“Goddammit, Lucian,” she muttered. “I can’t believe I almost let you do this again. Do you have industrial-strength pheromones or something? God. I really hate you. You suck.”
“I hate to point this out given the situation, but your hand is on my dick, Pixie. And if you move a muscle or take a deep breath or even make eye contact with me, I’m going to come.”
I realized the mistake a second too late.
Because she didn’t take her hand off my cock. No, the woman deliberately licked her bottom lip, shoved my hand into the top of her dress, and then gave my dick one hard jerk.
“Fuck,” I rasped as she held my aching hard-on in a death grip.
“Did you get what you wanted?” she whispered in my ear as her nipple taunted my palm. “Then go the hell home and forget I ever existed.”
As if that were physically possible.
“This isn’t what I wanted,” I said through clenched teeth.
She raised an eyebrow and gave my shaft another squeeze. She was so fucking beautiful when she was being diabolical. “Bullshit.”
“Shit. Fine. Okay. Of course this is what I wanted. You know how good it was between us,” I reminded her.
“I’m fully aware of how good the sex was. It was everything else that was subpar. I’m not settling for being someone’s weekend fuck buddy anymore. And I’m sure as hell not allowing some overgrown man-child to cast me aside like I’m nothing because he can’t deal with feelings. I’m out of your league, Lucifer. This was your last freebie.”
I wanted to kiss her. And judging from the look in those heavily lidded green eyes, Sloane was having similar thoughts. I wasn’t above taking advantage of that.
“There a problem?” I didn’t need to look up to know the Morgans had entered the hallway.
“I love you two like brothers, but if you don’t leave now, I’m going to rearrange your faces,” I threatened.
Sloane rolled her eyes and removed her hand from my throbbing dick. “Man-child.”
“Sloaney, which of us do you want to leave? Me and Knox or Rollins?” Nash asked.
She locked eyes with me, and I found that dark smudge in all that green. “I want Lucian to go,” she said firmly.
“Pix,” I whispered.
But she shook her head. “No more, Lucian. It’s time for you to go.”
My heart, if I actually had one, fell out of my chest onto the floor and was crushed under her boot as she turned and walked away from me.
“Let’s go outside, Luce,” Nash said in his cop voice. “You look like you could use a smoke break.”
Each brother grabbed an arm and hauled me through the kitchen and out the side door into the parking lot. For once, they were united, and perhaps for the first time ever, it was against me.
“You don’t get to treat her like that, Luce,” Nash announced when the door slammed shut behind us.
“I really wanna introduce my fist to his face,” Knox said through clenched teeth as his boots scuffed at the gravel.
“I get it, believe me. But we can’t,” Nash insisted.
“I hate not getting to punch people.”
“There’s nothing stopping you,” I said, deliberately taunting him. A fist to my face would feel better than the raw, jagged hole in my chest.
Knox’s fist relaxed, and then he was pushing a finger in my shoulder. “You’re lucky your dad was an abusive asshole. Otherwise, I’d be mopping the floor with your dumbass face.”
We’d scuffled as young boys always did. Thrown rocks at each other. Wrestled in the creek. But somewhere along the line, Knox and Nash had continued their pummeling of each other and I’d been left behind. They’d fought over toys, then bikes, then women.
“What does my father have to do with this?”
Knox looked to his brother for help.
Nash looked at his feet. “Why don’t we go get ourselves another round? Save ourselves the trouble,” he suggested.
“Not until you tell me why you make each other bleed on a weekly basis but you’re acting like I’m some delicate flower.” Using Sloane’s exact words made me miss the taste of her even more.
“Gettin’ hit doesn’t mean the same thing to us as it does you,” Knox said finally. “If I punch my pain-in-the-ass brother in the mouth, it’s because I love him and he pissed me off.”
“Expound,” I demanded.
“Fuck,” Nash muttered.
“Finish it,” I ordered, growing impatient.
“We don’t hit you because you got hit at home. Your dad wailing on you was all kinds of fucked up. Maybe we didn’t know exactly what was going on, but we weren’t stupid. Least not that stupid,” Knox amended.
“You two don’t fight with me because you think I don’t know the difference? That I can’t handle it?”
They glanced at each other, then shrugged. “Basically.” Nash said.
“Yup,” Knox agreed. “Besides, you’re more likely to throw some fancy lawyer than a punch.”
I took off my jacket and draped it over the tailgate of the nearest pickup.
Knox hooted. The side door of the bar opened, and Stef and Jeremiah stepped outside, holding their drinks.
“Told you we didn’t want to miss this,” Jeremiah said.
“Can’t we just have one night that doesn’t end in someone getting punched in the face?” Nash grumbled.
“Not tonight,” I decided.
“You sure about this?” Stef called to me. “There’s two of them and one of you.”
“You’re here,” I pointed out as I rolled up one sleeve.
“I am. But in this case, I’m Team Sloane. You dicked over a great girl—for reasons that probably made sense to you at the time but in reality are total shit. I gotta cast my vote with the Morgans here.”
His morals annoyed me.
“Same here,” Jeremiah agreed.
I turned my attention to my other sleeve, unbuttoning the cuff and beginning to roll it up. “I hate all of you. What the hell are you doing?”
Knox was pacing back and forth, rolling his neck and taking turns stretching each arm across his chest.
“Clearly this guy hasn’t been in a fight over the age of thirty,” Knox said conversationally to his brother.
“You gotta warm up,” Nash instructed, dropping into a squat.
Knox rolled his neck again and started performing shoulder circles.
“What happened to the days of sucker punching some unsuspecting asshole in a bar?” I asked.
“Throw a punch and pull a muscle in your back so bad you can’t wipe your own ass, then we’ll talk,” Nash advised, circling his arms backward, then forward.
“This is more anticlimactic than I thought,” I complained.
A fist shot out and rammed into my jaw, snapping my head back.
“That’s what happened to sucker punching, unsuspecting asshole,” Knox said cheerily as my head rang like the inside of a church bell. “Do better. Don’t treat women like shit. Especially not Sloane.”
“Christ.” I bent at the waist, rubbing my jaw and biding my time. “I didn’t treat her like shit. We agreed it was nothing, and then we ended the nothing.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it. Besides, you can’t be done already. Nash didn’t even get a shot yet,” Knox insisted, slapping me on the shoulder.
“Let’s go back in and drink,” Nash suggested, sounding disappointed.
“You didn’t get to hit him yet. It’s pretty fuckin’ satisfying,” Knox said.
“Guess I’ll just insult him and call him names for being a coward who’s afraid of a little blond librarian,” Nash said.
That little blond librarian was more terrifying than any of us, and we all knew it.
Knox was half turned to look at his brother and didn’t see me coming. My fist plowed into the side of his face with satisfying force. He stumbled sideways before recovering with a grin. “Now that’s more like it.”
“My turn,” Nash said, moving into position. “You don’t get to treat Sloane like she’s some one-night fuck. Doesn’t matter what went down between you two or how things end, you treat her with respect.”
“What are you two? Her big brothers?”
I feigned a punch and Nash ducked. He caught me with an uppercut to the solar plexus that knocked the breath right out of me. I swung again, glancing a shot off his jaw.
My friend, the goddamn chief of police, grinned wickedly and drew back his arm. I blocked, but not well enough. His blue-collar, law-abiding fist caught me on the bridge of the nose.