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“No, you don’t.” Damien shoots me a smirk while he flips the steaks to reveal a set of picture-perfect grill marks. “But that’s alright. I get it.”
“I trusted you enough to call you for help,” I remind him, insulted for some fucked-up reason.
“I think what you meant to say is desperate.” His smirk morphs into a laugh. “You were desperate enough to call me for help.”
Because I don’t have an answer for that—at least not one that won’t end up with us throwing each other around the back porch, I look away again and give him a shrug. “She said something weird this morning,” I say instead, desperate to change the subject.
When I say she, Damien’s brow collapses in on itself. “She—you mean Kait.”
“Yeah.” I give him a nod, remembering the way she looked at me when I called her Sunshine this morning.
My name is Kaitlyn. You can call me that or you can call me Kait.
“Kait.” I say her name out loud and immediately decide I don’t like it. “She said she’d find a place to hide out and finish watching her lecture,” I tell him before taking another drink of my beer, this one draining it. “What did she mean—hide out?”
For a second, Damien doesn’t answer me. I think he’s trying to formulate a response. Instead, he comes back with a question of his own. “Why would she have to find a place to hide out to finish anything? You said she could work here—or did you change your mind again?”
“No.” I shake my head while I set my empty on the porch railing I’m leaning up against. “I didn’t change my mind. I just—”
“What did you do?” Pulling the steaks from the grill, Damien sets them on a cutting board to rest before he turns to aim a glare in my direction. “And don’t say nothing because we both know you did something.”
I know she didn’t tell him what happened this morning—that she found me sleeping, mostly naked and hard as a rock, on the couch—because when Damien climbed out of his truck, he was carrying a six-pack and not a baseball bat. But still, it’s probably best I explain the situation in case she changes her mind and tells my brother about what a perv I am. “I fell asleep on the couch last night,” I tell him quickly while trying to navigate around the parts that’ll piss him off. “She found me and I was...” I swipe a hand over my face on a rough sigh. “It was morning, man—what do you want me to say?”
He stares at me blankly for a few seconds before the lightbulb pops on. When it does, his glare sharpens to a razor’s edge. “Kait found you sleeping on the couch with a fucking hard-on?”
“It. Was. Morning.” I repeat myself, biting each word in half. Lying my ass off because morning had nothing to do with it and everything to do with her. “I don’t make the rules and I can’t control biology. It just happened and it’s not like I chased her around with it or anything, for fuck’s sake. I just—”
“Jesus Christ...” Tossing the tongs he was using to flip the steaks onto the cutting board, he slams the grill lid closed. “I need you to listen to me very carefully, Went—one—” He holds up a finger, all but shoving it in my face and it takes every bit of patience and self-control I have to not slap it away. “Kota told me what’s really going on with you—what happened in LA. Why you’re here.”
Shit.
I don’t have to ask how she found out—Dakota is a college student. College students thrive on social media celebrity culture and I’m sure photos of me in every sort of conceivable, compromising position are plastered all over every tabloid and celebrity gossip site in the country. Before I can ask him exactly what she heard, Damien shoves finger number two in my face. “And two—and I’m going to say it slowly this time so hopefully it’ll sink into that thick fucking skull of yours—the last thing Kait needs is to deal with you and your fuckboy bullshit.”
Something about the way he says it, the way his jaw flexes and grinds between words tightens the back of my neck.
“What’s going on?” Giving in, I slap his hand out of my face. When he doesn’t haul back and punch me in it, I take a step forward, closing the gap between us. “And don’t say nothing because we both know it’s something,” I tell him, throwing his earlier words back at him. Flipping through the few interactions Kait and I have had, I think about how desperate she was to keep coming up here to study—desperate enough to agree to model for me even though I could tell that the prospect made her highly uncomfortable. What she said to me this morning when I commented on how seriously she seemed to take her education.
Yeah, I did... for all the good it did me.
Even stranger was the way she said it. Like she was trapped. At the end of the road only to find a dead end.
“Is she in trouble?” When I ask, Damien’s jaw tightens again, a split second before it relaxes.
“It’s not my place to say,” he says carefully. “I just work here.” Picking up the cutting board, he turns away from me to head back into the house. “Grab the beer—let’s eat.”
SEVENTEEN
Kaitlyn
My laptop is trashed.
In the ten minutes it took me to get Brock Morris away from Abbey and off the ranch, Two-tone decided to take a stroll around his stall and nose into my backpack. Not only did he shred my green notebook—the one I use for study guides and practice tests—he stepped on my laptop for good measure, shattering the screen and breaking its plastic casing beyond repair.
“What is that?” Damien asked, following me into the barn to stand in the doorway of Two-tone’s stall.
“It was my laptop.” I say it as casually as I can, shoving it back into my backpack while reminding myself that 1) Two-tone is a horse. He has no idea what he destroyed or why it was so important to me, and 2) I’m the one who was dumb enough to leave it in the stall with him in the first place. Zipping the flap of my backpack closed, I shouldered it and gave Damien a shrug. “It’s not a big deal.”
Except that it is.