He nuzzled her neck. “Don’t give me a bad rating, ’kay?”
Eve had never found herself in this predicament—namely, how to get out from under a massive wall of muscle and man.
Eve stared up at the ceiling. Her phone had fallen when he’d dragged her onto the bed, and her flashlight cast a circle of light above her. She wriggled a little. Her legs had fallen asleep, squished by his, and her boobs were hurting, sandwiched by his chest. Discomfort aside, though, this was nice. He smelled a bit like bourbon. She sniffed. And the outdoors.
Okay. You’ve gone past the point of helping him.Now she was straight up perving on an unconscious man.
Go out with me.
She bit her lip. He hadn’t meant it, or if he had, it had been directed at Anne, not Eve. He’d reject her if she was Eve. She knew, because they’d already played that scenario out in real life once.
Rejection wasn’t something she was well equipped to handle. Not because she always got her way, but because when rejection did come it felt fierce and cruel no matter how it was delivered. Even a gentle “no, thank you” or chastisement left her craving a dark spot to lick her wounds and obsess over all the things she’d done wrong.
Have you ever wanted something you couldn’t have?
So many times. So many, she’d found it easier to shove her desires down, far away. Because if she didn’t try to satisfy those desires, then she wouldn’t have to deal with the pain of being rejected.
As she’d been told so many times, she could only change her behavior. She couldn’t change others’. So she’d changed her behavior to make sure others couldn’t hurt her with their behavior.
She licked her upper lip, grimacing at the salt of her sweat. Between his body, the room temperature, and her sweatshirt, she was far too overdressed.
She inhaled one last time, savoring the hint of Old Spice and the forest. He didn’t just look like a lumberjack! He smelled like one too.
Heart eyes.
Time to stop smelling him.
Easing out from under him was no easy trick, especially when she had to be extra careful not to wake him. He snorted and snuffled a bit, but either he was a deep sleeper or the alcohol had made him that way. She got one leg on the floor, and squeezed her torso out gracelessly.
Her left arm was still stuck under him and she pulled as gently as she could. She froze when he groaned and rolled away, onto his back, catching her arm further under him. The faint light from her phone made his roughly hewn features vaguely sinister. In that sexy way.
This is not better than smelling him.
She yanked at her arm, finally freeing herself. She waited a beat, but his breathing remained steady and regular. She leaned down and scooped up the fallen phone. The narrow beam of light bounced around the room. The place was small, but tidy, no clothes lying around or excess clutter. If she were still sniffing around like a perv, she’d say his room smelled like him too.
She made her way out of his room, closing his door as quietly as she could, and then crept down the stairs, shoving back her hood and ripping off her hat so she could fan her overheated face with it. She got to the bottom step and her flashlight happened to angle to the left, to the living room, sweeping over a gray leather couch and a fireplace. There were a surprising number of bookshelves ringing the room. She’d never have pinned him as a reader.
She cast a guilty look over her shoulder, up the stairs. She was not going to creep around his house, compounding her weirdness. For one, every second she stayed here, she was at risk of being found out. So far, the darkness, her silly disguise, and his intoxication had all worked in her favor, but that wouldn’t last forever.
Second, this was all morally questionable.
Gah.
She crept into the living room and toward a shelf. In a second she would leave, but since she was already here, she could glance at his books, right? That wasn’t intimate. She wasn’t sniffing his underwear. Or him. Anymore.
She scanned her light over the spines on the shelf closest to her. Art history mostly, which shouldn’t surprise her. The man owned a tattoo parlor. What were tattoos but pieces of art? Livvy had showed her pictures of designs she’d done, and they could easily have been in any museum.
Eve had scrolled through Gabe’s social media more than once, taking note of every photo he’d posted. He seemed to favor tiny, intricate designs and delicate script. So odd, paired with his big body and frame.
She took a few more steps, and her light dipped over a cluster of frames. She couldn’t help but smile at the first one. It was a family photo that must have been taken not long after Gabe was adopted. He was in his mother’s deceptively fragile arms, his ginger head resting on her shoulder, a green blanket clutched in his fist. He was pudgy, his tan face round and sweet and serious. Sonya Hunter was smiling at the camera proudly, one dark brown hand resting on Gabe’s bottom. A tall, handsome black man stood at her side with his arm tight around his wife, holding a little girl a year older than Gabe, her hair braided and tied with pink ribbons.
Gabe’s sister, Rhiannon. Though Eve hadn’t known her well, she was infamous in Rockville. She’d gotten into every single Ivy League college, and then ditched Harvard midway through her sophomore year to run a tech start-up in Silicon Valley.
Eve touched Sonya’s face. She had fond memories of Gabe’s mother. Eve had been so much younger than the Kane children and Nicholas that she’d always felt left out of all the fun, but Sonya had always taken an extra second to pull her in for a hug when she was roaming the Kane household alone, hunting for someone to play with.
She shifted over to the next photograph. This one was of Tani Oka-Kane, surrounded by her children, and Gabe and Rhiannon. Tani wasn’t smiling—even now, the woman wasn’t a fan of smiling—but there was a light in her eyes that didn’t really exist anymore.
Sorrow moved through Eve. After her mother had died, Eve had missed out on a lot of things, but one of those things had been having a second and even third family at the Kanes’ home. There had been nowhere to escape her father.
