Page 16 of PortCity Killers

Part of me wouldn’t put it past Bryce to hand Jaymes over to Valentina if he didn’t think I would survive whatever exchange he was planning, which was exactly why I planned on going with him.

The two men stared each other down as I stood, dropping my plate in the sink.

Bryce took it from me, coming up behind me and laying a small kiss to the side of my head. I leaned into it, shuddering at the warmth of his breath.

“Go get a shower, I’ll clean this up.”

“You cooked,” I said, still holding the plate half in the sink.

“I know,” he smirked, “But I got it.”

I didn’t question him again, just set the plate in his hand and walked around the island, giving Jaymes a withering look as he watched the exchange.

There was only one bathroom in Bryce’s apartment, so I grabbed my bag from the inside of his closet where I’d laid it yesterday and brought it into the bathroom with me.

I grabbed a towel from under the sink where Bryce usually kept them and threw it over the hook on the outside of the shower.

I made quick work of my hair, washing and then conditioning it as I rubbed at my shoulders hoping to release some of the tension I could feel building back up in my neck.

It wasn’t as if Bryce’s thoughts were unfounded, but our arrangement had always been carefully curated so that our personal lives did not collide. His ‘let him learn the hard way’ approach had been too rough for my fragile heart when Jaymes had first come to live with me.

Now? Now I saw every black eye he pretended wasn’t gracing his face and every bruised side he pretended not to clutch in the past few months.

I wondered if shielding him had really done anything but throw him straight into the arms of people like Collin.

Maybe I should have left PortCity that day when he called me from his adopted parents’ house. I should have told him to work it out with them, to suck it up and go to college like they asked.

At least if he was selling pills to a bunch of rich little pricks, he might not have been coming home sporting a new shiner every weekend.

I couldn’t change what was already done, though, much to my dismay. Instead, I could only reach forward.

I grabbed the bar of soap off the shower wall and let it lather over my skin instead of ruminating on thoughts of what I should and shouldn’t have done with my little brother.

The smell of Bryce’s sea salt soap had me aching to throw the curtain open and run to him, rubbing myself against him, Jaymes in the house be damned.

One fuck from him and I was ready to throw caution to the wind and head back to bed with him, and honestly, who had I been kidding?

I had known when I broke the seal off that can of worms that that was exactly what was going to happen, just like it always fucking did. I couldn’t tell if I was more mad at him or myself for that.

When my hands skirted down my belly and over the curls between my thighs, I let my head fall to the shower wall, slicking my hand between my folds.

Once, twice, three times I let my fingers trail over my slit only letting them circle my clit once before I released a shaky breath and rinsed off.

I knew from experience how thin the walls here were, and I didnotneed my brother and lover hearing me doing the dirty fox trot by myself in the middle of the insanity we were currently dealing with.

As if he heard my inner turmoil, the door opened. I poked my head out to see Bryce closing it with his booted foot.

I expected him to lean back against it and watch me dry off as he did so often in the past, but a strangled gasp escaped me when he snatched the rest of the curtain open, making water spill to the towel on the floor.

“Bryce!”

The cold air prickled at my skin, giving me goosebumps and pebbling my nipples to hard points. I hissed at the tightening around the barbells inside them, clutching at my boobs as if it would soften the hurt.

I reached out to shut off the water, but Bryce had my hand before it could touch the handle.

“You’re going to want the extra noise,” he said.

“What?”

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