Page 4 of Messing With My Brother's Best Friends

I turned to lead her inside the house, thinking that if I just kept talking, she’d keep coming, but when I looked over my shoulder, I saw a familiar stubborn expression.

Because all three of us had worked hard to get her glaring at us like that throughout our childhood.

What had been born from a childishly cruel glee at provoking Finn’s brat sister, turned into something else when we all hit puberty. I couldn’t think of anything smooth to say to get her sighing in my direction, so I’d just yank her ponytail, stick my foot out when she was walking past, just to get a reaction. Kendall was always fucking beautiful, but when she was pissed something else happened.

My heart stopped beating, and I had that weird feeling, like I was on the top of a rollercoaster, about to go rumbling over. I was terrified and elated all at the same time. My hand rose, doing something it’d wanted to for so fucking long, reaching out for Kendall, despite a voice inside my head screaming that this was a bad, bad idea. Something that seemed to be confirmed by Connor and Gage’s looks of concern.

Don’t fuck this up, I communicated silently, glaring at each one of them before smiling at her. Do not fuck this up for me. Because it had to be fate that brought Kendall to my door. I’d bought new pillows and blankets in the hope of bringing someone clean and tidy into the house, but I got something so much better.

The only woman I’d felt anything for.

I shot her a cheeky grin, hoping to dispel the tense mood, before wiggling my fingers.

“C’mon. Let’s go inside.”

Chapter 3

Kendall

Oh fuck no.

The last time I saw these three idiots was when I finished school. That was the day I’d moved out of home, leaving behind my brother and his dickhead mates. As was often the case with families like ours, I hadn’t seen Finn a lot since, so that saved me from confronting the three banes of my existence.

Gage, Van and Connor.

Van turned around, holding out a hand then shooting me a panty melting grin. Those blue eyes sparkled, as if that was enough to get me doing what he wanted, while Connor and Gage stepped closer.

So I stepped back.

Barbie watched all of this going down like I had lost my mind and perhaps I had. A full colour flashback of the way my brother, Finn, used to torment me hit me square in the gut. And who were my brother’s greatest henchmen? These guys. I shook my head, trying to clear the red haze that now covered my eyes as I retook surrendered ground.

“Ken, what the actual fuck…?” Barbie hissed. “These are the guys that are renting the room. The one with the nice pool, remember? Margaritas, suntan lotion and me—”

“I make a damn fine frozen margarita,” Connor said, crossing his stupid muscly arms across his stupid broad chest before smirking. God, I forgot he had dimples.

“I’m sure you do,” I said, trying for calm and failing utterly. “But is it so good that I’d forget the crimes against humanity you committed on my pillow? Farting on it when I was getting ready for bed.” Connor’s lips twitched, but didn’t form a smile. “Making it smell like sweaty arse by rubbing your balls on it.” Van blinked twice and then shook his head as his hand raked through his blond hair. “It took me weeks to work out what you’d done. I had to change my pillowcase every day, and Mum was at me for all the washing. Then Finn said it was just because I stank before…”

I sucked in a breath, then another.

“Before you stole my pillow and then left it in the dog’s bed.”

Gage just stared me down, those flat hazel eyes of his giving nothing away, just as they did when we were kids. Before, he was a tank, but now he was just this huge wall of impervious muscle.

“Bluey didn’t tear it up,” he said.

“No, but it got infested with fleas.” My hand rose up, feeling an instinctive need to scratch, even though it had been years since that moment. “It was only when Dad had to have the place fumigated that you lot got into trouble.”

“We’ve got lots of pillows here now.” Van stepped forward, a sheepish smile on his face. As if that would make everything better. “A whole bunch on the couch. You can take one… Take all of them, but Ken—”

“Nope, not doing this.” I turned on my heel and went to march away, but Barbie grabbed my arm and held on tight.

“Cool your jets, Fanta Pants.” I had red hair, so that epithet followed me everywhere. She glanced back at the guys then the house before staring up at me. “Remember the shed.”

“There’ll be other pla—”

“The people who were trying to pass off the living area as a bedroom?”

That place had no door on it at all. The ‘room’ was little other than an expansive corridor that had a bed set up in it.

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