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I sigh. “Thanks. I’m sorry. It was a long night. I needed a drive.”
“Where did you go?”
“Nowhere. Just… around.”
Before they can get a good look at my face and tell I’m lying, I kick off my shoes and sit down on the edge of the pool. My clothes are still damp from being in the ocean with Ilya, but I try to push all of that out of my mind. Pushhimout of my mind.
The problem is, I’m not sure it’s possible to ever get Kirill completely out of my system. He’s taken up root in corners of my mind that I can’t scrub clean.
Even now, I’m sitting next to my sisters, but my mind is back on that beach. Kirill’s hand is around my throat and my back is arched against him. He may have been angry with me, but he liked it, too. I could feel his excitement pressing against my hip, lethally hard, dangerously tempting.
“Rayne?”
Lana’s voice rips me out of my dirty thoughts. I look over sheepishly. “Sorry. Yeah?”
“Alexis and I were waiting here for you because… Well, we wanted to talk.”
Immediately, my alarm bells start blaring. “Okay,” I say slowly. “About what?”
“Well, first of all, we’re sorry,” Alexis says. “Last night was kind of a shit show. We’d been drinking before you showed up and then we kept drinking. Basically, we were messy drunks and we’re sorry.”
Lana doesn’t say anything. But when Alexis nudges her in the side, she jolts upright. “Yeah. We’re sorry. I shouldn’t have said the things I said last night.”
I shrug. “That depends. Did you mean them?”
Lana hesitates. “Well…”
Alexis groans. “No, no, no, you two,” she interrupts. “We’re not doing this. We’re apologizing.”
“I did apologize!” Lana protests.
“And your apology doesn’t mean shit if you meant what you said.”
Lana dips her head, her shoulders shrugging up around her ears. “I’m trying my best. But I can only do so much. If Rayne doesn’t want to accept my apology, then that’s on her.”
“And if Lana wants to give a half-assed apology that isn’t sincere,” I fire back, “then that is on her.”
“It’s not half-assed,” Lana snaps. “I am sorry. I could tell I hurt your feelings, and I feel bad.”
“You don’t feel bad about what you said; you just feel bad that it upset me.”
She rolls her eyes and mumbles to Alexis, “I told you this wasn’t going to go well.”
“If you think it won’t go well,” I cut in, “then it won’t. Because you’ve already made up your mind about this conversation and about me.” I pull my feet out of the water and stand up. “I know how you all feel about me.”
“What does that mean? We love you. That’s how we feel,” Alexis protests.
I snort. “Oh, yeah, totally. You love me enough that you were afraid I’d try to come stay with you and Dustan after Mom died.”
Alexis’ face pales. “What? Who said that?”
“Dustan. Last night. I heard him and Mitchell talking after the two of you left.”
“That idiot,” she hisses.
I turn to Lana. “And Mitchell can be as mad as he wants about me taking his car for a drive last night. Because I’m pretty pissed that he’s been referring to the guest house as the ‘loser sister-in-law suite’ since I came here.”
Lana gasps. “I didn’t—I’m sorry, Rayne. He’s never said that to me. I would have told him not to say that.”
