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She pulls another men’s shirt against her body, the damn thing so big she can almost wrap it all the way around her with it still buttoned in the front.
“That’s too big,” I say, analyzing my tone, thinking it sounds too damn fatherly. I cringe, imagining her seeing me that way.
Jesus, how disgusting am I? I feel like a creepy old man.
“Everything has to be altered,” she says, not bothering to look in my direction. “The more fabric the better.”
“Is this everything?” I ask a few minutes later when she leaves the racks of clothing.
She shakes her head, and somehow I’m left pushing the nearly full cart behind her as she heads to the section labeled CRAFTS.
As if she’s looking for a treasure, Devyn sifts through every overflowing bin, pulling out buttons and things that could maybe be used as trim, now that I know she’s planning to do some form of alterations on these clothes. She finds several spools of thread, putting back the ones that don’t pass her test of tugging on it to make sure it doesn’t break.
“That’s only a dollar,” I say when she tosses a lime green spool back that matches one of the items in the cart.
“It’s too old. It does me no good if it breaks when I try to use it,” she explains, her eyes lighting up when she holds up a pack of oversized sunflower buttons.
She tosses them in the cart before going back to digging through the next bin.
Her focus somehow makes her seem older. I haven’t had much involvement with the younger crowd, other than new boot Marines joining the Corps, but even those guys would act immature often. She’s showing such care and attention to her task, that it’s unexpected.
I have to consider that this is just my brain trying to reason with me after the way I looked at her earlier.
Her age honestly doesn’t matter because, at the end of the day, she’s still Vaughn’s younger sister, and completely fucking off-limits.
“And I think that’s it,” she says, dropping one final spool of thread into the cart.
I push the cart to the front register, helping her pull all the musty clothes, buttons, trimming, and thread from the cart and piling it on the counter.
I wave her away when Devyn reaches into her purse as if she’s going to pay for the items. She nods, not arguing with me like I thought she was going to.
“Seventy-eight, forty-three,” the woman says, treating the items with even less care than Devyn did as she placed them in the cart.
I pull cash from my wallet, unwilling to put a card into the janky reader.
I take my change, shoving it into my pocket so I can help Devyn with the bags. She thanks the cashier excitedly, wishing her a good day before turning toward the front exit.
“I thought it was going to be more than that,” I say absently.
“They have really great prices. I can’t wait to come back again.”
I take a deep breath, fighting the urge to insist that she never come alone, unsure if it would sound protective or fatherly.
Chapter 13
Devyn
I feel like a giddy girl imagining Harry Styles directly singing to her during a sold-out concert. He pressed his hand to my back not once but twice! I’ve never had a guy touch me like that. I felt safe and turned on all at the same time. It was an instant connection. As he climbs in behind the wheel, I find myself hoping for him to do it over and over.
I keep my eyes locked outside my window as he drives.
“Are you hungry?”
I almost answer with all the things I’m dying to taste, but no matter how he looked at me earlier, I doubt he’d ever give in to that part of him.
“I ate at the luncheon, but feel free to stop if you are.”
He shakes his head. “I’ll grab something back at the clubhouse.”
It feels like it takes years to get back to Cerberus property, and I know that’s because of how excited I am to get started on the clothes bagged in the back of the SUV. I could picture in my head exactly how I would change each one to make it my own style.
I climb out the second he places the vehicle in park outside the clubhouse, hurrying to the back to grab my bags. With his longer legs, Emmett is quicker, but he doesn’t say a word when I eagerly snatch a bag from his hand.
Instead of just letting me go, he redirects me around to the right side of the building, keeping pace with me as I make my way toward Em and Diego’s house.
“Why go outside if going through the clubhouse is faster?” I ask, genuinely curious.
“Stormy is single,” he says, his eyes locked on the path in front of us.
