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Chest heaving, he rolled onto his back and got rid of the condom, dropping it in the trashcan near his bed. Then he reached out, wrapped a hand around Leah's waist and pulled her close. Every bone in his body had been replaced with Jell-O laced with some sort of sleeping pill. He was going down. Hard. But a sharp elbow to the ribs kept him from drifting into the sweet hereafter.
"Hope you don't think you're staying here," Leah said, all the sex kitten gone from her voice.
He tried to untangle that statement and came up blank. "What?"
She rolled over to face him, her still kiss-swollen lips drawn tight. "That didn't change anything. I still hate you."
Drew glanced down at her naked body, lingering on her tits that still bore the tell-tale signs of him. "But you want me."
She let out a huff and shrugged. "Seems to be my cross to bear."
This woman made no sense. None. They'd just had mind-blowing sex and she was kicking him out of bed? Out of his own bed? Whatever he'd been thinking during the deed, he needed to block that shit out because Leah Camacho was exactly the same as she'd always been.
"You're as mean as a snake-bit cat in a room full of rocking chairs." Still, because he'd been raised right, even if it did piss him off sometimes, he got out of bed and gave the space to his houseguest.
She smiled up at him, obviously not giving a shit. "And I own it."
He grabbed a pair of sweats from a drawer and yanked them on. "Sweets, you're gonna have to learn one of these days that there's nothing wrong with being a little soft around the edges."
"Sure there is. That's exactly how you get hurt, which I don't plan on being again—especially not by someone with the last name Jackson."
The soft tremble to her voice, despite the hard look in her eye and her do-not-fuck-with-me body language, hit him like a punch to the gut. Leah and his little sister Jess had been best friends growing up but something had changed all that. He didn't know what, but it had obviously messed with both of them. The realization took some of the edge off his own frustration as he started out the door.
He stopped in the doorway. "People can change, you know. You gotta learn to trust that." Maybe even him.
Whatever reaction he'd been hoping for—and he wasn't even sure himself—he didn't get it. Instead, Leah harrumphed and rolled over so she faced away from him.
Shaking his head, he walked out into the hall, grabbed a blanket from the hall closet where his cuffs still hung, and made up the couch in the living room unable to get the idea of change out of his head. People did change. But him? He was still in the same place he was last time Leah was in town, dealing with overbearing parental expectations of what he should be doing and waiting for a phone call with a job offer out of town. It was like his life was stuck on a loop with Leah being the one who always seemed to knock him out of it.
5
Leah
Thank God the coffee pods were right by the Keurig because, if not, she might have staged a one-woman riot in the middle of Drew's kitchen. She'd brass balled her way into having the bed to herself last night, but that didn't mean he hadn't been there anyway. He'd invaded her dreams to the point that she'd woken up this morning with her arms wrapped around his pillow and her nose buried in it as she inhaled the amber, musky scent of him that clung to it. That meant she was pissed off and horny at the same time—both of which were all too familiar when it came to being near Drew.
After half a cup of straight black goodness was warming her belly, she felt human enough to make the call. The contact list on her phone listed the number as being for Isaac, but her big brother wasn't the person she wanted to talk to. She hit dial.
"B-Squad Investigations and Security," a woman answered, her familiar voice as crisp, efficient, and borderline bitchy as the woman herself. She and Leah were like peas in a pod that way.
"Hey, Tamara." She sat down at the table and took another sip of coffee.
"Leah, is everything okay? Isaac just left on a job but I can patch him in." His brother's fiancée immediately ready to burst into action after Isaac had no doubt brought her up to speed on the craziness going on in Catfish Creek.
"Nope." She shook her head as if Tamara could see. "I was looking for Lexie."
"Really? Why?"
"Tamara, I know you love my brother and even if you didn't, you know he's got a way of crowbarring the truth out of people." And she didn't want the favor she was about to ask Lexie repeated to her big brother.
"Don't I know it," Tamara said with a chuckle.
"So it's better if you don't know the answer to why."
There was a pause long enough for her to look around Drew's sunny kitchen and realize that, like his office, it was completely bare of anything personal, as if he'd never unpacked when he'd moved in.
Tamara sighed. "Secrets are not the basis of a strong relationship."
"Are you telling me you two have always told each other everything?" The silence on the other end of the phone was telling. "It's not like I'm hiding a sixteen year old."
