Just don’t set one off.
If he were my nineteen-year-old wild-hearted brother, I’d rip the bottle out of his hand.
Jane shoots out of her seat and careens forward. “Eliot. You promised you’d be better about this.” She tries to steal the wine.
He yanks back. “I’m not drinking in excess, Jane.”
She reaches further.
He lifts the wine over his head and gasps. “Why so edgy? We’re all just talking. For now.” He winks at me.
I’m not scared.
But I also can’t tell if he’s bluffing. There could be nothing but smoke behind the curtain. For as intensely as they’re studying my stern features, I’m guessing they can’t read me any better than I can them.
Jane snaps at Eliot in French. He responds with less heat in the same language, and while they argue, Charlie tears the wine out of Eliot’s hands.
“Brother,” Eliot glares.
Charlie ignores him and puts the bottle to his lips.
Comms sound in my ear. “Take the wine from Charlie,” Oscar instructs. “He’ll appreciate it.”
Copy that. I listen to Charlie’s bodyguard and extend my hand towards the Merlot.
Charlie scrutinizes me for a long oxygen-caging second. He wipes the corner of his mouth with a finger, his intrusive eyes crawling down me. And then he passes me the wine.
“You have to drink it,” Oscar says.
I almost stiffen. Don’t freeze up like a motherfucking shitbag.
I try to kick my ass into gear, but a nagging voice growls, stay sober. Adding to the mess upstairs in my head, Eliot and Tom’s Epsilon bodyguards start spewing shit on comms.
“Stop helping Thatcher.”
“This shouldn’t be easy for him. He fucked the team.”
They want me to hear their complaints. Or else they’d forget the radio and just turn to Oscar who’s beside them at the bar.
Guilt hammers my ribcage, but I shove it down. I’ve got an objective to see through.
Make a choice.
I swig the wine, and then I lower my radio volume a notch before handing the bottle to Jane.
“Thank you,” she says softly to me and takes the heftiest gulp. Scratch that—three gulps, and just when I think she’s done, a second from taking the bottle, she holds up a finger and swallows more wine.
She has a high tolerance. She’s not approaching drunk. Probably not even buzzed, and I’m glad one of us can down that much right now.
I curve my arm around her chair. Waiting for when she’s ready.
She finally shoves it in my opened hand. “Liquid reinforcements,” she whispers to me, wine trickling down her chin. I wipe the red liquid off with my thumb.
She blushes, and our eyes attach deeper.
Blood pulses in my cock, and I could kiss Jane. I’m a millisecond from dipping my head down—
“Do you have anything to say?” Beckett asks, stealing my attention. He blows a filmy line of smoke upward.
I nod a few times.
He’s calm, but I can’t discount the threatening look in his eye. They’re all protective of their older sister. And I understand how they’d want to guarantee no harm invades her life. Fuckbags after targets after shitheads surround her on a daily basis, and if they need me to prove that I’m not one of them, they don’t even need to command me to jump.
I’ll already be off the ground.
“Yeah,” I nod, about to start talking in length. “Look, I love Jane—”
“That’s funny,” Charlie cuts me off. “Considering a week ago, none of us thought you were even attracted to her.”
It throws me back. Not physically.
I’m mentally wrenched to a moment I shared with Jane.
To the night she told me her brothers and little sister wanted her to “open herself up” to love, and subsequently heartbreak. Because they thought her feelings were one-sided, un-fucking-reciprocated, and that I’d never be interested in her sexually or romantically.
She gushed all of this to me.
And then as I was tying my boots, she said, “I can’t blame them, really.”
I knotted my lace. Thinking she’d mention how I wasn’t easy to read. That I was too stoic for her siblings to conclude anything but disinterest on my end. Or at the very least, that I was a professional bodyguard and I would’ve forced my dick down during the fake-dating op.
But she said, “Your type doesn’t usually fall for my type in popular culture.”
It struck me hard. Painfully. I sent a narrowed look over my shoulder. “Why wouldn’t my type be into you?”
She rolled on her side, pink sheet draped over the curve of her wide hip and belly. Wavy brown hair frizzed wildly around freckled cheeks. Her small breasts exposed and nipples perked—and my cock twitched with an aggressive, primal hunger.
If she was a lion, then I was the animal that wanted to mount the fuck out of her and play around with her until she was one beautiful whimpering mess. Spent and safe and satiated in my arms.
I didn’t want to leave her room. I wished I could listen to her talk while the sun rose and set. Every second. Every day.
But I had to go.
Zero three hundred hours. On the dot. Or else my fucking carriage would morph into a pumpkin.
“It’s just that…” Jane trailed off, giving me a long once-over. Her aching breath pushed her lips apart. She fixated on my dark hair tucked behind my ears and my jawline and my tall, muscular build. “You’re blatantly hot and fit in the realm of Vikings and billboard jocks. I’m—”
“Gorgeous,” I interjected. Not hesitating to cut her off there.
A soft noise left Jane, eyes melting. “I…” Flustered, she sat up slightly on the headboard. “We’ve been through this. I have a strong love for myself, you know, but I recognize that classically, I’m not the world’s definition of beauty.”
“You’re mine,” I said with power and force. Feeling pissed off, I shifted my glare onto the wall and grabbed my black button-down off the ground. I was boiling.
Not at her.
But at the media outlets, tabloids, and spineless pricks that constantly critiqued Jane’s appearance. That pitted her against whatever the popular body type is of the fucking millennium.
It was horseshit.
Jane went quiet.
I finished buttoning my shirt, and I trekked stringently to the end table. Collecting my things. I holstered my gun on my waistband. “There shouldn’t even be an ideal woman.”
I caught her smile.
She cleared her throat. “I agree.”
We stared at each other for a long time, unsaid things reinforcing more tension and strength between us, and I broke the silence. “If your brothers and sister are assuming that I can’t be attracted to you because I’m classically hotter, then that’s outright fucked up.”
Her siblings never met any of her friends-with-benefits. Including Nate, who looks like an A-list Hollywood actor that spent time shoving kids against lockers in high school. But even if Charlie had shaken hands with Nate, I was sure he’d say that he’d been using Jane.
“My siblings would weigh all probabilities, I think,” Jane said softly. “And maybe it hurts them to assume this. But we’re all smart enough to know that the emotion inside a fact doesn’t make the fact any less true.”