Enemies With Benefits (Loveless Brothers 1)

I turn, frown, and stick a hand in my pocket as I count up the number of beers she’s had. The cups they gave us were tiny, but the answer is enough to get her tipsy.

“I’ll give you a ride,” I say.

“I’m —”

“I’m already your coffee slave for the summer, accept a ride, for Chrissake,” I say. “You already know I won’t get you killed.”

“You’re mad because I won.”

“Yup,” I say, crossing my arms in front of myself. “And I’ll be even more pissed off if you make me talk you into accepting a ride, so come the hell on.”

“My car’s here.”

“Ken’s not gonna tow you.”

“Then how am I —”

“Violet, I swear to God, I’ve been back in town for three months and I’ve already spent two of them convincing you to get in my car so I can get you home safely,” I say. “Don’t make me threaten to pick you up and carry you out of here.”

She narrows her eyes, but I swear she blushes again. I ignore the thought pricking at me, that picking her up and carrying her somewhere wouldn’t be so bad.

“I’ll do it,” I say.

“Okay, okay,” she says, standing. “Fine. Thank you.”Chapter EighteenEliWe wind the windows down and let the warm night air drift in as I drive. Violet pushes the passenger seat all the way back and props her feet on the dashboard, still wearing brightly colored socks I can’t make out, her hands over her head.

It’s distracting. I’m tempted to spend more time looking at her than at the road in front of me, even though I know I’ll be seeing plenty of her when I hand her coffee every morning for the next three months.

Ugh.

“Where’d you even find a car this old?” she asks, poking at a spot in the ceiling. It looks like a cigarette burn, a singed circle in the fabric that stretches over the roof.

“Maddy Thompson was using it to haul her dogs around her farm,” I say. “And when I moved back she’d just gotten a slightly newer pickup that was better for dog-hauling, so she let me have this for two hundred bucks.”

“You paid that much?”

“Hey now,” I say, patting the console. “She passed inspection on the second try and hardly ever breaks down in the middle of nowhere.”

Violet shifts in her seat and sticks a hand out the window, her fingers waving through the wind. She watches them, head turned away from me, like she’s thinking.

“Why did you come back?” she finally asks.

I take a hand off the wheel and lean my elbow on the door frame, let wind lick my hair. Of course Violet would ask the question I don’t know how to answer. Not really.

“The chef at Le Faisan went on maternity leave, and she asked if I could fill in for her for a few months,” I say. “She’s a friend from culinary school.”

Violet looks over at me, her hand still dancing out my car window, fingers slowly waving in the wind.

“That’s all?”

“That’s not good enough?” I ask.

“If you were just here to do a friend a favor, you wouldn’t still be around,” Violet says.

“I decided to stay.”

“Why?”

I feel like my spine is slowly turning to iron and it’s ready to come through my skin and become armor at any second.

It’s my own fault. I know better than to leave myself unguarded around Violet, however briefly.

“Why not?”

Violet finally turns and looks at me. Her eyes are colorless in the faint glow of the Bronco’s instrument panels, but I’ve got that familiar feeling: sharks in the water.

“Because you always hated it here,” she says, like it’s obvious. “Remember the day you got the admission letter to the University of Chicago?”

I grin in the dark, looking out the windshield.

“You still mad about that, Violet?”

Now it’s her turn to laugh.

“Not anymore, but you sure were a dick,” she says.

“You got into every other school you wanted,” I said. “You got into Yale, Duke, Georgetown, all the state schools, and you couldn’t even let me have Chicago.”

“Probably because you acted like Jesus Christ himself had come down and personally handed you that admission letter,” she says. “And it’s not like getting into Yale did me much good.”

“Well, neither did Chicago,” I say.

She’s quiet, but I can feel her watching me. Waiting, like she knows I’ll say something if she gives me long enough.

I wonder if I should tell her. I wondering if she already knows.

“I left halfway through my second semester,” I finally admit, because the darkness in the truck feels like armor. “It was that or get kicked out for failing everything.”

A beat of silence: contemplative, oddly gentle.

“That was true?”

“As the gospel.”

“I always thought the gossip mill was exaggerating,” she says, shifting in the passenger seat. “Was everything they said true?”

I pass my hand over my hair, my elbow still on the frame.