I smirked, remembering those batting eyelashes as she pretended she didn’t know exactly what she was doing in that barely there tank and panties. If we’d just entered some sort of prank war, I doubted anything would ever top her using my libido as a weapon of mass destruction.
God, that ass. The way she’d bent over, giving me a perfect view of curves that had haunted my dreams for the past two nights. The memory alone was enough to make me shift uncomfortably in my chair.
Before Ryker had dropped the world’s coldest shower in our lap, I’d been imagining burying myself in?—
Nope. Not going there again.
Point was, I had to give it to her. Dakota had a wicked sense of humor. At the prospect of losing her business and being forced into a fake engagement with someone she hated, she didn’t curl into a ball and cry like many people would.
In fact, she’d never even cried after Ryker warned us our lives might be in danger. Not once. Which was strong as hell.
Add that to the things I definitely shouldn’t admire about Dakota Blackwood.
Another shocking thing about the cold slap of fear from a possible danger was how it lowered my anger wall toward Dakota. You know, the one that kept me so busy, mentally cataloging how right I was and how wrong she was for curating her perfect online image? Yeah. Turns out, realizing my best friend’s little sister might be in danger made me hate what she did at least ten percent less.
Okay, maybe twenty.
In fact, Blake’s words from moving day had been echoing through my head ever since.
“We all put on masks sometimes. But Dakota’s not your mother. She’s not crafting some perfect facade to hide the fact that she’s falling apart. She’s building a brand, running a company. It’s performance, yeah, but it’s not the same kind of performance that killed your mom.”
And she was different, wasn’t she? In my time with Dakota, it was becoming clearer that she didn’t normally outright lie to people. Not like this fake-engagement situation anyway. And let’s remember, she wasn’t thrilled about that either. Hell, she’d explicitly said she hated lying to her followers. She wasn’t lying the way my mother had. Dakota was simply showing the best version of herself, the one she felt safe with showing, I guess.
But why did she think that’s all people would accept?
Ugh!
See? This kind of thought was exactly what I was avoiding today. I still loathed Dakota Blackwood. I did. So what if she was funny and sexy and apparently made of titanium? That didn’t change my feelings.
My animosity was still there, buried under all this … whatever this was. And I’d hold on to it like a life preserver—that was for damn sure.
She was just Knox’s sister. That was all. He wasn’t here to protect her, so it fell on me to watch out for my best friend’s littlesister. As soon as this blew over, we’d go back to hating each other.
Wait. Go back to?Present tense, Pierce. Present tense.
I do not like Dakota Blackwood. I do not like her in a vest. I do not like her goddess-like chest.
I wasn’t going to slip into non-loathing territory just because we were in danger. Being in danger didn’t change the fundamental dynamics of our relationship.
So I wanted to make her a little less scared. So what? It was basic human decency. Contrary to popular opinion—specifically her opinion—I wasn’t a complete raging asshole.
Plus, she freaking deserved this prank, that evil little vixen. How dare she give me the blue balls from hell?
Dakota’s coffee maker gurgled to life, right on schedule. The thing was programmed to go off at the ass crack of dawn so the princess’s coffee was ready when she emerged from her beauty sleep. Because God help the person who had to deal with her before she’d had her caffeine fix.
If there was one thing I’d learned from sharing mornings with Dakota, it was that the woman was usually grumpier than a wet cat when she first woke up.
I suspected it was because she spent half the night working on her business, but whatever. She had her perfect coffee maker scheduled to brew the perfect blend, designed to suck that bad attitude right out of her and replace it with liquid humanity.
Next to her coffee maker sat her perfect little container of sugar, complete with a neat label because Dakota labeled everything.
The fun thing about sugar? It looks exactly like salt.
I slid the sugar container back into place, checking to make sure it didn’t look conspicuous. Then I moved on to the kitchen clocks: stove, microwave, and counter. I fast-forwarded all of them by exactly twenty-seven minutes.
Let’s see how Princess Punctual handles being “late.”
I settled into my usual seat at the table, scrolling through morning news on my phone, when the queen herself emerged at the exact same time she had yesterday. Down to the minute.
