Dirty, Reckless Love (Boys of Jackson Harbor 3)

“You want me to leave? I’ll leave. I can’t do this right now anyway.”

“Do what?”

“I can’t deal with your drama, Ellie. Your need for constant attention.”

Betrayal and anger slice through me. I cling to the anger. “Constant attention? Are you kidding me? You’ve barely acknowledged my existence lately.”

He scans the bags with his belongings and shakes his head. “I’ll be back for my shit later.” He doesn’t even look at me before he stomps away and slams the door behind him.

I coil myself into a tighter ball, trying so hard to hold on, to keep it together. But it’s useless. Like squeezing a fistful of sand and watching it slide out between your fingers and fly away on the wind.

Levi

“What’s going on?” Shay asks, her voice sharp.

I blink up at her from my coffee and cover a yawn.

“That’s, like, the twentieth time you’ve yawned in the last ten minutes. What kept you up so late?”

On the other side of the kitchen peninsula, my oldest brother, Brayden, grunts. “Questions that have X-rated answers for two hundred, Alex?”

Ethan chuckles, then adds, “No, more like questions that shouldn’t be asked in front of my six-year-old daughter.”

Lilly props her hands on her hips and lifts her chin. “I’m almost seven!”

Shay rolls her eyes. “You two shut up,” she says, pointing at Brayden and Ethan. “This is different.” She turns back to me. “Am I wrong? Is this all because you’re tired from some wild night out?”

“Hardly. I closed the bar for Jake so he could go home with his beautiful fiancée.” I wink at Ava, who’s standing with Jake on the other side of the kitchen. “Pretty obvious who got the better side of that deal.”

Ava blushes prettily. She’s been an honorary Jackson for most of our lives, so she’s used to me teasing her, but she still embarrasses easily when it comes to talk of her and Jake. In a way, they’ve been a couple forever—best friends since they were kids and never apart for long—but in another way, they’re brand new. They can’t keep their hands off each other.

Jake wraps his arm around his fiancée’s shoulders and presses a kiss to the top of her head. “Can’t argue with you there.”

Shay looks at her watch. “Okay, so you closed down the bar and then didn’t bother sleeping in the subsequent eight hours?”

“Shay’s on the case, Levi,” Carter says. “Better spill your secrets.”

“I crashed at Jake’s place,” I tell her. “Just didn’t sleep well.”

“Did I see Ellie leaving the bar this morning?” Brayden asks, piling eggs onto his plate. “What was she doing there so early?”

Every pair of eyes turns to me now, except for Lilly’s—she’s too enamored with the ooey-gooey cinnamon roll on her plate to bother digging for Uncle Levi’s secrets. I know it’s going to look all kinds of bad if I deny the truth, so I shrug. “Ellie needed a place to crash, so she stayed at Jake’s.”

“With you,” Carter says.

Shay’s eyes go wide, and she holds up a hand. “I was wrong. It is that kind of tired. Okay, okay, no more details needed.”

Brayden’s oblivious, but Jake studies me carefully. “Ellie needed a place to crash?” He looks at Ava, who bites her bottom lip. Who knows what they’re secretly communicating? But I don’t really care.

“She woke up in the middle of the night, and Colton wasn’t home.” I shrug, making light of it. “She went out looking for him. She was upset.”

Ava perks up at the mention of her brother’s name. “What’d he do this time? Christ, that boy needs a keeper.”

“Not your circus, not your monkey,” Jake gently reminds her.

I set my jaw. I should keep my mouth shut, but I don’t fucking care. I’m so pissed at Colton for doing this to her. “She found him with Molly. It screwed her up.”

Shay frowns. “So what? They’re close.”