The Price of Mason (Forbidden Men 10)

Apparently not.

No one left me alone anymore. It was annoying as hell. Ever since my failed engagement, family and friends had been all up in my business, constantly bothering me and trying to drag me back into the herd to heal me or some such shit. But couldn’t they see it was too late for that? I was broken. Dead inside. And everything sucked. Even the fact that Teagan was here to see Luke, not me. Not that I wanted her to bother me. I just wanted to be left alone. But still… It sucked to be thrown over for my own brother.

Once she made it inside, getting her foot caught in the opening and nearly tripping and falling on me, she rustled around, making enough noise that she would’ve definitely woken me by now if I’d really been asleep in the first place.

What the hell was she doing? I couldn’t crank my head and look—not that I’d see much in the dark—because the movement would alert her to the fact I was awake, but whatever it was seemed to take a lot of squirming and cursing under her breath.

Typical. Teagan had never been able to stay still. Or quiet.

But couldn’t she go make a commotion in someone else’s tent? Say Luke’s? Since that’s who she’d been seeking in the first place. My tent was blue. His was red. They were impossible to mistake.

She lost her footing, then cursed again, and stumbled around to right herself, only to step on my ankle.

“Ouch,” I bellowed, jerking my foot away and making her yelp in surprise. “What the fuck, T?”

“Oh my God! I am so sorry.” She patted around my leg as if trying to find my ankle and assess the damage. “Are you okay? I totally didn’t mean to do that.”

“I’ll live,” I grumbled, tugging my foot out of her grip when she actually found it and latched on so hard it made the pain in my ankle spike instead of abate.

“Oh. Good.” She blew out an audible breath and stroked my knee through the covers in reassurance. “In that case, let me in your sleeping bag, will you? It’s fucking freezing out here.”

“What? Why? There’s no room. Why don’t you go find your own sleeping bag in your own tent?”

She let out an aggravated sigh. “Because I’m conducting an experiment. Now would you please just let me in already before I get hypothermia?”

I rolled my eyes over her typical dramatics but fumbled for the zipper of my sleeping bag even as I grumbled, “What the hell kind of experiment involves you climbing into my sleeping bag with me?”

“I’ll show you,” she assured. “Just hurry before I freeze my nips off.”

“It’s not that cold,” I argued, irritated she had to go and bring up her nipples, because now I was thinking about them, along with the breasts they dwelled upon.

It really pissed me off that she’d gone and developed tits. And really nice tits at that.

The worst thing about Teagan was that when she’d grown up, she’d grown up hot, like fucking hot, like “bite your knuckles while you groan and stare lustfully” hot. It wasn’t right at all. When I’d been twelve, she’d been six. When I’d been eighteen, she’d been twelve. And when she’d been fifteen, popping feminine curves like some kind of sex goddess, I’d been way too old to be looking. I had no idea how Luke had managed to tease her about it, snapping the back of her bra and laughing like a dork when she’d started wearing one, because I’d only been able to blush and clear my throat uncomfortably, looking away because I felt like some kind of lecher.

But what the hell, nature? Seriously. Teagan was supposed to remain that annoying little tagalong who could in no way, shape, or form turn me on.

The weirdest part about her grown-up status was that she was no longer too young. She was twenty now, and her cousin Beau had set me up on a blind date with a twenty-year-old just last month—his way of helping me get over Sonya. It hadn’t worked. But nothing did these days. I was firmly stuck in my funk.

Not that I could focus on funks or failed relationships right now. Right now, all my brain could seem to register was: she’s twenty now.

She’s twenty.

Holy shit, Teagan was twenty.

Don’t ask me why I kept thinking about her finally being in my dating range; I’d never once thought about dating her before, but she was currently crawling into my sleeping bag with me for reasons unknown and talking about her hard nipp

les, so it was kind of impossible for my brain to not go there.

So…

Yeah.

There went my brain, along with a couple other body parts, going places they most definitely should not.

“It’s not that warm either,” Teagan muttered as she crawled over me, nearly kneeing me in the junk as she opened the unzipped part of my bag—proving to me that it really was fucking freezing outside—and she started to shimmy in, her bare legs brushing against mine, which made even more unwanted things in me stir to life.

“Careful,” I strained, sensing nothing but disaster in our future.