Page 20 of No Second Chances

I turn to face her, and while she is pulling her leggings back up over her stomach, I bite my lip to cover the groan that threatens to break free. Kennedy turns me into a bitch, and I don’t even give a shit about it. Just being around her makes everything better. Almost okay.

The lock clicks, and the fantasy I have of bending her back over the table evaporates. She’d slipped by me to unlock the door, and I can’t even blame her for wanting to get away.

“Kennedy.” Her name is a fucking prayer on my lips.

“Don’t worry.” The smile she gives me sends my heart racing, the exact same way it always has. “I won’t tell anyone about you having your hands on my ass.”

I snort, unable to help myself, and then my mouth opens and I say the one thing that will send me straight to hell.

“Kennedy, if I had you again, I wouldn’t give a fuck who heard that I had my hands on your ass.”

9

KENNEDY

“So, did Linc let Dom pull that tick off your ass?”

Even the mention of Linc’s name sends my brain back a week. His hands on my hips, and the look in his eyes when he didn’t think I saw him. News flash, I had. I couldn’t crane my neck hard enough when he dropped to his knees.

Hell, I struggled for the entire interaction not to lean back and press my ass against his face. The tick being stuck on my skin made things inconvenient, but it didn’t take away the desire for Linc to claim me as his own. Then, way too soon, he stood up and his hands weren’t blazing a path of arousal and need through my body anymore. Instead, I was left practically panting with a need that only he was capable of creating or fulfilling.

Just like that, all the years that passed between us vanished. I was hurtled through time and space back to a night when Linc, against all odds and reason, let me claim him as my own.

“Hellooooo. Earth to Kennedy.” Mom snaps her flour-covered fingers in front of my face, smiling when I blink owlishly and stare at her. “I asked you if Linc actually let Dom get that tick off you last week. You didn’t call to tell me how it went, and I almost resorted to calling Dom to find out.”

Heat steals up my cheeks at the memory replaying itself over and over in my head and I have to swallow to try and buy myself time to give her a vague enough answer so that she will leave me alone.

But she doesn’t even wait for me to say anything before she starts talking a mile a minute, turning her back to me in favor of the food she is making. “I don’t think he did. Not Linc. He had that growly look in his eyes. The same one your father gets when one of his rookies gives me a compliment and he wants to break him in half and then gives him the shit shift for a month to make himself feel better about it.”

I sigh, hoping she’ll get the hint and let me off the hook without eventually giving her an answer, but she doesn’t bite. Instead, I stand in the kitchen and watch while she wipes her hands impatiently on her apron and goes back to cooking like she’d been born behind a stove. The look she gives me would have had me confessing my worst sins ten years before, but I’m not a little girl anymore. So I don’t give her the answer she so desperately wants.

Instead, I pull out my phone and send my little sister Casper a text.

K: Your mother is absolutely batty.

C: She’s your mother until after the babies come. Then she’s mine so I get free babysitting.

I snort at her response, completely ignoring the righteous indignation coming from Mom’s direction.

K: Hurry up and pop out the twins. You’re getting fat.

C: I’m telling on you.

Mom gasps, and I look around to see her staring at her phone, her mouth hanging open. Damn, Casper really did tell on me.

“Kennedy Marie Townsend.” I wince at her use of my full name. “You called your sister fat? How dare you? She’s pregnant, with twins. You better be careful, or karma's gonna bite you in the ass. Just like that tick. How do you even get a tick on your ass anyway? It’s barely spring. What did you do, just go sit in the grass naked until you got bit?”

I watch her sniff dramatically and then turn back to the massive bowl of what looks like biscuits that she is kneading with every bit of the frustration I can tell she wants to take out on me.

“Stuff it, Mother.” My words come out bratty, but I won’t be taking them back. I’m a grown-ass woman, and if I want to call my annoying, pain-in-the-ass sister fat because she deserves it, I will.

But I also take out my phone again.

K: This means war, you know.

C: Yeah, but it was soooooo worth it. How’s your ass?

K: I’m gonna kill you.

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