Enemies With Benefits (Loveless Brothers 1)

It might be my imagination, but I think she sniffs the air.

“Dirt and pine trees and rocks,” I offer.

“Do dirt and rocks smell different from each other?”

“They do here.”

She puts her hand on the door handle, like she’s about to get out, but then she looks over at me again.

“What’s it like?” she asks.

“The smell of dirt?”

“Being homesick.”

I swallow, thinking.

“I’ve never felt it,” she says, staring straight ahead. “I’ve never been away for long enough.”

“Maybe you’re just not the homesick type.”

“I doubt that.”

I watch her. She watches her trailer, eyes glued to the light over her tiny porch like it holds all the answers. Like she’s refusing to look back at me.

I want to reach out and touch her. I want to feel the curve of her cheekbone under my fingers, let her warmth infuse my skin. I want to see if she smells like home, like pine and dirt and rocks, or whether she smells new and wholly different.

I haven’t gotten our kiss behind the brewery out of my mind yet. I might never.

“It’s the feeling that everything around you is slightly wrong and you can’t fix it,” I say, still staring at her. “It’s a bone-deep desire to bury yourself in the familiar.”

She turns and look at me, her face unreadable.

“It’s wanting what you already know and can’t have,” I finish.

Violet just watches me. I have that feeling again, the feeling that she’s peeling me back layer by layer. The feeling that she knows me like no one else does.

Then she opens her door and breaks the spell. The cool night air rushes in. Her seatbelt clanks as she unbuckles it.

“Thanks for the ride, Eli,” she says, and hops out.

I hop out too, both doors slamming.

“Then it’s Eli again?” I say.

Violet looks over her shoulder as she fishes her keys out of her purse, eyes crinkling at the corners.

“Did you have some other name?” she asks.

“Back at the bowling alley I was Loveless all of a sudden,” I say as we mount the steps to her tiny front porch, barely big enough for two adults to stand side-by-side. She’s got lights strung back and forth over her tiny lawn area, and we’re both saturated in the ambient glow. “Glad to know I got my first-name privileges back.”

She turns her key in her lock. I lean against the aluminum siding of her trailer, right next to her front door.

I shouldn’t have followed her up here. I should have stayed in my car until she got inside safely, and then just left.

Being this close to Violet unchaperoned feels dangerous.

“You called me Tulane first,” she counters. “Like you’re my high school track coach.”

“If you’re comparing me to Mr. McLeod, I’m gravely insulted.”

“Then don’t call me Tulane, Loveless,” she says. She’s teasing me.

“Don’t call me Loveless, Tulane. At least when I call you that I know who I’m getting. Shout ‘Loveless’ in a crowd and you could be getting any of us.”

“What if you’re not the one I’m calling?” she says.

I frown, my hands in my pockets.

“And why would you be summoning one of my brothers?”

“Why would I be summoning you?”

“For a car and a sober driver, apparently,” I say. “Because you want to know all the sordid details of being in a Mongolian harem.”

“I thought you said you weren’t,” she teases.

“I neither confirmed nor denied.”

“Then what are the sordid details?” she asked, taking a step closer, her blue-gray eyes looking up at me with a challenge. The key in the lock is forgotten.

“Let’s hear them, Eli.”

I know I should leave. I should say goodnight and leave right now, and I don’t. I’m going to do something I regret, and I can feel it coming like it’s a train and I’m standing on the tracks.

I kissed her once already, and she ran away the second it was over. I know better than to do it again.

But I like the way my name sounds when she says it. I like the way she looks at me, the way she practically dares me to do something, the way my heart thunders with every inch she comes closer.

I lean in, like I’m about to whisper a secret, and she tilts her face upward like she expects something else. Every thought of walking away flies from my brain.

“Unless you weren’t actually in a harem,” she says, her voice suddenly softer. “Unless you’re just lying to impress me.”

“Would you be impressed if I’d been in some princess’s harem?”

The breeze blows a strand of hair across her face, and without thinking, I catch it and push it back behind her ear, my fingers against the soft skin of her neck.

“I’d sure be surprised,” she says.

I don’t move my hand away. I just keep it there, feeling her pulse thump under her skin.

“I’ll take it,” I say, my voice softer now, matching hers. “What else would surprise you?”