Reed gives her a dull look and starts upstairs to the bedroom he’d once claimed.
Andi shakes her head before turning her attention to me again. “God, he hasn’t changed any,” she says. A glitter of a smile lifts in those pools of brown, and all I can think as she stares at me is how fucking beautiful those eyes would look peering up at me as her lips wrap around my—
“Maddox fucking Keynes,” she drawls. “You look…” Her brows raise as her eyes drift over me for the third time, and this time, she swallows before stepping into the doorway. “Are you coming in?” she asks, drawing me away from a perfectly good fantasy.
“Am I invited?” I ask, and a smile flinches on her bow-shaped lips.
She chuckles softly. “You may as well be a Matthews, too,” she replies. She jerks her head toward the living room. “I suppose you can crash in the pool house.”
I smile broadly and hold out my arms, hoping to god she doesn’t realize I want to hug her out of some deep-seated desperation to have her near me.
“Hey, beautiful,” I say to her.
She beams, and the way she lights up with that little word makes me restless.
“Maddox,” she says before entering my embrace.
I breathe her in and linger in that hug for longer than I should.
If this is the only chance I get to touch her this week, I’m taking it.
And, god, the smell of her hair…
She smells like warm spices, and… is that orange?
I wonder if she tastes this good, too.
A crash sounds upstairs, and we part at the noise of it.
Fucking Reed.
“That’ll be him throwing out the exercise equipment,” she mutters. Her gaze drifts over me again, those dark eyes seeming to take in the sight of me as if she’s trying to find a secret she knows I’m hiding.
“Come on,” she says. “I’ll help you take your stuff to the pool house.”
She grabs my bass before I can tell her I have it, and something about her carrying it away through the kitchen makes my mouth dry.
She isn’t yours to take, I remind myself.
I follow her through the back sliding door, finding the cover pulled over the pool for the season. There are a few more fallen leaves on the surrounding deck, and as much as I try to turn my attention away from Andi walking in front of me, it’s fucking impossible.
The green oversized sweater she’s wearing is falling off her shoulder, revealing a lacy bralette beneath it, and the shorts she’s wearing have me needing to adjust my pants. The backs of those thighs may as well have my name tattooed on them with the way I can’t stop staring.
She even has little skulls on her tall black socks.
Wait. Not skulls—
“Are those Jack Skellington socks?” I ask.
She smirks at me over my shoulder. “Of course,” she says. “Do you want the Sally ones?”
“Abso-fucking-lutely,” I reply.
If there was one little thing she and I had bonded on in the past, it was a love for all things Tim Burton and cult classic horror. She never missed a Halloween in the old place, especially when Reed’s youngest brothers, Koen and Kamden, were preteens. It never mattered that she was the oldest. She never treated us like she was too good to hang out with us.
If anything, she protected us.
Looking back, I realize we should have been the ones protecting her.
