Page 101 of Devil's Kiss

“Not if you want me to get through dinner.”

Brantley eyed the wine cooler and reached for it. “How many bottles are in here?”

Jordan shrugged. “Not enough to put me out of my misery.”

“He’s still mad about you not telling him?”

“Mad is an understatement. He won’t take my calls, won’t text. And, well, you saw him just now.”

“Maybe Finn can talk some sense into him. I can understand why he’s upset, but what you’re doing is a wonderful thing. Surely he can see you weren’t doing it to hurt him.”

“Yeah, I don’t know, Brantley. You didn’t see his face when he heard. We’d had such a great evening, and then it all went to shit. So, um,sorryin advance for whatever happens in there.”

“Hey, I hid all the fine china just in case.” Brantley flashed a smile and then looped his arm through Jordan’s elbow. “And you brought alcohol. So maybe it will go better than you think.”

Yeah, judging from the look on Derek’s face a minute ago, Jordan highly doubted it.

“HEY, MAN,”FINN said as Derek walked through the large archway of the kitchen.

“Hey,” he said, crossing over to see what Finn was doing at the sink, and to take his mind off the fact that he wished he was anywhere other than where he was right that second.

Fuck. He almost hadn’t come tonight, and when he’d walked up to the front door and seen Jordan standing there, his first instinct had been to run. Before he’d had the chance, though, Jordan turned around, and one look at his miserable expression had Derek frozen in place.

He’d wanted to take Jordan’s face between his hands and kiss the hell out of him. But then he rememberedwhyhe was upset, and the anger at being so blindsided the night before slammed back into him and made him resentful.

After the taxi dropped him home last night, Derek had lain awake in his bed and listened to every single message Jordan had left for him. From the first apology to the very last plea that he pick up the phone and talk to him, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to call him back.

He wasn’t stupid. He knew what Jordan had done wasn’t meant to hurt him. What he couldn’t understand waswhyhe hadn’t told him. Why wouldn’t he have asked him if he was okay with his name being on some national platform for people to know what had happened to him? It made him feel nauseous, but at the same time he knew the importance of what Jordan was trying to do.

“You don’t look so hot, man,” Finn said, as he peeled jumbo shrimp in a colander.

Derek grunted in response. That was Finn, straight to the fucking point. “Thanks a lot, Danny boy.”

“Just keeping it real, man. What’s up? You come with Posh tonight?”

When Finn waggled his eyebrows, Derek shook his head.

“But I thought?—”

“Yeah, well. We had a fight.”

“So I heard. But?—”

“What do you mean you heard?” Derek interrupted.

“He was chatting with Brantley last night.”

Derek wasn’t sure if it was due to the annoyance already festering inside of him, but that little tidbit of information brought the fury he’d managed to keep on a low simmer to a boiling point. “Oh, that’s just fucking great.”

“Hey,” Finn said, and glared at him. “Newsflash. You two are always fighting. It’s like foreplay or some shit. So what’s the big deal this time?”

Derek looked at the shrimp, thinking the idea of ripping something’s head off wasn’t a bad one. “I don’t wanna talk about it.”

“Well, that’s nothing new either, is it?”

He turned his head toward his friend, suddenly finding that every single word coming out of Finn’s mouth was rubbing him the wrong way. “What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

Finn threw the shrimp he was holding back into the sink and turned around. “That you bottle shit up. You’ve done it for as long as I’ve known you, and you’restilldoing it.”