“You can stand up for yourself here, Lucy. No one is going to be mad about it.”
Lucy averted his gaze, the shyness, the doubt, back in his eyes. “I don’t know.”
“I do,” I tilted his chin up, and he met my eyes again. “Just be yourself, and put your foot down on your boundaries. They can’t take anything from you that you don’t give them, okay?”
Lucy nodded. “Okay.”
He sounded breathless, like he had last night. I shook the memory away, though, because this moment was important, too. This moment when he let me touch him, looking at me with so much trust.
“Are you two done?” Duke drawled. “Or are you still flirting?”
Lucy jerked away from me, dislodging my grip on his vest and abandoning my fingers to the cold from where they’d been touching his face.
“Sorry.” Lucy raised a hand to his hair, pretending to fix it like we hadn’t been caught red-handed.
I turned to glare at Duke, but he merely shrugged, sending me a knowing look. He was goading me.
“You’re not even wearing your vest, Knox. You’re holding us up.”
I shook my head and tugged my vest on. Mine had red lights beneath the plastic layers, where Lucy’s had been blue.
I glanced back at Lucy, who was being coaxed into a conversation with Maisie and Tucker now. He was getting another look at someone else’s sibling relationship. A pair of brother and sister who would kill for each other instead of sabotage each other, like Lucy’s sister had done to him.
“And you said you weren’t in love with him,” Duke muttered under his breath while I tightened the straps of my vest.
“I’m not.”
“Sure, dude. Tell that to your face.”
11
LUCY
It was pitch black in the laser tag theater. Our vests were illuminated in certain spots—the shoulders, chest, and small notches along the sides. The first round showed me well enough that the vests had sound effects that exploded next to my ear whenever someone shot me in the vest with invisible bullets. Once I got shot three times, my entire vest deactivated, and I was led back to the big door at the entrance until my timer went off again and my vest reactivated.
Needless to say, I was pretty useless at laser tag. I’d never played it before. Hell, I hadn’t been to an arcade since our nanny took Cordelia and me to one when I was eight. Dad had been furious when he found out, and that nanny never came back after that.
“Dead again, Lucy?” Kaiden laughed as he settled on the ground beside me, his plastic gun coming to rest across his knee.
I smiled. “You’re here, too.”
“I am,” Kaiden agreed, “I think Maisie will get Duke out any second. Then we can try to convince Duke to buy us some nachos to apologize for sucking so bad as team leader.”
I laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”
Kaiden winked. “Not a chance. He’s going to be whiny about it, but he’ll buy us pity nachos if we give him good enough puppy dog eyes.”
“He doesn’t have to buy nachos.” I frowned, feeling guilty again for my family’s money.
It was always a sore spot when I’d tried to make friends over the years. It was why I’d just accepted that I should only spend time with children from families my dad approved of. Then they’d be as rich as my family, and they would feel good when they had more money than I did, not the other way around.
And after Knox had snapped at me last week about being upset about such a good opportunity with the exhibit, I knew that this wasn’t the crowd to flaunt my money around. They’d hate me for it.
Kaiden shrugged. “He can still do it. He always tries to sell Knox off to the kitchens to pay for it anyway. It’s funny as hell.”
I smiled weakly. “Does he actually? Has it ever worked?”
Kaiden chuckled. “Once, almost. It was a lady who I guess had a daughter around our age in the kitchen, so she was willing to break any rule there was to get Knox back there to make the moves on her daughter.”
