Page 75 of Beneath Your Beautiful

Luke had done a shitty thing and he’d hurt me, but my heart wasn’t broken like I thought it was. I’d wanted to be a different girl, expand my horizons, and explore the great beyond, but with Luke I’d stayed in a holding pattern, not growing, or changing. I’d held so much of myself back from him, confined to that box he’d kept me in.

With Killian, I’d been myself right from the start, not holding anything back. And he liked me just as I was.

* * *

Of course, I snuck into Garrett’s room and stayed with Killian. What my dad didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. Unfortunately, a six-thirty a.m. wakeup call came in the form of Sawyer pounding on the bedroom door. I burrowed under the covers as the door burst open. Privacy, in our house, was a joke.

Something hit my arm, forcing me to blow my cover which hadn’t been much of a cover at all. I pulled back the covers, grabbed Sawyer’s Nike and pelted it at his head. He ducked, and it hit the bedroom door with a thwack. “This is war,” I declared. “You asked for it.”

Sawyer laughed at my ridiculous statement, and so did Killian. I glared at one and then the other before I threw back the covers, jumped out of bed and flew at Sawyer, trying to knock him over. Fat chance of that. He threw me over his shoulder and deposited me on the bed.

I flopped back on the bed. This was all too much for this early hour. It was barely light outside. I sniffed the air. “Is that bacon?”

“Dad’s on KP duty,” Sawyer said then looked at Killian. “Ready for that run?”

“Give me two minutes,” Killian said.

“Meet you out back.”

“Did you guys make this plan without me? I’m going with you,” I said, even though running at this hour was the last thing I wanted to do.

“What did I tell you?” Sawyer asked, and Killian chuckled, sharing an inside joke I wasn’t privy to. “She hates to be left out ofanything.”

“Tell me about it,” Killian said.

After Sawyer left, I elbowed Killian in the ribs. “You’re on my team. No defecting to Team Sawyer.”

“Whatever you say, Sunshine.”

“Happy birthday, baby.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Killian

“How do you like your steak, son?” Jack Madley asked, as he fired up the barbecue. A tray stacked high with five of the biggest, thickest steaks I’d ever seen sat on the shelf next to the grill.

I looked at Sawyer who was carting a cooler of beer onto the deck and then at Garrett who was fiddling on his phone. Neither of them answered.

Eden’s dad chuckled. “I know how they like their steaks. I was—”

“Killian likes his steak rare,” Eden said, setting a salad on the table, and pulling a face. “Yuck.”

She wasn’t a big fan of steak but had chosen the menu, designed specifically for me. I was getting the Eden Madley special birthday treatment, and the Madley men were more than happy to go along with it. They loved steak, the bigger the T-bone the better.

“Sorry, sir, I thought—”

“It’s Jack,” he growled. He’d corrected me a few times last night, but I kept reverting to sir, for reasons I couldn’t understand. I’d never called anyone sir in my entire life, but the man deserved my respect. Jack Madley had embraced me as his daughter’s boyfriend, without judgement. I didn’t know how to handle that, any more than I knew how to handle this whole situation. Eden might have wanted to get away from home, and I could understand why she didn’t want to live in a small town or anywhere near that jackass, but this house was a home. It was clear within minutes of meeting her family that they all had her back, and she’d been raised with love.

I was drinking a cold beer on the deck in the early evening sunlight because I’d been told birthdays are special in the Madley house which meant I wasn’t allowed to lift a finger to help. I looked out at the green expanse of her backyard and into the woods where I’d hung out with Sawyer last night after Eden had gone to bed, a cunning plan to make it look like she was honoring her dad’s wishes.

“Do you ever get that feeling when you’re surrounded by people having a good time, and you feel like you’re not really there? Like, you’re numb?” Sawyer had asked me.

“Yeah, I know that feeling.”

“I’ll be twenty-four in October, but I feel like I’m decades older than the guys I grew up with.”

“I know that feeling.”