Ren turns his sunglasses my way as we continue walking. We are the same height, but I feel like he’s looking down at me. Then he gives me that tongue click again, and it sounds derisive this time. I push his arm off my shoulder, but my petty retaliation is thwarted as I trip on my loose shoelaces. He grabs my forearm before I smash my face to the ground.
Patting my shoulder, he says, “You should go for someone who takes care of you. Like your friend, sky-blue eyes, what’s-his-name.”
I frown. He seems to forget it every time. “Brad.” I talk about him constantly, and Ren even saw him once. I introduced them before Brad moved to California.
“Did you sleep with him?”
This again? “No! I told you already.” I stop on the curb, push up the messenger bag on my back, and crouch down to tie my shoe.
“Why do you keep asking me that?”
When I’m done, my phone beeps. Brad texted me his flight details.
“That’s why.” He points at my cell. “You are constantly talking to each other, and nothing happened?” Ren sounds incredulous.
“Don’t you have good friends?”
He doesn’t answer straight away. And I know why. He is charming with blond, shiny hair, confidence, and don’t-fuck-with-me vibes, but he’s also easy to approach and laid-back. I see how girls send appreciative looks his way everywhere we go. They must jump on him at every turn.
“I have you,” he finally states.
“That’s…” I can’t finish verbalizing my thought. The air is yanked out of my lungs as Ren shoves me back against a tree trunk. Hard. And then throws himself on me.
I hear tires screeching, a loud thud like metal hitting a hard surface, and then I see a black car moving at full speed away from the curb where we were standing a moment ago.
“Fuck! Did you see that?” I hear someone exclaiming as Ren pulls his body back to look at my face.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” I wince. My mind goes back to the memory of the scaffolding and the man who saved me. Masked or not, why does this keep happening to me? Gods, I’m a mess.
Ren takes my hand and carefully peels me off the tree trunk. I feel a burning sensation on my right shoulder. Fuck! It’s going to bruise. My messenger bag cushioned the encounter with the tree, and at least the rest of my back is fine. I pull the strap and move it onto my hip.
“What the hell happened?” I ask.
“That car almost hit us,” Ren tells me with gritted teeth.
“It did?” My eyes widen as I scan his face in shock. It all happened so fast. My brain is still trying to put together the pieces. “So, does this mean that you saved me?”
“Umm…” He scratches the back of his head.
“Are you guys, okay?” a couple of people ask us. “Did you see who was driving?”
“No,” Ren replies. “But I got the car license plate.”
He did? Wow. I can’t even remember the car model.I arch my back and roll my shoulders. Damn, it hurts.
“Let’s go sit and grab something to drink.” Ren points toward the campus café a couple of blocks away. At least he didn’t suggest going to the hospital like my overprotective brother would have.
We start walking again as he taps on his phone. Is he reporting to the brotherhood?
“Don’t tell Ollie. Please,” I plead with him. “If my big brother finds out, he’ll turn full mother-hen on me. I don’t want him to worry and turn my life into a bubble-wrap hell.” And Rague? Whatever punishment Madam Karma has in store for the driver, my brother-in-law would execute a much gorier one if he got wind of this. Same as Lori. With what is going on lately, they have a good reason for being overprotective. “It was clearly an accident. A drunk student, perhaps.”
He sighs. “I won’t tell them, but I’m asking Dare to check that car plate.” One of his triplet brothers. “That fucker should have stopped and checked on us.”
He’s right. We could have both been hurt or worse; the decent thing to do was for the driver to stop.
“What are you going to do when you get the driver’s name?” Because Dare will find it. Rami is the brotherhood’s hacker and a game creator. After he got together with Hunter, he took Dare under his wing, teaching him everything there is to know about programming and unauthorized access to whatever data.
