Page 48 of Sinful Like Us

Blood pulses in my cock, and I could kiss Jane. I’m a millisecond from dipping my head down—

“Do you have anything to say?” Beckett asks, stealing my attention. He blows a filmy line of smoke upward.

I nod a few times.

He’s calm, but I can’t discount the threatening look in his eye. They’re all protective of their older sister. And I understand how they’d want to guarantee no harm invades her life. Fuckbags after targets after shitheads surround her on a daily basis, and if they need me to prove that I’m not one of them, they don’t even need to command me tojump.

I’ll already be off the ground.

“Yeah,” I nod, about to start talking in length. “Look, I love Jane—”

“That’s funny,” Charlie cuts me off. “Considering a week ago, none of us thought you were even attracted to her.”

It throws me back. Not physically.

I’m mentally wrenched to a moment I shared with Jane.

To the night she told me her brothers and little sister wanted her to “open herself up” tolove, and subsequently heartbreak. Because they thought her feelings were one-sided, un-fucking-reciprocated, and that I’d never be interested in her sexually or romantically.

She gushed all of this to me.

And then as I was tying my boots, she said, “I can’t blame them, really.”

I knotted my lace. Thinking she’d mention how I wasn’t easy to read. That I was too stoic for her siblings to conclude anything butdisintereston my end. Or at the very least, that I was a professional bodyguard and I would’ve forced my dick down during the fake-dating op.

But she said, “Your type doesn’t usually fall formytype in popular culture.”

It struck me hard. Painfully. I sent a narrowed look over my shoulder. “Why wouldn’t my type be into you?”

She rolled on her side, pink sheet draped over the curve of her wide hip and belly. Wavy brown hair frizzed wildly around freckled cheeks. Her small breasts exposed and nipples perked—and my cock twitched with an aggressive, primal hunger.

If she was a lion, then I was the animal that wanted to mount the fuck out of her and play around with her until she was one beautifulwhimperingmess. Spent and safe and satiated in my arms.

I didn’t want to leave her room. I wished I could listen to her talk while the sun rose and set. Every second. Every day.

But I had to go.

Zero three hundred hours.On the dot.Or else my fucking carriage would morph into a pumpkin.

“It’s just that…” Jane trailed off, giving me a long once-over. Her aching breath pushed her lips apart. She fixated on my dark hair tucked behind my ears and my jawline and my tall, muscular build. “You’re blatantly hot and fit in the realm of Vikings and billboard jocks. I’m—”

“Gorgeous,” I interjected. Not hesitating to cut her off there.

A soft noise left Jane, eyes melting. “I…” Flustered, she sat up slightly on the headboard. “We’ve been through this. I have a strong love for myself, you know, but I recognize that classically, I’m not the world’s definition of beauty.”

“You’re mine,” I said with power and force. Feeling pissed off, I shifted my glare onto the wall and grabbed my black button-down off the ground. I was boiling.

Not at her.

But at the media outlets, tabloids, and spineless pricks that constantly critiqued Jane’s appearance. That pitted her against whatever the popular body type is of the fucking millennium.

It was horseshit.

Jane went quiet.

I finished buttoning my shirt, and I trekked stringently to the end table. Collecting my things. I holstered my gun on my waistband. “There shouldn’t even be an ideal woman.”

I caught her smile.