Chapter Thirteen
Quinn Parker had never been accused of being a gentleman. But he knew that there were certain ways you treated a lady. And when a lady asked for something as nicely as Lark just had, he knew it was downright ungentlemanly to turn her down.
So he did what any gentleman in that situation would do. He hauled her onto his lap and started kissing her. Deep and long, his tongue sliding against hers. He speared his fingers into her hair and came up against a nest of tangles, but he didn’t care.
Because he was kissing Lark. And no matter how bad of an idea it was, he couldn’t bring himself to stop. Couldn’t find any motivation to.
She wanted him. He sure as hell wanted her. And he was going to have her.
He said a brief prayer of thanks, one he had a passing concern might be blasphemous, for the condom he’d put in his wallet, and for the fact that he had his wallet in his back pocket already. Because he didn’t want to haul her upstairs and hunt for protection. He didn’t want a bed. He didn’t want to wait. He wanted whatever surface they could find here, and he wanted it now.
“You need to invest in skirts,” he said, shifting them both so that she was lying back on the table and he was over her, between her parted thighs. “Think how much easier that would be.”
“We’re in the kitchen,” she said, her eyes round.
“Did I not get an order for varied locations? I thought I was contractually obligated.”
“It’s the daytime.”
“And I’ll get to see you.” He unsnapped her pants and tugged them down, moving himself out of the way when the position of his body started to impeded his progress. “Are you sore?” he asked.
“No. But you weren’t willing to take my word for it last night.”
“Apparently I’m selective about these things.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a condom, tearing the top off, freeing himself from his jeans and rolling it onto his length. “My chivalry just ran out.”
He put his hand between her legs and pushed a finger inside of her. She was slick, ready for him already. He added a second finger, just to be certain. The last thing he wanted was an outpouring of screaming and swearing again.
Well, actually, that would be fine, if it wasn’t pained screaming and swearing.
“Ready?”
“Yes, Quinn. Yes, please.”
That was almost too much for him. Enough to make him lose it then and there, before he ever got in. He gritted his teeth and pushed inside of her.
Dammit. She was so tight. So hot. He didn’t know how he was going to survive this. Somehow, in the few hours since they’d made love, he’d forgotten how it was. He’d forgotten just how intense it had been.
He’d forgotten that this little virgin had given him the best sex of his entire life. He’d thought he’d made that up. He’d thought, in the bright light of day, it couldn’t be possible. Because honestly, it had been awkward. And it had scared at least five years off of his life when she’d obviously been in so much pain. And the blood had scared off maybe three more.
So bearing all that in mind, he hadn’t really believed it was possible that she was the best he’d ever had.
But she was.
She arched beneath him and he realized his error in not taking her top off. He didn’t have access to her breasts. Those perfect pink breasts. But he didn’t want to struggle with her top right now either, because that would mean breaking his rhythm, and that, honestly, might kill him.
Slender legs wrapped around his hips, pulled him in harder. “Good?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, her voice a whimper. She hadn’t cussed at him. She hadn’t said “ow.”
He pushed deeper into her and she let out a short, sharp sound.
“Good,” she said, as if knowing what his next question would be. “So good.”
He increased his pace, watching Lark, her eyes closed tight, her head thrashing back and forth, her body arching into him, moving up to meet him with each thrust. The sight alone about did him in.
And then he felt a wave go through her body, her internal muscles tightening around his cock, stealing every chance he had at rational thought, stealing all of his control, and pushing him over the edge into the abyss.
He grunted, an actual grunt, like an animal, as his orgasm thundered through him like a stampede. He hadn’t been able to hold it back. Hadn’t been able to hold anything back because, for some reason, Lark Mitchell made him lose his mind.
As the haze faded, pleasure receding into the background, he had a concept of how much of an ass he looked like. Standing there at the table with his pants undone, inside a half-dressed woman, with his front door unlocked.
He looked like a man who hadn’t been able to wait. A man who had been half out of his mind. And that’s what he was.
Sobering. Like a bucket of ice water over the head.
He looked down at Lark, who was flushed, her lips deep pink, swollen. She looked dazed, which made him feel a little bit smug, but she also looked a little nervous, which made him feel like a terrible person. A defiler of innocents.
Damn that newly discovered conscience.
“Just a second,” he said, dashing for the half bath just off the kitchen to dispose of the condom before straightening his jeans and doing his belt back up. When he went back to Lark, she was dressing, tugging her pants on, doing a kind of one-legged hop as she did.
“Lark—”
There was a knock on the door that was closer to the punch of a battering ram than a polite request for entry.
“Lark,” he started again, and the battering ram slammed against his door again. “Just a second,” he called. “Stay here.”
She nodded, straightening her clothes and smoothing her hair with unsteady fingers. She still looked recently kissed, and thanks to the high color in her cheeks, pretty recently full-on tumbled, but he wasn’t going to tell her that.
He went to the door and jerked it open. “What?”
If the realization from a moment ago had been a bucket of ice water over the head, this was a block of ice thrown into his face. It wasn’t employees on his doorstep, or a religious faction with tracts. It was two very large, very suspicious-looking men that he happened to know were related to the woman he’d just defiled—that was the word he’d settled on earlier—on his kitchen table.
And in the split second it took him to register who they were, he could see the flash go off in Cade’s eyes. And suspicion turned to the desire to commit cold-blooded murder.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Cade growled, advancing on Quinn, not waiting to be invited in.
And that was all the time it took for the flashbulb to go off in Cole’s head. And then he had two men looking at him like they wanted to kill him.
“I live here,” Quinn said. “And I’m not sure what makes you think you’re the one with the right to just walk in.”
“You know good and well why,” Cade growled. Yes, the other man had a limp, but he also had a brother standing behind him who was just as big and just as angry. “You’re Longhorn?”
“What do you think, Sherlock?” he asked. If he was going to die, he wasn’t doing it meekly.
“Where is my sister?” Cade bit out.
Quinn hadn’t expected Cade to move so quickly, considering his limp, but it turned out he was pretty damn fast, and before Quinn could respond Cade had him by the back of the neck, ready to introduce his head to ground if Quinn made a wrong move.
Cade was lean—Quinn probably outweighed him by a good twenty pounds, thanks to muscle mass—but Cole was a house, and between the two of them? It was better to avoid bloodshed.
“I swear it, Quinn, I don’t care very much about my life at the moment, and that puts you in a damn dangerous place,” Cade said, his voice a low growl. “So if I were you, I’d start talking. Where. The hell. Is my sister?”
“She’s right here, a*shole, what are you doing?” Lark came out of the kitchen just then. The damn woman was trying to get him killed.
Cade released his hold on him and looked at her, and Quinn could feel the other man thinking, putting all the pieces together.
Shit.
“What are you doing here?” Cade asked.
“I work here,” she said. “And obviously, you already figured that out, or you wouldn’t be here.”
“I hoped to God it wasn’t true,” Cade said. “You work for him?”
“Yes, for him,” she said, her voice trembling, arms crossed beneath her breasts, chin thrust upward. “Looks like we’re both good at keeping secrets. Oops.”
Cole’s lip twisted up into a snarl. “You bratty little hypocrite,” he said. “You were keeping this from us? And you have the nerve to get all up on my ass for not telling you about dad?”
“Totally different. One only needed to affect my life and my choices; the other was something that concerned me, and was hurting someone else so you could protect me. It’s different.”
“How is it different?” Cole asked, advancing on her.
“I didn’t know I took a job with Quinn when I first signed. I didn’t know who Longhorn Properties was either. Surprise, it was him, but I’d signed the contract already.”
It was a nice stay of execution, the three of them going over fine details. Quinn wasn’t complaining. He wasn’t looking forward to what was going to happen when Cade’s very slow deductive reasoning skills took him to the obvious point of conclusion.
“And you didn’t think to ask me for help?”
“I didn’t need help. I had a job. So look at it from my perspective. Either I break the contract and I owe him money, or I work like I’m supposed to and he owes me money. And, I might add, if I owed him, it’s money I don’t have, so it would have been you paying him. I walked into an impossible situation and I did the best I could.”
Cade crossed his arms over his chest. “What the hell do you call the situation we’ve been in? Im-damn-possible. Sometimes you make a bad choice. And since you should know that, I expect better, more adult behavior than what you treated us to last night. Act like a baby and I’ll damn well continue to treat you like one.”
As Lark looked between him and her brother, Quinn called himself a villain a thousand times over. Because she looked so torn. So anguished. So angry. And it was his fault. If he’d never touched her, at least she would only be defensive over her position as his employee. Not over the fact that they’d had sex no more than ten minutes ago.
And then the attention was back on him.
“Where did you stay last night?” Cole asked, his voice suddenly turned to ice, the question directed at Lark, his eyes resting on Quinn.
Quinn looked at Lark and tried to send a quick, telepathic plea for her not to get too defiant. She didn’t get the message.
She looked at her brother directly, her eyes glittering. With rage. With tears. With determination. “Here.”
Quinn expected Cade to question her on what that meant, since they’d been standing there talking for the past few minutes. So the impact of Cade’s knuckles on his jaw was unexpected. Unexpected enough that he lost his balance and fell into the wall, the side of his head striking the corner of the doorway.
“Shit.” He held on to the side of his face and felt around inside his mouth with his tongue for missing teeth. Thankfully, there weren’t any, but he couldn’t see straight.
“Did you touch my sister?” Cade grabbed him by the shirt collar and slammed him against the wall. He was still too dazed to fight back. “You sick f*cker. Did you touch my sister? It wasn’t enough for you to mess me up, but you had to . . . for what? Because you’re pissed that you got caught cheating?”
He wanted to be defensive. He wanted to get mad and defend . . . his honor? He didn’t have any. But hers, maybe. The thing was, that was what had happened. He’d been pissed and he’d plotted a way to get back at Cade, and even though that wasn’t why he’d slept with Lark in the end, the result was the same. He was still standing here, with Cade’s knuckle-print on his face, having divided their family.
And yeah, his head hurt like hell. But Lark was going to be hurt too. That was the part he couldn’t reconcile. The part that made his gut ache.
But it was Cade’s fault. In the end, it was Cade’s fault. And he’d be damned if he thought of it differently. To hell with standing here and taking punches. He wasn’t the one laying down false accusations. He wasn’t the one ruining a man’s life because of his own stupid grudge against someone for not being friendly enough.
Yeah, Cade was like everyone else. He’d looked at him, and he’d seen the bad blood.
“I didn’t do anything to you,” he ground out. “I wouldn’t waste my time trying to beat you by sabotaging you.”
“So show me who did it, Parker. Who on the circuit? Everyone else is my friend.”
“Or everyone else bothers to fake it and pretend they like you. It’s a competition. Grow up, dumbass, none of us were friends. I just didn’t play games.”
“You’re wrong about that. We are all friends. We just didn’t like you. Now I’m only going to ask you one more time before we kick the ever-loving shit out of you, what did you do to my sister?”
“Stop it,” Lark said. “I mean really, stop it. You insulting . . . horrible . . . go away.”
“Lark, did he hurt you?” Cole asked.
“Get out,” Lark said.
“Us?”
“Yes, you,” Lark said, directing her anger at her brothers. Just how he’d hoped.
No. This wasn’t the plan anymore.
Does it matter? It’s what’s happening.
“How could you do this?” Cade asked, the question directed at Lark. “How could you work for this bastard, come hide out with him just because you got mad at us? How the hell can you stand there and as me to get out? I sacrificed for you. I feel more like a parent than your brother and the whole time you were . . . shit, I don’t even want to know.”
“Did you ever stop and think maybe this isn’t about you, Cade?”
“How can it not be? You go around trying to tell us how smart you are, and I can only assume you’re either stupid, or you don’t know who this guy really is.”
Silence fell between them, thick with anger. Lark’s cheeks were pink, tears pooling in her eyes. Quinn didn’t know if she was going to dissolve or explode.
She didn’t do either.
“Sure I do,” Lark said, hands on her hips, her tone strangely calm. “I know exactly who he is. Quinn Parker, former rich boy, ex-con turned rodeo rider currently barred from the circuit. Occasional bouts of a*sholeishness followed by moments of shocking decency. Good with his hands.”
Damn. He was going to get killed. She was going to get him killed.
“Anything else you want to know?” Lark asked.
Cade looked like he was going to throw up. Or hit something. “Did he . . . did you?”
“Is that your business?” she asked.
“You did. You f*cked him,” he spat, his voice laced with venom. “Even though you know what he did to me, you let him put his hands on you.”
And just like that, Quinn saw red. “Back off, Mitchell,” he growled. “If you want to be pissed at me, that’s fine, but you have no right to come in here and start yelling at her. You have no right to talk to her like that.”
“Where the hell do you get off telling me what I have the right to do, Parker? I’m her brother—who are you?”
And Quinn made the decision that, as days went, this was an okay one to die. “I’m her lover.”
Yeah. Shit. Getting your nose broken hurt. It wasn’t his first time getting his nose broken, but it had been a long time. The impact was so intense he saw stars, and very little else, because his eyes were watering like a son of a gun and his knees shook, giving out beneath him.
Back in his bar brawling days he’d done a lot better. And it had hurt less. Maybe because he was usually drunk when he got into those fights. Now he was eight years too sober to be taking hits to the face.
“Out!” Lark screamed.
He heard Lark shouting through his haze of unholy pain. Finally his vision started clearing, and he stood back up, wiping the blood off of his face with the back of his arm.
“Not without you.” Cole or Cade, he couldn’t hear the difference in the pain haze.
“Are you going to pick me up and carry me out? Because I don’t think you can do that. I am an adult, you’re on Quinn’s property, and you just assaulted him. I will call the cops on you, Cade, I swear it. Please don’t make me.”
“Lark . . .” Cade said, his voice choked.
“I’m serious. I would rather keep it between you and me. But if you don’t get the hell out right now, I’m not afraid to escalate it.”
He looked up and saw Cade walk out. Cole stood for a while and looked at Lark, who had a tear tracking down her cheek.
“Door’s open if you want to come home,” Cole said. “But you have to come alone.”
Cole turned away and slammed the front door shut, and Lark’s hand was on his arm.
“Are you okay?”
“Broken nose,” Quinn said, suddenly a little bit embarrassed that he hadn’t put in a better showing for Lark. But the alternative had been punching her brother, and then she would have been mad at him and not them. “Not the first time. But I feel like I should be asking you if you’re okay.”
“I can’t believe he did that to you. I can’t . . . what were they doing coming here to defend my virtue?”
“You did have virtue.”
“They don’t know that.”
“Honey, I’m sure they did. How many dates have you been on recently?”
“You haven’t taken me on a date. You’ve taken me on a table though.”
“Yeah, well”—he wiped at the blood running down his face again—“I’m still imagining they had a fair idea. Which, whether you like it or not, makes you the innocent party and me the guilty one. Plus, I think Cade would cheerfully slit my throat in a dark alley regardless of my relationship with you, so this just gave him a really handy excuse to go on a hate rampage with my face.”
“Maybe you should get a tissue. Or a drop cloth. You’re sort of having your own personal plague of blood coming out your nose.”
He looked down at his arm and winced. “Yeah.”
“He’s an ass.” She brushed a tear from her cheek, her shoulders shaking.
“Hey.” He put his hand on her cheek. “Are you okay?”
“No,” she said, her voice thick. “I’m not. I wanted to . . . have this and not have them know. I wanted to make a grand gesture without actually having to face any consequences for it.”
“You could have gone with them.”
She shook her head. “No. I couldn’t. But I have to . . . I have to make my own decisions. My own mistakes. They have to let me someday. Today’s a good day to start.”
“Fair enough,” he said, his chest tightening when she said the word mistake.
“I can’t believe he did that to you,” she said, wiping a tear from her cheek.
“Okay, I don’t like your brother, let’s get that straight right now.”
“It wasn’t unclear to me, ever, how you felt about Cade,” she said.
“Yeah, well. I’m making sure you know. I don’t like him. But in his position? I probably would have done the same thing.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. And my sister is older.”
“So you’re all sexist asshats who think women can’t make their own decisions?”
“No. We’re brothers. We’re protective. Right or wrong. Double standard or not.”
“It’s not fair.”
“Fair doesn’t come into it. It’s all gut-level emotion, which isn’t exactly logical.”
“You haven’t really talked a lot about your brother and sister,” she said.
“I didn’t know we were sharing personal stuff,” he said.
“Uh . . . my brother just got all up in your grill, and you know my dirtiest family secret. Do you need any more? Cade used to wet the bed; it’s true. Oh, and because of some old debts that I’m now certain are connected to my dad, we’ve been struggling financially.”
“Really?”
“Well, we have money, but getting enough cash flow to keep the ranch going has been tough. The only thing bailing our asses out are the new contracts Cade helped get us for providing stock to the Rodeo Association. There. I shared. I shared dirty personal stuff. Spill your secrets, Parker.”
He tried not to let that thought linger in his mind, tried not to weigh the significance of it. Of what it could mean for him. Of how he could use it.
He looked at Lark instead. At the sincerity on her face. At the concern in her eyes. Even while she was in her own personal hell, she was worried about him.
“Follow me to the bathroom so I can mop my blood up and I’ll tell you.” He blinked, and a pain shot through the bone in his nose up to his forehead. Then he started toward the bathroom.
Lark closed the lid on the toilet and sat, watching him as he stood at the sink and cleaned the blood off of his arms.
“How many brothers?”
“Two,” he said. “One sister. All older. All blond. Pale.” He looked up at the mirror, at his busted-up face and brown eyes. “They all have blue eyes too,” he added.
“So you don’t belong.”
“No. And I know why.”
“Your dad.”
“Yes, the man who fathered me. I don’t actually have a dad. Not the man I was raised to call that, and not the man whose genes I share. It’s funny, because I still consider my mother’s husband to be my dad. He’s who I think of when I hear the word.”
“Have you met your real father?”
He nodded slowly, still looking in the mirror. “For about thirty seconds.”
The front door to the modest track house had opened to reveal a shocked-looking man. A man with eyes that matched his own.
“He told me to go away,” Quinn said. “Because his real family couldn’t find out about me.” He looked down at the sink, at the bloody water running down the drain. “That’s the story of my life, really. I was a bomb. Talking about me too much, or in the case of my real father, acknowledging me at all, would have blown up people’s lives. My mother’s husband pretended not to know so that he didn’t cause a scandal. My mother pretended I didn’t exist. That she’d never had her moment of insanity. I’m this thing they made that doesn’t fit anywhere in their lives.”
She stood up and walked behind him, reaching around his body and putting her hands beneath the water. Then she put her palm on his forearm and slid it over his skin, over the blood that was still there.
“You fit, Quinn. You fit with me.” She moved her hand to his jaw and removed the blood there too. “You fit in me.”
“Not at first.”
“Well, you do now. Turn and face me.” He did. She grabbed a hand towel from the rack by the sink and wetted it, smoothing it over his face. “I’ve never gotten to take care of anyone before. Everyone’s always taking care of me.”
This felt weird. Wrong. Because it felt so right. Because it made his heart feel like it was too big for his chest. Like he could stand there, in the tiny bathroom, forever, with his face bleeding and Lark Mitchell taking care of him.
It didn’t feel like a couple weeks. It didn’t feel temporary.
But it was. Nothing would change that fact.
“Well,” he said. “No one ever took care of me, so . . .” He cleared his throat. “I kind of like it.”
“Yeah, well, don’t make a habit of this.”
“I used to,” he said. “Make a habit of getting the shit beat of me.”
“What changed?”
“The rodeo. I got serious about it. I won’t say I stopped being a drunk jackass the minute I got into the circuit, but it started easing then. Having a goal gave me a purpose.” He winced. “I was a better fighter then, or maybe alcohol just made me think I was. Ten foot tall and bulletproof. I miss the feeling a little bit today.”
“We could go get a drink.”
“Nah. I can’t.”
“Off the ranch,” she said.
He shook his head, for some reason a little embarrassed to make his next admission. “I don’t drink anymore. At all.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I . . . I don’t know if I was an alcoholic; I wasn’t drinking all day. But I was more prone to being an ass when I was drunk, and I got drunk pretty much every night. That started early on. I got a DUI when I was sixteen. Kinda kept up with the drinking through my early twenties. In bars, so I would say, ‘Yeah, well, I’m not drinking alone,’ like that made it okay. Then one day I was hungover before a big ride. I fell off the damn horse and into the dirt almost before he was out of the gate. I didn’t feel so bulletproof right then. I looked like a fool. I felt like one. I lost the event. I never drank again. Eight years sober.”
“The circuit really changed you.”
“Yes, it did. For the better. Being without it seems to be bringing out the worst in me.”
Lark’s hands shook while she kept dabbing at the blood on Quinn’s face. She was so angry. So beyond angry that Cade had hit him. That Quinn hadn’t fought back. Even while knowing she would have been mad at Quinn if he had fought back.
“And in Cade,” she said.
“He thinks I stole what he loves,” Quinn said, his dark eyes intent on hers. She didn’t know if he meant the rodeo or her.
“But you didn’t,” she said. Either way, it was true. Because she was going to be left without Quinn in a few weeks, and she didn’t believe that Quinn had done anything to hurt Cade.
Not the man she knew. The man who had been consumed with guilt after taking her virginity. The man who cared so much about her satisfaction. The man who’d drawn her a bath and cleaned up her blood. Like she was doing for him now.
The man who had been rejected by everyone who was supposed to love him.
That man wasn’t perfect, but she had no trouble believing him now when he said he hadn’t done anything to Cade.
Which was why, as much as it hurt to know she’d made Cade feel betrayed, she’d stayed. Because he didn’t deserve their hate. He didn’t deserve the consequences he was living. As much as she ached to go with her brothers, too much of her was with Quinn. Walking away was impossible. It shouldn’t be, but it was.
“You’re so sure?” he asked.
“My brother just beat the sassy out of you with his fists, and you didn’t do anything about it.”
“Fighting is stupid.”
“And so is cheating. So is cheating when the cost is going to be worth so much more than the gain. You’re not a stupid man, are you, Quinn?”
He leaned in, and she looked at his nose. At the purplish bruising spreading from the bridge and down beneath his eyes. “I might be. I think this . . . us . . . it’s probably kind of stupid.”
“Well, thanks,” she said, her next stroke of the wash cloth over his skin a little bit too hard. “Should I be glad to be your moment of stupidity?”
“I’m your big mistake, aren’t I?”
“Fair enough. And next time please don’t let my brother use your face as a punching bag.”
“Next time?”
“Well, you know, yeah. Can you imagine how dead you would be if he’d caught us on the table?”
Quinn laughed, a humorless sound. “The authorities would be scouring the woods for bits of my bones.”
“They’re so stupid. Like I didn’t have a choice. Like I didn’t drive here myself.” She knew it wasn’t that simple. She knew they thought that Quinn had nearly killed Cade, and in the beginning, she had too.
But not now.
She’d known it, deep down, probably since that night in his truck. Because he just wasn’t the villain he’d been made out to be. Sure, he was rough, but he wasn’t the bad guy in the story. She just knew.
Maybe . . . maybe she could make them see.
“Lark, you’re going to have to make up with them eventually.”
“Like when you leave?”
He shrugged. “If you want to leave it that long.”
A wave of embarrassment hit her. “Sorry, I realize you didn’t offer to let me stay here, and that’s sort of what all this . . . sounds like. Like I’m inviting myself.”
“Hey, I wouldn’t complain about having you here. But we do have a bunch of teenage boys staying, so it just can’t be too obvious you’re sleeping with me.”
“Setting a good moral example?”
He snorted, then winced. “Hell no. I’m incapable of that. But it would go one of two ways. Either they’d see you were with me and leave you alone for fear I’d squash their heads like grapes if they touched you, or they would see that you were a woman engaging in a sexual relationship and decide you were game for them.”
“Oh.”
“In which case they’d find their hoodlum asses sent back to where they came from. I can take a lot. If they want to cuss and yell and generally be horrible snots for a while, fine. But if they disrespect any of the women here—you or anyone else—it’s over.”
Her heart tightened, and her certainty in her decision, about Quinn, about staying with him, intensified.
“I’ve come to a conclusion,” she said, standing back and assessing him. She’d gotten his face clean, but his nose was swollen, and he had bruising spidering out from there and along his jaw.
“What’s that?”
“Now that I’ve seen so much of it, I’m convinced.”
“Of what, darlin’?”
“Quinn Parker, I don’t think you have a drop of bad blood in you.”
Something changed in his eyes. For a moment he looked lost, sad. Then it disappeared, replaced instead by that sort of steady, emotionless void that was always in Quinn’s eyes.
“I wish that were true, but it’s not.”
“You’ve never done anything to hurt me.”
He laughed, and it chilled her down to her bones. “Baby, I’m hurting you right now. Every minute you spend with me is saving up more and more hurt to cash in when I leave. I’ve already messed things up with Cole and Cade.”
“They messed it up themselves. I get that there’s no way Cade is going to be thrilled that I’m with you, but if he just got to know you . . .”
“I’m having sex with you, and he’s perfectly aware of that, which means any chance he had of liking me is over.”
“That’s stupid. Cade’s had sex with, like . . . a million women.”
“Double standard, like I said, it’s a brother thing. I’m sure he would even agree, but I’m sure he wouldn’t care either.”
She started to unbutton his shirt. “You have blood on this. It’ll stain. And you really seem to understand him for someone who considers him a mortal enemy.”
“I have a feeling we’re a lot alike. Don’t repeat that. Ever.”
“Both boneheaded dumbasses?” she said, pushing the shirt off of his shoulders and throwing it onto the ground.
“I told you I was stupid.” He bent down and kissed her lips. “You make me stupid, Lark.”
“How hard did you hit your head?”
“Hard,” he said. “You’re going to have to stay with me and make sure I don’t fall asleep. If I sleep I’ll slip into a coma and die.”
“Liar.”
“Come back upstairs with me.” His voice was rough and sexy and his face was swollen and misshapen. And she wanted to go upstairs with him. Wanted to start the day again, in Quinn’s arms, without all this crap with Cole and Cade.
Because very suddenly she wasn’t high on adrenaline. And she wasn’t even angry. She was just tired. And sad and confused. Every tear she’d already shed threatened to build into an endless stream of them.
She forced a smile. “I can never resist a man with a flattened nose.”
“If I would have known that, I would have had your brother hit me weeks ago.”
“Quinn, I was just being nice. You look like a raccoon.” He laughed and she went up on her toes and kissed the tip of his nose. “I’ll totally still bang you though.”
“Thank God he didn’t kick me in the balls.” He swept Lark up into his arms and she flailed, putting on palm on the wall.
“Hey! What are you doing? You’re bruised and beaten. Put me down.”
“He only hit my face. My body’s fine.”
“I’ll say.” He looked at her and she smiled, some of the sadness easing. “You going to show me how fine?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“My knees are weak.”
Quinn took them out of the bathroom and started up the stairs. “Good thing I’m carrying you, then.”
“Just don’t drop me.” Her eyes clashed with his and she tightened her hold on his neck. And she suddenly didn’t feel like that was part of the joke.
Please, Quinn, please don’t drop me.
Unfortunately, even in his strong arms, she was afraid she was already falling.