Page 38 of Never Dance with the Devils
“You can be yourself with us,” I rumble, tilting her face toward me and waiting for her to open her eyes, making sure she hears that loud and clear. “We want you to be.”
“Even though I’m a cold-hearted bitch?” she challenges breathlessly. She’s putting up walls, re-erecting the defense that crumbled a bit with her admission, andpushing us away with the reminder of what she thinks she is.
I wonder how many times she’s been called that? How long it took before she started calling herself that? Based on the number of times I had to be called a worthless piece of shit before I internalized it, my bet is a lot, and that makes me angry as hell at every single person who dared to dilute Kayla down to such an untrue conclusion.
“Woman, the last thing you are is cold,” I grit out, “and if youactlike a bitch, it’s a warranted reaction to someone else’s bullshit.”
Yep, poetry in action over here in my head.
But it’s what she needs to hear as her lips slam against mine, her fingers diving into my hair to pull me in harder like she needs to taste those words. I’ll say them over and over until I overwrite her own internal narrator, though I have no idea how long that’ll take considering my own fucked-up inner voice still gives me shit regularly.
While I have her mouth, Maddox moves in to growl in her ear, “We like who you are, Princess.”
Her head drops back, ending our kiss, and I meet Maddox’s eyes. Something changed tonight, for all three of us. We’ve been taking things slow—or as slow as we could—but that ended with her admission that she’s not here to get fucked. She’s here to be… loved.
MADDOX
“Aaaaah!”
Crash.
The scream wakes me from a deep sleep, but it’s the crash that gets me moving.
Time slows as I look to the middle of the bed with bleary eyes, finding a Kayla-sized gap between me and Riggs. I meet his equally confused gaze and without words, we’re both running, naked as the day we were born, toward the living room, where the sounds came from.
“What the fuck!” Kayla shouts.
“What do you mean, what the fuck? What are you doing here?” a male voice answers.
In the living room, I find Kayla in the open sliding back door, one arm across her breasts and her other hand at the apex of her thighs, standing in a puddle of coffee and broken cup pieces, looking somewhere between horrified and murderous. There’s also a guy glaring at her, one arm outstretched like she owes him some explanation and the other covering his eyes, whichonly minimally saves his life because who is this fucker and why is he on my patio?
Reacting instantly, Riggs strides across the room, picks Kayla up out of the broken shards on the floor, nearly tossing her back and trusting that I’ll cover her, and raises his fist to pummel this intruder.
“Wait!” Kayla exclaims, fighting me as I try to shield her with my body. “No!”
Riggs glances back, both of us surprised at her outburst.
“Yeah, wait,” the guy says. But instead of looking shocked by his current predicament and impending death at the hands at one of the league’s toughest defensemen, he seems bored? And is that a shit-eating grin stretching across his face? “This is gonna be good.”
“Shit,” Kayla whispers under her breath. But in some weird, debutante final boss—manners or death demonstration, she introduces us all. “Guys, this is Kyle, my brother. Kyle, this is…”
“Riggs Patrick and Maddox Brooks. Yeah, I know,” he quips sardonically. “I installed their pool last year. Some of my best work.”
Oh, yeah. We did have a pool installed when we bought the house. The realtor handled most of it, and we never met the actual installation crew because we were in the city, focusing on finishing out the season and dealing with stuff via email. We played the last game of the season and came ‘home’ to a reward of an amazing back yard and a decorated house that we had very little to do with.
“What are you doing here?” I demand, wrapping a blanket around Kayla’s shoulders. Now that she’s said they’re related, I can see a general resemblance in theirblond hair and blue eyes, but where Kayla is elegance personified, Kyle is heavily muscled and rough-looking in dirty jeans, a T-shirt, backward ballcap, and work boots.
“Scheduled maintenance check. The confirmation for the appointment said to let myself in the back yard,” he answers easily before cutting his eyes to Kayla to drawl out, “Didn’t expect to find my sister, naked with her morning coffee.”
Okay, that explains the puddle in the floor and the scream. But I have no idea about the appointment, nor do I like his accusatory tone.
“What day is it?” Riggs’s brow furrows as he runs a hand through his hair.
“The twentieth,” Kyle replies.
“Fuck.” So yeah, I guess the appointment is cleared up too. Just one of those automatic things we didn’t even think of after it happened.
“Look, let’s all…” Kayla says, stepping out from behind me like she’s taking charge of this whole encounter.