“Besides,” Jagger said, “we want to talk to you about something.”
“Fine.”
I went inside, through the kitchen and up the stairs to my room where I dropped my bag. I hesitated, contemplating a bathing suit, then remembered Vigo’s words.
… come gat naked.
He hadn’t said to put on a bathing suit. He’d said to get naked, and I was starting to understand that part of my bargain with the Hawks was doing as I was told when it came to things like my naked body.
I stripped off my clothes and grabbed a towel from the bathroom, wrapped it around my body, and headed back downstairs, torn between the desire already building at the center of my body and the nerves twisting my stomach into knots.
“Welcome back,” Jagger said when I returned to the terrace.
I stood there, wondering how one divested oneself of a towel, thereby revealing one’s naked body, with a minimum of awkwardness.
“What are you waiting for, mouse?” Hawk asked, his eyes glued to my face. “Take off that towel. And there better not be anything underneath it.”
Good call on the bathing suit, I guess?
I let the towel drop, then hurried to the hot tub, my cheeks burning.
“That’s what I’m talking about.” Vigo licked his lips with a flash of his tongue stud. “Fuck, I’m hard already.”
“Same,” Jagger said, studying me through the steam.
I set my phone on the deck next to the hot tub and eased myself into the water next to him with a sigh.
And not gonna lie, it felt delicious.
I’d never been naked in a hot tub before and now I wondered why. Wondered how many other things I’d denied myself while playing the good girl role assigned to me by Bram and everyone else in Blackwell Falls.
“Talk first.” Hawk spoke like a stern boarding school dean keeping his charges in line.
“Fine,” Vigo muttered, sidling up on my other side.
Now I was between him and Jagger, their thighs brushing against mine under the water.
“We paid Dorsey a visit today,” Hawk said.
It took a second for my brain to process what he’d just said. “TravisDorsey?”
“The one and only,” Vigo said. “Even picked up a baseball bat for our trouble.”
I ignored the part about the bat. There were a million reasons Vigo would end up with a baseball bat in this scenario, none of them reasonable. “Why did you go see Travis Dorsey?”
“Wanted to dig around your theory a bit.” Jagger stretched his arms out over the edge of the hot tub.
His fingertips brushed against my bare shoulders and I had to force myself to concentrate. “What theory?”
“That someone else ordered the hit on your parents,” Hawk said.
I tried to hide my surprise. The Hawks hadn’t seemed to care much about my theory when I’d spilled my guts to them in the kitchen. “And?”
“And you were right,” Jagger said. “He was paid to do it.”
My mouth dropped open. “Are you serious? How can you be sure?”
Vigo laughed. “He wasn’t in any condition to lie.”
