Page 36 of Twisting Beauty

She moved like she belonged to her own body now. Rua used to curl inward without meaning to, as if she expected the world to strike first. This girl held herself straight, turned her face up when she listened, her expression curious instead of wary. The sound of her voice drifting up on the breeze, close enough to familiar to unsettle and wrong enough to grate.

It caused a strange pull in my chest, an unwanted instinct to go down and get closer.

My hand tightened on the stone ledge until the old grit bit into my palm. Irrelevant.

“You good, Lorc?” Finn’s voice seemed to come from very far away.

I didn’t answer, couldn’t tear my attention from the theater unfolding in the courtyard.

Footsteps scraped over stone behind me, and then Rafe, the nosy bollocks, was at my shoulder, following my line of sight out into the courtyard. “What’s got your attention, lad?”

“Is she hot?” Breezy came up to my other side, dragging in a lungful of smoke. He leaned an elbow on the windowsill and nudged me with his shoulder.

Even Finn dragged himself off the couch a second later. They crowded the window without asking, all of them peering down at her now, and the fact that they had noticed her, too, set my teeth on edge before a single word left their mouths.

Rafe let out a low whistle. “She was unreal in chem today. Standing up to Aoife like that.”

Breezy launched into an exaggerated falsetto and pretended to clutch at his pearls. “My Birkin! It’s melting!”

“Proper savage,” Finn said, shaking his head slowly, his tone laced with awe as a grin pulled at the corners of his mouth.

“I nearly proposed,” Rafe added.

“I may have come a little in my pants,” Breezy said with a hand on his cock and a groan.

The line earned him the oohs and aahs he wanted from the lads, but the image of them all looking at her that way made my jaw lock hard.

“Shut it,” I bit out through clenched teeth.

I hated that they were looking. I hated that they noticed her at all.

Breezy, the dolt, kept grinning like he had not heard the warning in my voice at all. “What? It was hot, mate. You have to admit it was hot.”

“Don’t talk about her like that.” The words came out low and hard.

Silence settled over the room in one heavy drop. The lads went still. Even the bag in the corner seemed to stop moving.

It should have embarrassed me, how quickly it happened, how completely. One minute they were talking shite, and the next I was standing there, ready to belt the shite out of them for putting her in their mouths. I wasn’t sure I could explain it.

The boys exchanged glances.

Finn kept his voice careful when he said, “Don’t think she needs you fighting her battles for her, lad.”

He was trying to bring the room back down, and that only made the truth of it sting more.

She did not need me.

For some reason, I still wanted the right to decide who looked at her and how.

Rafe cleared his throat. “Yeah, she’s got enough fight in her now.”

“Yeah,” Breezy added, still looking out the window. “Rua never had the stones to stand up for herself before.”

That landed closer to the truth than the rest of their shite, and it made something settle in me with cold certainty.

I glared down at the girl masquerading as my sister. “That’s not Rua.”

The laughter faded, replaced by a tension I could feel rather than see. The silence that followed pressed the air out of the room, stifling the rustle of crisp packets and freezing the joint mid-pass.