Page 54 of Finding Their Place

But had I been her, I’d have been wrapped up in Wyatt too.

Conflicting emotions from lust to jealousy wound tight around me until I sat like a tensed sprinter, ready to explode into motion at the first crack of the starter’s gun.

My Blow Pop clacked on my teeth as I moved it side to side.

Haley’s cell rang, but I was the only one to jolt at the ringer she’d forgotten to turn down. Neither of them paid any attention. She was enamored with Wyatt while he played with her hair, murmuring in her ear while she flushed and smiled.

I turned my scowl back to the TV, unseeing, uncaring of the action movie with the dark-haired actor that usually would give me a raging boner. The lollipop in my mouth crunched to pieces beneath my attempts to ease the tension in my body.

Her cell rang again.

I grabbed it off the coffee table when she didn’t, needing a break from the two of them. “It’s Lily,” I said after glancing at the screen.

Wyatt held out his hand, and I tossed the phone their way. He snagged it from the air like he’d been a hockey goalie his whole fucking life.

“I’m busy, bitch,” Haley said by way of greeting, but her grin faded. “What?” She hopped off Wyatt’s lap and grabbed the clicker from the coffee table, pointing it at the TV.

The news station ran a breaking story.

Abraham Quell had been murdered while in prison, his penis sliced from his body and shoved up his backside. He’d been left to bleed out.

One of the guards had supposedly leaked the gruesome details of the story, and although it hadn’t been verified by law enforcement, I believed the reporter. Even though Quell had been held in solitary confinement away from general population, a man who’d sexually abused children wouldn’t last long among other inmates. One slipup on anyone’s part that would leave Quell open for attack was all it would take—it was all that it had taken.

The fucker had met his end, rightfully so.

“It wasn’t his tongue severed from his body,” I mused out loud what Haley had hoped for, “but this is ten times better if you ask me.”

“Damn right.” Haley perched on the couch beside me—fucking finally—riveted by the TV.

“That’s the fucker Blaine told me about,” Wyatt stated quietly.

Haley glanced over at him. “You know he grew up on that compound?”

“Yeah.” Disgust showed on Wyatt’s face as he pursed his lips, his head shaking. “His boyfriend Greyson is the one who helped put that Quell guy away, right?” He asked the question, but quietly as though more musing rather than looking for an answer.

“Yeah,” Haley said, her focus still on the TV. “His father’s private investigator dug up the shit the FBI hadn’t been able to.”

Wyatt made a noise in his throat as though intrigued, pulling Haley’s attention toward him. “What?” she asked.

“That’s what I have to do.”

“What?” Haley repeated while I glanced between the two of them, just as baffled as her.

“Hire a PI to find them.”

Without a word, Haley dropped the clicker onto the cushion beside me and left the couch for Wyatt’s lap once more, dropping my heart back to its new place of shitty low. Straddling his legs, she held his face in her hands. The intimacy between their locked gazes was almost too much for me to bear, but I couldn’t tear my focus off them as they existed in their own little world.

I lusted for another goddamn piece of candy to crush between my teeth. My hands fisted at my sides, my jaw clenched tight.

“So, you’ve decided, then?” she finally broke the silence between them, her voice low and full of concern.

“I need answers,” he replied, nuzzling into her palm like I did whenever she comforted me.

I shifted to ease the tension coiling inside me, knocking the clicker onto the floor and inadvertently muting the TV. Both of them glanced over at me. While I might have considered myself to be an actor, I wasn’t sure I schooled my features enough to keep from revealing my feelings. But fuck, how I tried as the seconds ticked past in a strange, quiet moment between the three of us as they continued to stare at me.

“I found out last Sunday that I was adopted,” Wyatt explained, having at least picked up on the question in my mind about their exchange.

The guy didn’t know me from Adam and had just given me what had to be his greatest vulnerability if his open expression was any indication. That bit of news had shattered him—and I’d experienced that feeling far too deeply myself.

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