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“Living with Cullen, she has to know the Preacher brothers are stubborn as fuck.”
Frankie grunted his agreement.
I stared my twin, and he glared right back at me before exhaling as if frustrated.
I brought up the whole Zoey being taken situation with him days ago, but he’d blown it off. I knew he agreed with me to an extent. We weren’t like Dom and Cullen, but we weren’t always good guys either. And after bringing it up to him again right now, knowing we had to really talk about this and figure out what the fuck was going to happen, his sour-ass mood came back tenfold.
Kimber and Amelia had taken Zoey out of the room so I could talk to Frankie about it and not make her even more uncomfortable. She’d been staying in the guest room with me, even after I mentioned she could stay in my room down the hall. She just shook her head and said she was good here. I wondered if she wanted to tell me that she could just leave, stay in her own place, but thank fuck that conversation hadn’t been brought up. I didn’t know if I could have kept my inner possessive-asshole-caveman side down.
I could’ve talked to Dom and Cullen about this as well. Hell, they probably would have been on my side, seeing as they were pussy-whipped for their women. But this was a me-and-Frankie situation. He brought Zoey into the fold, and we needed to straighten that shit out.
“Listen,” I said and exhaled slowly, shifting on the bed so my back was to the wall and my feet hung over the edge. “We need to figure this out, Frankie.” I wore a pair of sweats and a plain white T-shirt, my feet bare, the shower I’d just taken the first one since I’d been shot. The sponge bath I’d been doing hadn’t been anything to write home about. I was clean, freshly shaven, and didn’t feel like ass. I was ready to hash this shit out.
Frankie and I didn’t butt heads often, but when it did occur, it got pretty dirty. We were too similar, which meant we didn’t back down. Stubborn to a fault, that was us.
What I felt for Zoey went above all rationalization and common sense. I wasn’t even sure Frankie would understand that. It consumed me, wrapped all the way around me until I couldn’t breathe. Zoey owned my heart, and I hadn’t even told her. I was sure she could see the way I looked at her, how I tracked her movements constantly. I didn’t try to hide it. But she was a captive here in every sense of the word, had only been in my life for seven short days, and all I saw with her was eternity.
Yeah, how the fuck could I tell anyone that? They’d think I lost my damn mind.
“I understand why you did what you did, Frankie, and I’m not faulting you for that. Hell, I would’ve done the same thing.”
“Then why are you busting my balls about this?”
Because what I feel for her scares the shit out of me. What I feel for her defies all logic and reason, and I don’t want her to hate me because of what you did, good intentions or not.
That’s what I wanted to tell my twin, but the words refused to come out. I didn’t want to make things worse.
Me and Frankie had always been thick as thieves… literally and figuratively. Being brothers, especially twins, had us forming a bond that was undeniable, that no one else would ever be able to experience. Maybe it was because we shared the same womb. Maybe it was because we were the same age and had been attached at the hip as kids. Or maybe it was being the person we leaned on as we watched our father beat on Cullen and Dom to protect us?
Whatever the reason was, I knew I wanted to be honest with him, but I felt myself protecting my feelings for Zoey harder than I ever protected anything else in my life. Because how I felt for her, how she looked at me, how she made me feel, had become the most valuable thing I ever owned. It was more precious than all the money I’d stolen, all the gems, priceless jewels, and artifacts we’d taken as ours. The way she made my heart race when I looked into her blue eyes, the way she stole my breath when she sang, and how she made my heart race with a soft touch to my arm—nothing in this world could top that.
There wasn’t a hell of a lot that scared me, but this, being honest with my family, terrified the fuck out of me.
Frankie exhaled and then leaned back on the couch, his legs slightly spread as he took on a relaxed pose, his arms thrown over the back of the couch cushions, his big body taking up the entire space. He stared at me, an identical version of my face looking back at me. He could read me as easily as if I were looking in the mirror and pointing out all my flaws.
