“Shut up.”
“Suit yourself.” He shrugs and walks away, leaving me with my hyperactive phone, and I’m forever grateful he goes straight to Jack to help him with the beer delivery.
I trudge back inside and drag myself into the shower. I’m sentimental enough that I hate washing what Jack and I did this morning from my skin. It’s only sweat, but the thought of it sliding down the drain hurts my heart. When I get out, my phone is still ringing. My dad this time, and I ignore him too in favour of placing a call of my own.
Cam O’Brian picks up on the third ring. Voice gravelled and rough with sleep. I’ve woken him up, but I don’t care.
“Did you thump my dad?”
A pause expands. The click of a lighter as Cam lights one of the smokes he’s been trying to quit since his twenties. “Why are you asking me that?”
“Someone did. My ma says he has a black eye.”
“So he probably deserved it.”
“So it was you?”
“Boyo, if I’d decked your dad he’d have no bones left in his fucking face.”
I flinch. “Don’t say that.”
“You asked.”
“No, I asked if you did it. Not how badly you’d maim him if you had.”
“Because you already know,” Cam counters. “You think I’m gonna go to the trouble of hunting your old man down just to give him a little tap?”
“You said you’d give him a couple of days to make it right. It’s been a couple of days.”
“Those days were foryou.” Impatience bleeds down the line. “So you could make better decisions than running all over town trying to fix something that’s always going to be fucking broken unlessDavwants to move heaven and earth to change it. I was never going to go after him for a couple of grand. Not unless you want?—”
“I don’t.”
“Fine. So what the fuckdo youwant from me?”
Wish I knew.
But I don’t, so I hang up on Cam without answering the question and press my fist to my lips, frustration searing my veins. My phone rings in my hand and something feral snaps loose in my chest. A throttled shout claws its way out and I bunch my muscles to hurl the phone at the wall—to give Skylar’s dent from the summer some company. To make the sheernoisein my head a tangible force of destruction?—
Strong fingers close around my wrist. Sure of their path. The phone still vibrating as Jack’s hand curls fully, warm and immovable, stopping me dead. “Don’t. It’ll haunt you later.”
He’s not wrong.
I drag in a stressed breath, one that burns on the way down, my pulse booming in my ears, and without the pleasure Jack gave me this morning to soften the impact—that hurts too. “I didn’t hear you coming.” I rarely do, but I like to tell Jack. In case he’s got to thinking he’s anything less than a solid wall of sheer muscle with tread as light as a piskie.
A six-four piskie who tosses my rowdy phone onto my bed and crowds my space, anchoring me in body heat and pure man.
Damn.
Arousal I can usually contain flares to life, the memory of his lips on my skin, his breath hot in my ear as he gripped my cock?—
Stop.
I try, but I’m as weak now as I was this morning, and I lean into his touch, closing my eyes as his thumb shifts where he pins my wrist, ghosting over the pressure point, stirring a hoolie in my blood. A storm that’s all gentle rain and soft waves, building and building and building, until there’s nothing gentle about it.
My eyes fly open.
Jack lets go of my wrist to slide that wicked hand along my jaw, and I’m so powerless to his oblivious possession of me.