Page 42 of Hunter

“He doesn’t.”

Isabella is suddenly standing beside me, her hands on her hips, her posture saying that Marcia should probably take off her hoop earrings if she’s planning to keep talking to me.

“I think he can decide for himself,” Marcia says defiantly, tossing her hair and flagging down the bartender. “Two more shots, please.”

“Sure. Okay,” says Isabella, her voice dancing on the edge of dangerous. She turns to me, her eyes arresting mine. “Decide, Casanova.”

Dayyyum. This is hot as fuck.I smile because Isabella’s possessive side is new to me—and entirely unexpected—but I love it. I fuckingloveit.

“No, thanks,” I tell Marcia, without looking away from Isabella’s dark-brown eyes. I hold them. I own them. “No more for me.”

“Good choice,” she whispers, her voice low and gritty. The band starts playing a cover of Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida,” the unmistakable vamp kicking off their next set. She takes my hand and leads me to the dance floor. “Dance with me.”

“I’m shit at dancing,” I confess, following her all the same.

“I’m not,” she says, choosing a spot on the parquet and lacing her hands behind my neck.

I pull her against me, my hands flat on her lower back, our bodies flush, her gorgeous breasts crushed against my chest. We move to the music, staring into each other’s eyes until it gets to be too much—too intense. I look away from her, but her eyes pull mine back like iron filings near a magnet. I’m lost in her.I’m losing myself.I pull her impossibly closer, and she sighs, resting her cheek against my chest.

Can she hear my heart?I wonder.Can she feel it thundering under her ear? Does she know it’s beating like that because of her? Would it matter if she did?

The lead singer leans into the microphone which garbles the words of the song, but I know the lyrics by heart. I listened to this song non-stop the summer it came out. I was fifteen at the time, and my mother had died five months earlier.

For some reason I can’t explain, Once you’d gone there was never

Never an honest word…

I had raged at God that summer, furious and broken, trying to be strong for my younger siblings, but utterly devastated inside. My father had checked out. Paw-Paw picked up the slack, doing every tour my father couldn’t handle.

My gran tried her best to be both mother and father to all of us that summer, but she only had two hands. Because Harper, Tanner, and I were already teenagers, we were expected to take our mother’s loss in stride, or at least try to deal with it by leaning on each other. Parker, Sawyer, and Reeve were five, four and one, and needed more hands-on attention than we did. And yet…they were so little, they didn’t know what they’d lost. They didn’t know the incredible woman who’d just been deleted from their lives. They had no dreams of her clapping in the bleachers at our high school and college graduations or dancing with us at our weddings or holding our children in her loving arms one day.

Harper, Tanner, and I knew exactly what we’d lost, and it hurt worse than any pain I’d ever known before or have endured since.

I close my eyes and hold on tighter to Isabella, and eventually the song ends. She leans away from me and smiles.

“Let’s get out of here.”

***

Isabella

I could feel an intensity thrumming through him as we danced.

I don’t know what he was thinking about—if it was me or something else entirely—but I picked up on it, and against my better judgment, I want to ask him about it. I know it’s not smart for us to forge an emotional connection. I know that this entire arrangement is only temporary and ends when the race ends. But my best friend is also married to his brother. I care about Hunter. I can’t help it.

Messy.That’s what this is. No matter how neat I want my life to be, I feel like messy is inevitable.

Instead of going down the hallway toward my cabin, I pull Hunter outside, onto the open-air deck called the Sun Lounge. Almost everyone is inside drinking, dining, and dancing, so we have the quiet space to ourselves.

It’s only nine o’clock, so the sun hasjuststarted its slow descent. By ten-thirty, it will fall below the horizon, but a lavender-purple light will cast the world around us in dim, dreamy dusk for five hours until the sun rises again at three thirty.

I walk to a railing, leaning against it, watching the wake created in the water by the motion of our small ship. Hunter stands beside me, his hands clutching the railing.

“I like your jealous side,” he says.

“I like yours, too,” I say.Much more than I should.

“Yuri’s old enough to be your father,” he mutters.

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