“If you thought I was a jerk, why would you say yes to Lily’s scheme?”
“Scheme?” Arlo laughs softly, placing her hand on my chest. “There was no scheme. She thought you were redeemable, and like me, she believes our pasts don’t define our futures. She just felt like you needed a few tweaks. And you were so good to me, I wanted to see if you were the man I thought you were.”
I lunge forward, pushing Arlo onto her back and put my body weight on her. I settle between her thighs, our bodies separated by a few scraps of cloth. “And what tweaks do I need?”
She looks up at me, her feet hooked behind my back, a smirk on her lips. “A few,” she teases, running her fingernails up and down my lower back.
My mouth finds her neck, and I kiss the spot right below her ear that makes her moan. “And what would they be?” I murmur against her skin.
“You could kiss lower,” she whispers, her body squirming underneath mine.
There isn’t an inch of her body I don’t want to kiss. My mouth needs to be intimately acquainted with every patch of her skin, knowing how it tastes or feels against my lips. But we haven’t gotten there yet. I’ve learned restraint, something I’d thought impossible.
I move my hands to her arms, stretching them above her head, and I hold them there as my mouth drifts lower. She arches her back, pushing her breasts upward, offering them to me for worship.
“Like this?” I sweep my bottom lip over the swell of her breasts, loving the way she feels and hating myself for liking this so much.
She grinds her middle against me, making it impossible to hold in my moan or stop my dick from getting rock hard. “Lower,” she tells me.
She’s beautiful like this. Natural and uninhibited, a wildness she never shows to the outside world but saves for me. There’s something precious about this side of her that she only shares with me. A sacredness to the way she stares into my eyes, burning for my touch.
I take her nipple between my lips and run my tongue across the top, wanting nothing more than to strip her bare and bury myself deep inside her.
She moans, her back arching like it has every other time I’ve had my mouth on her. Responsive isn’t even a strong enough word to describe Arlo when I taste her body.
There’s pounding at the front door, and Arlo stiffens underneath me. “Are you expecting company?”
I lift up, hanging my head, and I release Arlo’s arms. “No, but it’s never a good sign at this hour.”
“You better go,” she says, pushing against my shoulders when the pounding starts again.
I growl under my breath, hating whoever’s at my door after midnight. “I’ll be right back,” I tell her, adjusting my dick as soon as my feet are on the floor.
She sits up, reaching for the sheet to cover her breasts. “I’m not going anywhere,” she whispers.
I stalk out of the bedroom, down the hallway, and open the door without looking.
Standing on my front porch are two of my cousins, one leaning on the other, barely able to stay upright.
“Hey, cousin,” Rosie says with a big, fake-ass smile. “Luna got into a bit of trouble tonight.”
Shocking…not.
“And?” I ask, getting smacked right in the face with the stench of liquor coming off Luna, wrinkling my nose.
Rosie looks up at me from under her eyelashes, unable to make full eye contact. “I’m wondering if we can crash here tonight?”
I step forward, leaning against the doorframe as Luna sways, and somehow, Rosie keeps her from falling over. “And why would I let you do that? Why didn’t you go to your sister’s?”
“Fuck that,” Luna slurs, her eyes not focusing when she looks at me. “I don’t need the lecture from Gigi.”
“Shut it,” I tell Luna. “You don’t get a vote.”
“Fucker,” she mutters under her breath.
Rosie raises her eyebrows. “If you can’t tell, Luna’s pissed at Gigi. And I can’t take her home like this, or Mom and Dad will lose their shit. Please, please, please, can we stay here tonight?” Rosie begs.
“I have company.”
Rosie blinks, finally looking at me. “And that’s new how?”
I stare at her, my face conveying my unhappiness.
Rosie swallows and sighs. “You won’t even know we’re here,” she promises.
“We’ll be quiet,” Luna adds. “I just need to lie down before I…” She covers her mouth as her cheeks bulge.
“For fuck’s sake,” I hiss, stepping forward and scooping Luna into my arms before she barfs all over my hardwood floors. “This shit has got to stop.”
“It wasn’t her fault this time,” Rosie says, following me into the house as I carry Luna through the living room. “I swear. This time is not like the other times.”
The two of them have been nothing but trouble since the day they hit puberty. But instead of the rest of the family knowing about their party-girl, wild-child ways, they’ve used me and the other older cousins as cover.
“If your father finds out, he’s going to beat all of our asses, and I’m not looking to be black-and-blue.”
“He won’t.” Those words come from Rosie, and I know she won’t be the one spilling her guts because she’d be in just as much trouble as me, minus the bruises.
They are daddy’s girls like Gigi. Always the apples of their father’s eye as they did crazy shit on the down-low, keeping their status as good kids instead of hell-raisers.
They are nothing like their mom. Aunt Suzy is sweet, kind, and she has an innocence to her no one else with my family’s genetics has. But these girls don’t care, nor did they get virtue from their mom.
“Bathroom,” Luna groans, limp as a rag doll in my arms.
Arlo steps into the hallway, adjusting a T-shirt she must’ve grabbed from my room. “Everything okay?” she asks, eyeing Luna in my arms.
“She’s drunk,” I tell Arlo, motioning to the right with my head, needing to get around her with the dead weight.
She steps aside, letting me stalk past her to get the girl who hasn’t learned her limits to the toilet before she expels the contents of her stomach in the hallway. “What can I do?” Arlo asks Rosie.
“Nothing. She’ll be fine. This happens sometimes.”
Sometimes? I’d laugh if I weren’t so pissed at the two of them.
“It does?” Arlo asks her, clueless. “How often?”
“This time wasn’t her fault, though,” Rosie explains, but she doesn’t answer Arlo’s question.
The two of them have become masters of deflection. If they had been born with dicks…
They would be me.
The reality of that truth hits me square in the chest like a punch, knocking the wind out of me for a moment.
I push open the bathroom door with my foot and use my elbow to turn on the light before depositing Luna on the small rug in front of the toilet.
She groans, immediately moving her upper body over the toilet seat, hugging it like it’s her lifeline. “Go,” she tells me as her back starts to heave.
I don’t have to be told twice. I leave her there, clinging to the toilet to do her business for however long it takes her to get rid of the poison in her system this time.