Storm (Sex and Bullets 1)

Hawk shakes his head, clasps his hands together and presses his thumbs into his eyes. “Yeah, I know. It’d make me feel better, though.”

Raylin snorts, the sound turning into a faint sob, and I lift my arm to put around her—only my arm isn’t happy with me right now, and pain screams up my shoulder.

Jesus. Fuck.

“You’re coming with me this time,” Hawk says, “and no fucking arguments. Can’t do a thing when there’s some psycho after you.”

Now he believes me.

Of course he does. You don’t shoot someone in a penthouse suite by accident.

“That would be quite the feat,” Hawk agrees, and wait a minute, did I say that out loud?

Nausea rises in my throat, and I swallow hard. “You don’t think I’m crazy anymore?”

“That’s still on the table.”

“I can’t come with you. We—” I glance at Raylin, who flashes me a quick smile, making my heart trip, “we can’t. Too risky.”

“Enough.” Hawk gets up and dusts his pants. “This isn’t up for debate.”

“You’re right. We can’t go with you, because we’re going to the beach.”

“We are?” Raylin is staring at me with wide eyes.

Those wide eyes that caught me when I first saw them and never let me go. Like dark nets in a night sky. And…

“He’s a bit out of it,” Hawk says. “Doc told me it’s the blood loss. He’ll be fine by tomorrow.”

“My uncle,” I say, turning to Raylin, because we never finished our conversation that the shooting so rudely interrupted. “Left me the house.”

“The mansion at Boca Raton. Yeah, you told me.”

“In his will.” My mind is performing those weird leaps it normally does when you’re pissing drunk or on drugs. “That’s it.”

“That’s what?”

“The key he left me. What would it open? Something that was his and left to me in his will.”

“The mansion? But it’s not a house key…” She hisses. “Of course. The desk. In the office. One of the drawers was locked.”

I blink at her. “How the hell do you know that?”

She shrugs and grins. “Snooped around a bit.”

If I start laughing now, I may never stop. I put my hand over hers and lift it, turn it over. “I’d never have made it without you.”

Back at the beach, when I couldn’t seem to be able to surface from the dark. During the shooting afterward. The explosion. Rook getting hurt. And now this. The shooting. The riddle.

Disconcerting, how everything’s brighter when she’s around.

She smiles, mouth trembling a little. “Don’t you know I love you, Storm Jordan?”

I frown, then grin, then just stare at her. Wait a minute. Did she just say…?

“You really think we may find something at the house?” Hawk is standing there, hands in pockets, gaze cloudy. Oblivious.

Because she said she loves me. And suddenly I’m so happy I feel like I could float right of this sofa and out of this suite into the fucking clouds.