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“It’s not going to happen again.” The words were barbed as I was tossed back to that time.

Black eyes blinked, and Phoenix tightened his hold on my shoulder. “Make sure of it because I don’t want to be the one charged with putting you in the ground.”

Knew to my guts that Silas would never ask him to do it.

I was Silas’s best friend. His oldest friend. This was between me and him. And if I wound up dead? It’d be at Silas’s hand.

The lights inside suddenly flicked off and the door opened.

“Ready!” Elena peeped as she fumbled out, then turned around to push her key into the lock. I would have said she was acting far too fucking bright except that’s the way she always was.

A bright, blinding light.

Glowing into the shadows where I crawled.

She was barefoot, her big bag slung over her shoulder, hair so disheveled that if Phoenix hadn’t noticed the blasphemy that’d been going down before, he would have then.

He grunted to prove it.

I dug out my phone, thumbed into the alarm app, and set it as I clumped in her direction. “Give me that.”

She rolled her pretty eyes. “I’m plenty capable.”

Was pretty sure there was a message hidden in it.

That she could take it the way I’d been giving it to her and was happy to.

Greed fisted my guts, and I slammed down a five-ton iron gate in front of the ravaging thoughts.

There was no place for them.

I pried the straps of her bag from her hold and swung it onto my back. “Let me do my job, Lena.”

I wanted it to come out hard, but it basically spilled like affection.

Phoenix gave me a look that said I was fucked.

So utterly fucked.

A dead man walking as I trudged along behind her and down to the gravel lot.

Barefoot, she started to fumble toward her truck sitting on the farthest left side where she’d insisted we leave it so there’d be more room for customers.

“Ow, crap, oh, ouch…” she spluttered as she tiptoed and stumbled over the spiked, tiny rocks.

Fuck me. She really was going to be my demise.

Without giving her any warning, I hoisted her up and basically tossed her over my shoulder, though she kept her torso upright, her arms straight as she clung to my shoulders.

Of course, she squealed and giggled and drove me half mad with the feel of her belly pressed to my chest and her scent that had meshed with mine.

So intoxicating that I’d likely succumb to her every command.

I could feel the fiery burn of Phoenix’s eyes searing into my back as he watched me carry her to the truck.

“Little Apple, trying to wreck me,” I rumbled so only she could hear.

“You like it, and you know it,” she murmured back.