AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I wanted to keep her where she was. I wanted to drive my hands into her hair to pull her back to me so I could capture that mouth. I wanted to beg her to laugh again.
I wanted to make her smile . . .
It wasn’t until she was sliding off me to sit next to Libby that I realized I was studying the girl who had somehow become my world. Watching every movement and shift of her body like a man transfixed. Not to look for cues, as I so often did, but because I was mesmerized by everything she did.
“Hey, nerd,” Diggs said as he finished dumping sugar into a pile on the table. “Pay you ten bucks to eat this.”
Libby smacked him on the back of the head. “What are you, five? Don’t be an idiot.”
Elle leaned into my side as she laughed again. That same low, husky sound that was almost too hard to hear.
I wanted to capture the sound so I could play it again and again.
Grabbing for my phone when it vibrated, the smile immediately dropped from my face when I read the text from Johnny.
Pain and hatred burned through me when I looked up at my best friend. But instead of releasing Elle like I knew he’d expected me to, I tightened my arm around her waist as I dropped my phone on the table, and demanded everyone else do the same.
“We haven’t even ordered yet,” Einstein cried out from where she was trying to disappear between Maverick and Johnny.
“I don’t care,” I growled, my voice still rough from the emotions coursing through me.
Elle stilled when Johnny asked, “Still no phone?”
She looked his way when she realized he was talking to her, her head shaking subtly. “No.”
“How convenient.”
“I don’t have a computer either. Or a car.” She lifted a shoulder in a brief shrug. “You should try it sometime. Convenient is the last thing you’d call it.”
“Are you Amish?” Libby suddenly asked. As soon as Elle started to shake her head, Libby was firing off another question. “Technologically challenged? Because Einstein could help you with that.”
“I think I can figure—”
Libby gasped and slapped her hand on the table. “Or maybe you were in a coma for a bunch of years, and when you woke up you didn’t know how to drive or use phones.”
“Jesus Christ, Libby,” I groaned. “This isn’t a soap opera.”
“It could be,” she shot back.
“I just don’t have those things,” Elle interjected.
“Are you poor?”
“Fuck, Libby. Shut up.”
She leaned around Elle to send me a glare that would make lesser men fall to their knees and beg her forgiveness so she wouldn’t murder them.
Unfortunately for my sister, I’d grown up with her so I knew which one of us was more lethal. That look did nothing to scare me. It only proved there would always be a part of her that couldn’t deny what we were.
We both hated the world our family had been involved in for generations, but while I’d been trying to change it from the inside since I’d been forced to take our dad’s place, Libby had pretended to shun it.
Not that that made a difference. If I needed her to have my back, she would. And when it was done, she would hate me for it.
We both would.
She sat back with a huff when I didn’t wither under her stare, then turned her attention on Elle again. “You know, if you’re poor—”
“Libby,” I said in warning.
