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Quinn turned up the radio. It didn’t help. He could practically feel Aubry sitting there, and the fact she seemed to be engrossed in whatever she was listening to again only made it worse. She’d dismissed him completely and, though it should make him happy that things weren’t going to be any more weird than they already were, it aggravated the fuck out of him knowing she could turn off the attraction as easily as flipping a light switch.
He wanted his mouth between her legs. He wanted her on top of him. Fuck, he wanted her in every way he could possibly think of. It didn’t make sense.
“What’re you listening to?”
“You know, generally when someone has headphones on, it means they don’t want to talk.”
He knew, which was why he was provoking her—to get them back onto familiar territory. “And here I thought it was because you were anti-social and avoiding human contact in any way possible.”
She didn’t look over. “Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner. If only you could take a hint.”
“Aw, peaches, I can take a whole lot more than that.” Fuck. He hadn’t meant to say that aloud. Quinn tightened his grip on the steering wheel and gritted his teeth.
“I’m sorry, what?” Aubry moved one side of her headphones off her ear and appeared to give him her full attention. “Did you just allude to the fact that you like to be the catcher?”
“What? No.”
“That’s exactly what you did. ‘I can take a whole lot more than that’ were your exact words.” Her mouth curving up into a downright sweet smile. “I never pegged you for a bottom. Do you frequent truck stops and utilize glory holes, too?”
He growled under his breath. “Even if I was comfortable enough in my masculinity to be down for taking anything a lady can give me, that doesn’t make me a bottom, peaches. Far from it. And glory holes are fucking disgusting.” He forced himself to relax his hands and take a deep breath. “Though if you have a hole you’d like me to glorify—”
“Gross. So much gross.”
There they were—on solid ground once more. As tempting as it was to go back to silently stewing, that way lay madness. He had to keep her talking so he could remember that this was Aubry, red as the devil and mean as a snake. She might have a hot little body that he’d kill to get his hands on, but it wasn’t worth the price he’d have to pay when it came to her. Forgetting that was inexcusable. “So what’d you have to do to get a fancy invite to play this game?”
“Be better than everyone else.” She’d said it without a trace of ego. It was just her truth.
A truth he had a hard time believing. “I know you spend a terrifying amount of time holed up in that apartment of yours, with only the online game for company, but there are a few million other people around the world who do the same thing.”
“And I’m better than all of them.”
“Who decides that?”
She sighed. “What makes it so hard for you to wrap your puny brain around my being one of the best out there? The fact that I’m a woman? Or is it that you’re standing in the face of greatness and it makes you feel less like a man?”
That startled a laugh out of him. “Neither. I’m talking the odds, plain and simple.”
“Well, take your odds and shove them. There were exactly ten invites that went out for this alpha test, and I’m one of them. That speaks for itself.”
Yeah, he guessed it did. It was still weird to think about. “So someone ran the numbers and decided that, what, you’ve killed enough people in this game that you deserve a medal?”
“You can phrase the question as many ways as you want to and it’s not going to change the outcome. The short answer is yes. I’m very, very good at murdering people. Within the game, of course.”
“Of course.” He drummed his fingers across the steering wheel. “I guess I better watch my back around you, huh?”
…
Aubry didn’t know what Quinn was trying to pull, but she was over this conversation. All she wanted to do was bury herself in her book until the humiliation passed. Add in the fact that he felt the need to point out he didn’t actually want her and, yeah, she wasn’t getting over that anytime soon. Since she couldn’t physically walk away from him, mentally doing it would have been good enough.
Except he seemed to want to talk, even if it was to tell her how unbelievable it was that she had actually gotten an invite in the first place.
She put her headphones on again, but froze when the engine made a weird clanking sound that she could hear even over the country music he insisted on playing. “What was that?”
