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But then I find actual footage. A clip we recorded at the lake last summer: me, in a little red bikini, and him, shirtless and perfect. Muscular and broad. Best of all, his wide hands, touching my skin—though, at the time, he claimed it was entirely platonic.
“What? I’m just putting sunblock on your skin. I don’t want you to burn, Sully.”
“Hannah?” Viv’s soft voice comes from the hallway. “You okay?”
“Go away!” I swallow a fresh bout of tears and turn toward my nightstand.
I’m ashamed of myself. Pathetic. I’m as beholden to him as he claims he is to me. But the difference between us is that I never, ever,everwent out of my way to hurt him.
I grab my tiny vibrating bullet and hit the button on the side, praying it has charge and I won’t be left wanting. Then I press it to my clit and cry as I watch us on my phone. Touching. Laughing. Flirting.
My breath becomes choppy, and my spine arches as my feral orgasm teeters closer. There’s no finesse in what I’m doing tonight. No romance. Nothing tender. There’s just me, desperate to feel something other than pain, and him, buried deep under my skin and refusing to leave me in peace.
“Sullivan!”Axel’s boisterous laugh is both an aphrodisiac and heartbreaking.“What’s your smutty Viking Victor doing today?”He snatches a worn paperback from my hands and flips it over so I get a glimpse of the bodice-ripper cover he always teased me about.“Oh, Victor,”he reads.“Please touch me down there. Get my juicy juices on your fingers.”
“Shut up!”I snatch the book back, so the phone I hold, recording us, jerks.“Stop being an ass. Fix my sunblock so I don’t color weird.”
“Mmhmm.”
I caught on film the way he straddled the backs of my thighs. How his chest rippled with muscle. And best of all, how he squeezed more sunblock onto my back and massaged the liquid in.
Screw Viking Victor. Axel was all the man I ever wanted.
Axel
SEARCHING FOR REDEMPTION
“Where’d you go last night?” Ruiz walks around my living room in a towel, like we’re in a fucking frat house. He carries a mug of coffee—mymug, that Hannah gifted me for my twenty-first birthday—and drips water from his hair onto my couch as he sits.
Because he’s a fucking animal with zero consideration for other people’s things.
“You were out late.”
“Are you my girlfriend?” I grab my boots and drop my feet inside, bending to tie the laces. “We’re not on base, and you’re not my lieutenant. I don’t answer to you, bitch.”
“I was only asking a question.” He reclines on my couch, wide-legged, and risks revealing everything I never wanted to see. “You came home a little… tense.”
I turn my back and continue with my laces. “Get your naked ass up off my fucking couch.” Standing tall, I start into the kitchen. “And stop drinking from my favorite mug.” I tear my cupboard door open and search for another,lessermug to drink from myself. “Better yet, get out of my house and pay for a hotel, like regular, non-freeloading dipshits who visit a town they don’t have a home in.”
I slide my mug beneath the coffee machine spout and drop a capsule in top. Pressing the button, I turn from the counter, and growl when Ruiz saunters to the doorway. Still wearing just a towel. Displaying more abs than I have, and a smirk that says he’s done giving a fuck about the world.
“I’m pretty comfortable here.” He brings his coffee up and sips. “I appreciate the hospitality.”
“I’ll have the cops remove you.” The second my caffeine is done pouring, I spin back and snatch it up so liquid sloshes over the side. “They’re my friends.”
Not really. But he doesn’t know that.
“They’re not your friends.” His lips curl into a smirk. “Everyone knows cops and firefighters getting along is like dogs and cats. Not gonna happen. What are you doing today?”
“Getting on with my life and bringing the police chief back here to eject my squatter. You?”
He chuckles. “Sitting on my new couch and charging your credit card when I visit Porn Hub for a little entertainment. Have you decided if you’re jumping next summer?”
“Depends.” I push away from the counter and take my coffee into the hall. “What are you doing? I’ll choose the opposite, and life can be good again.”
“Oh please. Don’t act like you’re the one suffering!” he calls at my back. “Did you go see that chick last night? That why you’re so angry?”
“Mind your business.”
