Jude used a spatula to place scrambled eggs on the buttered English muffins, then topped them with pepper jack cheese while four slices of ham sizzled in the skillet.
“I don’t.” Denial was a habit of mine when it came to Lilah. “I just don’t want us to lose focus. And fucking Lilah seems like a good fucking way to lose focus.”
I wasn’t even surprised when Lilah walked into the kitchen while my words were still hanging in the air. The woman was like a fucking cat slinking around the house.
“Any details Nolan left out?” Lilah asked, heading for the coffee pot. “Want to know how many times I came? How many times we fucked?”
Her words were full of bravado but I knew from the flush on her perfect fucking face that she was embarrassed.
She put a cup under the machine and pressed brew, then turned to face us, arms folded over her chest, green eyes flashing. “Or maybe you just want to know what it was like for Nolan to take my virginity, to literally fuck me over after doing it figuratively in high school.”
All the air seemed to be sucked out of the room. It was like that moment when someone gave away a secret they forgot they weren’t supposed to tell, like letting slip that the casual dinner you had planned for a friend was actually a massive surprise party.
The blood was pounding in my veins, roaring in my ears.
Lilah had been a fucking virgin. And Nolan had gotten there first.
It shouldn’t matter. It didn’t.
I repeated it in my head like a mantra:it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.
But the words did less than nothing to dampen the jealousy raging in my body, fighting to escape like a caged animal.
Nolan walked over to Lilah and kissed her forehead. He pulled her coffee out from under the machine and handed it to her. “No one said a word about your virginity, sweetheart.”
She took the coffee and looked up at him. “No one… what?”
“No one said anything about the fact that you were a virgin. Except you, just now.”
She chewed her lower lip and the pink in her cheeks turned to full-on scarlet. “Fuck.”
39
LILAH
The word had been echoingin my mind since Nolan had handed me coffee, through the moment when Jude handed me an egg-and-cheese English muffin wrapped in foil. It had continued as we’d descended the stairs to the garage, piling into the Jeep, me in the back with Jude, Nolan up front with Rafe.
Fuck.
I’d resigned myself to the vulnerability of fucking Nolan. I’d wanted it, had wanted him. Still did, truth be told. He’d made me come with his mouth again after Jude had left the room, then fucked me in the shower, my hands braced against the tile wall while he’d pounded into me from behind, reaching around to stimulate my clit until my orgasm shattered me into a million pieces.
But that resignation hadnotextended to all of the Bastards knowing I was a virgin.
That part felt private, the only thing I had left of my sexuality that belonged to me alone.
Which was why I hadn’t told Nolan before we’d had sex. I didn’t want it to be about my virginity, didn’t want Nolan tothink he had to be careful with me. Didn’t want him to pity me, a twenty-one-year-old virgin.
Who was a virgin at twenty-one?
Then I’d walked into the kitchen and blown the lid off my own secret like an idiot. I was glad to be sitting in the back where I could slump down and stare through the window.
My cheeks still burned with humiliation.
“She didn’t say what she’d found?” Nolan asked from the front seat.
I knew he was talking about Storm, about why we were driving to the beach to meet her at Breakers.
“No,” Rafe said.