“If he’s on the gate, then he needs to be vigilant of his surroundings, not staring at his phone for what sweet shit you’re sending him. We’re under a lockdown.”
There was more huffing and tutting. It was the most personal reaction he’d seen out of Sunny in a while. “You’re being so ridiculous right now. So I’m to sit in silence and do nothing? I can’t text anyone?”
“Text one of your girls.”
He heard the fizz from the can opening, and then she thrust it under his nose, smirking. Seb took it, drained half, and then handed it back to her.
“But not Tanner?”
“He doesn’t need the distraction.”
Seb didn’t want her to have intimate conversations with his brother, however innocently friendly they might be.
Every inhalation she pulled in sent his blood racing. It was pure fucking hell. And had been that way for a long time.
He’d believed he had a grip on it, but his obsession took over, slithering into his mind and dominating every second of air.
He’d tried to make sense of it.
Late at night, while sleepless in bed. Or she plagued his mind when he rode out of state with his club brothers.
But there was so much Sunny in his life that he couldn’t pick a start date for when it changed.
She’d been his precocious shadow and then his little childhood buddy. Always someone he sheltered, cared for, and adored. Ruby and Preacher showed Seb what it meant to be loved by a genuine family. And that’s who Sunny was to him. She was family. Yet someone closer.
During his teen dating life, he’d had girls tell him to stop putting “that clingy kid” before them. Unknowingly, if Seb was out on a date and Sunny needed him (because she was scared or sick), he’d rush home to check on her after dropping off the date.
To Seb, it was a normal thing to do.
Sunny was important to him. She always would be.
But where it began to feel different nearly sent him fucking reeling.
Jealousy punched him square in the guts when he saw her sitting across the clubhouse with her friends. With her head close to Tanner’s while he showed her something on his phone, she’d laughed, slugged Tanner in the shoulder, and then his brother had slung an arm around her to ruffle her hair, which sent Sunny into a fit of shrieks.
Seb saw it in Tanner’s youthful expression. Like Sunny at the time, he was eighteen, and clearly on top of the world for making the girl laugh.
Seb had felt his feet move automatically. To do what? Rip Sunny away from her friend? To drive his fist into Tanner’s face, to demand he stop having feelings for her?
He’d walked out of the clubhouse that day and spent the night getting drunk, talking himself into it being an anomaly, and he wouldn’t feel anything of the sort the next time he saw her.
The next time he did, it was worse. That new feeling had dug talons into Seb’s chest, digging deep welts.
And it continued to get worse.
At his grown age of twenty-five, he’d had zero rights to notice the plumpness of her ass in tight jeans. He’d nearly drowned himself in scotch that night as punishment.
So he didn’t look. Seb put himself wherever she wasn’t, yet his instincts to make sure she was okay still weighed heavily.
He couldn’t wrap his head around the two versions of Sunny he was now seeing. He remembered the girl who would excitedly show him her lost tooth, always expecting a gift in return, and the same girl he’d taught to defend herself against bullies. During that period, he remembered rocking up to the school gates with Hawk to look menacing at the kid, knowing he had beef with anyone who had beef with his sunbeam.
And now the woman she’d become.
Smart, still so fucking precocious, funny, andshy.
The woman thought nothing about flinging herself into his arms like she hadn’t seen him in months. Pressing her little budding tits into his chest. Making him see stars with how tightly he wanted to hold her, and then the quickness in how fast he shoved her away because he couldn’t breathe.
As a Souls member, Seb had one job: getting Sunny home safely.
