck making out with Avery in the foyer. I’d spent the night avoiding everyone in the house, stewing over the image, now seared into my memory, and trying to figure out why I was so fucking pissed.
Beck and I weren’t even friends. More like business associates, if Evelyn’s house and bakery were both businesses.
And I barely knew Avery.
Not only that, but what I did know, I didn’t like. She could make all the excuses she wanted, but she’d abandoned Evelyn in her old age, had left her with a bunch of hired strangers instead of family.
And yeah, I liked to think Evelyn came to think of Noah, Beck, and me as a kind of family, but it wasn’t the same.
So why did I keep picturing Avery with her arms around Beck’s neck? Why did I keep seeing her luscious body pressed against that fucker’s nakedness?
And why thefuckdid Beck insist on cleaning in his underwear?
I huffed a deep sigh as I navigated my black Lexus down Main Street and onto one of the side streets that ran to the outskirts of town.
I needed to stop thinking about Avery Hart. I had bigger problems.
We all did.
Because Avery had been right when we’d talked about the investigation the night she’d found Pembroke’s body in the gazebo: we were all suspects.
Just the thought made me twitchy.
That was the thing about having a background like mine: you didn’t feel part of civilized society, even when you were able to fake it on the outside. I’d worked hard — had fought hard — to drive the black Lexus, to have a respectable job with a respectable employer like Evelyn.
But it hadn’t always been that way, and I knew it was only a matter of time before Sheriff Crowe homed in on me and my background as a foster kid. I’d never been in any trouble, but I wasn’t part of the cute little world that was Blackwell Hollow.
Not really.
Noah’s family had been in the area for ages, working the land before his mom died and his dad lost the farm, and Beck was tight with his family, close with his siblings, all of whom had grown up as part of the town.