Page 67 of The Love Bandits

I instantly do the same. “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t…” she says through breathless panting. “I can’t…”

Shecan; she’s so close. This isn’t a physical problem, but I’m not about to force an orgasm on her. So I pull away, my dick a hard, persistent ache. She arranges her skirt and sits up straight, but there’s no way she’s going to be able to make herself look chaste right now. Her hair is mussed, her lips swollen from me, and she’s so fucking beautiful like this that I almost take out my burner phone to snap a photo. Instead, I sit beside her on the back of the ruined hatchback. There’s barely room for both of us, our thighs pressed together, the top of the hatchback digging into me. It’s uncomfortable, but I want to be close to her enough that I’d bear worse.

She gives me a sidelong look, her expression sad. “I’m sorry.”

“Jesus, Lainey,” I say with a groan, “don’t tell me you’re sorry.Youhave nothing to be sorry for.”

She nudges me with her shoulder. “You called me Lainey.”

“I’m guessing we’re friends now. We just ruined your car together, and I know how you taste.”

Another nudge. “You’re a pig.”

“How am I pig?” I ask, turning my head to face her. “You’re gorgeous and smart, and you taste delicious, and you should own that. You should wear it on a fucking badge.”

Something flashes across her face, her lips turning up slightly, but then they drop. “Maybe I’m broken.” She gestures to the ruined bat and umbrella, the wreckage of the car. “This isn’t normal.”

Rage rips through me—not at her but at the lowly piece of shit who made her feel this way.

“It’s not abnormal. Haven’t you heard of rage rooms? You just made your own.” I pause, studying her face in the dark. The firm set of her lips, the slight line between her brows. “And I don’t like hearing you say you’re broken. That douchebag didn’t break you. He may have wanted that power, but he doesn’t get to fucking have it. No one has that power unless you give it to them.”

I think of other locked rooms. Of the contents of that bag from under the floorboards.

A sniff escapes her. “It looks like I have. I don’t know how to take it back.”

I lift a hand to her chin. I trace her lips. I press a light kiss to them. They’re soft and pink, and it’s as if they have a gravitational pull all their own. “Practice makes perfect.”

She smiles again before shaking her head slightly. “We shouldn’t do this. I barely know anything about you.”

It hits me that our scales are off, the balance gone. She told me something big tonight, something true, and I’ve given her nothing. Usually I’m a bargain seeker, the way Elaine told me she is, but I feel compelled to give her something. More disturbingly, I want to.

“You gave me something by telling me about him. About your parents. You want a truth for a truth.”

“Yes.”

I pause, thinking, then say, “My brother’s in trouble because of me. You remember that pocket watch I told you about?”

She nods, her eyes glistening in the dark.

“Ryan’s the one who took it. He thought he was helping me because I couldn’t bring myself to finish the job, but I was really upset. I…we haven’t talked for months after he took it. So he tried to steal it back, and he got caught. That’s why he’s in trouble.”

“How’s that your fault?” she asks, cocking her head.

“He’s a hothead. If I’d been paying attention to what he was up to, it never would have happened. But I was pissed, so I shut him out.”

“It’s not your fault,” she tells me, giving me those words I love hearing. “I’d like to know why you didn’t want to take the watch.”

I shrug, staring off into the night. It’s dark out here, secluded, with the closest street light far enough away that it’s no more than a wink in the night, almost like a distant star. It’s surprisingly nice. Usually, I want to lose myself in the chaos of a city—the noise, the bodies, the people. But it feels good to be sitting out here, in the back of this car, with this woman. It feels soothing, like slipping naked into a cool lake, knowing you could get caught but doing it anyway.

I can feel her waiting, and I’m not sure why, but I decide I’d like to tell her. She’s given me a deeper knowledge of her, and Iwant her to have the same for me. “The guy who trained us…he always told us to demonize the people we steal from, to think the worst of them. Because if you let yourself see them as people, it would feel wrong.” I give her a half smile. “Because itiswrong. Anyway. This guy…he was an older man, and he was all alone in the world. He’d lost his son. So it was easy for me to befriend him, but the more time we spent together, the more I realized he was a good person. Lonely. And he told me about the watch. It wasn’t some expensive toy, Elaine. It had been passed down in his family, from his great-grandfather, to his grandfather, to his father, to him. He’d wanted to pass it on to his son. It was registered with the Sons of the American Revolution.” I take a deep breath before letting it gust out, the truth stabbing into me. It’s a persistent pain I’ve carried around, the way hard lessons always are.

She surprises me by taking my hand, our thighs still pressed together, and in a strange way, it’s more intimate than what I was doing to her five minutes ago, when I was crouched on the ground with her thighs around my shoulders.

“He wanted togiveit to me.”

She squeezes my hand. “And you said no.”

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