I was finally a woman in a way that demanded attention.
Even Nova with his foster brother blinders had to sit up and take notice… didn’t he?
I tossed my waist-length hair behind my shoulder and flashed H.R. a cocky grin I didn’t feel. “It’s still early, I’m sure he’s just shooting the shit with the brothers. Besides, if he is preoccupied, what do I care? I’ll just come back outside and hang with my girl, right?”
It was me asking for permission even though I didn’t need it from her. It was my way of asking for validation because I knew I was being ridiculous, but I wasn’t going to censure myself the way I should have.
I needed just one person to get me. To get how it felt to have this garden thriving and blooming in my chest just waiting for that one man to walk through it, yet knowing that he never would.
And Harleigh Rose?
She might have been prickly as a barbed rose, but she understood unrequited love more than most, and better, she got me more than anyone other than my brother ever had.
So she sighed dramatically, slammed the rest of her beer back, then wiped her wet mouth with the back of her hand before shoving me on my way. “Go with my blessing then, if it makes you feel better. Either way, you know I’m here.”
I smacked a kiss on her cheek in thanks then turned on my heel and practically flounced up the stairs to the clubhouse, buoyed by hope.
And wasn’t that the danger? Hope filled the human heart until you felt it could float, and it was so easy to forget that an overinflated balloon was that much easier to pop.
The inside of the clubhouse was dark and filled with pot smoke, sweet and cloying. The scent was familiar enough to feel homey, which was an odd thought to have as I passed by the bar where Boner and Kodiak were doing body shots off a naked stripper from The Wet Lotus strip club then down the hall where Skell was rutting into someone who was distinctly not his wife.
But that’s how I felt there, amid the rock music and the thick lure of smoke, in a house of depravity with a group of outlaw sinners.
Like I was at home.
I followed the hall to the end, the T-shape branching off to the left and right where the brother’s rooms sprawled across the back of the building. Nova’s was to the left three doors down, and I could see his door was cracked open.
Giddiness exploded like an opened jar of butterflies in my chest, their wings tickling me as they flew between my ribs.
I didn’t know what I thought would happen.
Maybe I had some fantasy that I’d push open the door to find him drunk enough to be pliable, happy enough to see me after weeks of separation with me in Vancouver for university, that he’d notice me differently. That finally, he would see me independent of our historical context and view me as a sensual, grown woman.
But that was too specific. My hope was all-encompassing, so overwhelming there was no shape to it, only soft, glowing substance that spilled through every inch of me like warm water.
My heartbeat thundered in my ears, and sweat broke out over my brow as I struggled to control my anxious breathing and made my way to his door.
There was a moan, a breathy exclamation of sound that somehow beckoned me closer to the door even though it was obvious I was intruding on something.
A swathe of golden light fell from the hallway into the bedroom, illuminating a broad, tattooed back tapering into a narrow waist, the sheet clinging desperately to the hard swell of a male buttock.
I knew the play of muscles in that back.
Even in the dim light, I could trace the intricate whorls and swirls of the tattoos playing over his flesh.
My skin pebbled almost painfully as desire whooshed through me, stealing my breath, tightening my nipples to hard peaks, igniting a fire in my belly I thought would raze me to the ground.
He was fucking someone.
I should have been jealous, and I was, the taste of it metallic on the back of my palate.
But for a love-sick girl without a hope of reciprocity, the moment was too good to waste.
Seeing him like this with whoever lay beneath him was the only way I would ever get to witness all of his sexual magnetism unleashed.
Saliva pooled under my tongue.
When I pressed my thighs together, rubbing at the burn pulsing at the crown of my sex, I was slick there too.
A well for him to dip into if only he’d ever look my way to notice.
But he didn’t.
He never had.
I was so convinced of my own invisibility in that moment, as I had been in many others, that I dared to do something entirely forbidden.