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“Never mind.” She waves a hand between us. “It’s just something your dad said.”

“About what?” Now, my heart is starting to speed up its beating with my growing anxiety.

She glances toward the door, then lowers her voice. “About Bax.”

“What about him?” My brows draw together.

“That he?—”

“Can we start taking all these boxes?” Bax’s voice comes from behind me, cutting Mom off and making me jump. I spin around to face him, feeling like I just got caught with my hand in the cookie jar, even though I know I wasn’t doing anything wrong. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“It’s fine,” I mumble, and he looks from me to Mom, then back again.

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah.” I shift on my feet, then glance at my mom. “All of that is kitchen stuff, right?”

“Yep,” she chirps, not hiding her own guilt very well.

“Okay.” He looks between my mom and me as he picks up two boxes. When he easily carries the heavy load out the door, I start to ask my mom what she was going to say but cut myself off, thinking maybe it’s better if I don’t know.

CHAPTER8

Bax

“So, Olivia,” Talon prompts casually as he and I work together to reframe the window we just installed in Kourtney's guest room while Olivia’s dad and Liam install motion-sensor lights across the back of the house.

“Don’t fucking start,” I mutter, not quite under my breath, then sigh when he starts to laugh.

“Start what? She’s cute.”

She’s not cute. She’s gorgeous.

Well, okay. She’s cute as fuck too. But she’s also funny, and whenever I’ve had my arms around her, she seems to fit against me perfectly, like she was made to beright there.

“How pissed is Liam going to be when you start dating his sister?” he asks, his voice nonchalant.

“Are you done?”

His gaze locks on mine as his expression turns serious. “She’s the one, isn't she?”

I shake my head, even though I’ve been ignoring my own thoughts about that being the case. “How could she be? I knew her for years when she was a kid and didn’t feel shit.”

“Like you said—she was a kid. You never saw her as anything other than that.” He glances toward the door. “And you just said you ‘didn’t’ feel shit. Do you feel something now?”

“You said it yourself. She’s cute.” I don’t know why I’m not admitting to what I felt the moment I saw her in the bar over a week ago. Maybe because it wasn’t something that just hit me, it didn’t smack me in the face. There was no explosion. It was just… some kind of weird recognition—something that I assumed had to do with the fact that I knew her, even when I thought I didn’t.

“I’m not Liam. You don’t need to lie to me. I see the way you look at her.”

I tense. “I don’t look at her in any way.”

“Bro, you look like it’s killing you not to touch her anytime she’s close.”

Fuck.

“If she is who I think she is to you, I’m just telling you, you can’t fight the inevitable,” he says seriously.

“She’s young,” I finally spit out the main thing that keeps popping into my head… besides the fact that she’s my best friend’s sister.

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