Page 32 of My Three Rivals

I shrugged and grinned magnanimously. “Sure. You know what they say about keeping your friends and enemies, right?”

Maverick nodded slowly, but his skepticism was palpable. “Are you…?” he started, and I scoffed loudly.

“We’re here for one reason only,” I reminded him sharply. “I want to get home as much as you do.”

“Okay.”

He headed down toward the stairs again, and I called out after him. “Don’t go too far. Dinner won’t be long.”

“Yes, sir!” Maverick saluted before disappearing onto the top level, leaving me to stare at the defrosted chicken blankly.

Had I just invited Tegan to dinner? Didn’t this go against everything we’d planned?

No, we were changing the scheme now. Now we were… wooing her?

A foreign sense of confusion overtook me as I tried to remember what I was doing here.

I really needed to get my head on straight. Nothing had changed. The endgame was still exactly the same.

Fuck. I needed to take a shower.

But even as I thought it, I wasn’t so sure it was going to be so easy to wipe Tegan Pickett off my skin.

CHAPTER13

Maverick

Once again, I did a lap of the house, looking for signs of where Tegan might have gone. All day, I’d been thinking about what had happened with Natalia, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I owed Tegan some semblance of an apology.

Of course, I’d gone back and forth on it. I had thrown Natalia out once I figured out the animus, but it still could have been construed as an intentional slight, and I knew I wasn’t going to relax until I explained to Tegan that I had no idea who Natalia was.

This time when I strode upstairs, however, Tegan’s bedroom door was slightly ajar. My eyes narrowed. I’d already gone there and knocked, but she must have ignored me.

Approaching, I cleared my throat loudly as to not startle her before rapping on the door.

“What?” she called. “I’m not—”

I pushed the door open, and she stopped speaking, her green eyes flashing angrily when she realized it was me, but I found it hard to keep my eyes on her face when she was wearing nothing but a bra and a pair of yoga pants.

“Dressed,” she concluded, snatching her tank top off the bed and throwing it over herself.

I looked down humbly, but she grunted like she wasn’t buying the fact I hadn’t been checking her out. “What the hell do you want, Maverick?”

The ice in her question should have sent chills down my spine, but after seeing that flat stomach and the curve of her full breasts, I was having a hard time being angry at anything.

“I want to talk to you about what happened the other night,” I told her, kicking the door closed behind me.

“Leave that open,” she growled, and sat on her bed, but I didn’t move to obey her. “And I have nothing to say to you. You want to roll around with pigs? Don’t be surprised if you get dirty.” She laughed abruptly. “Oh. Look who I’m saying that to.”

I ambled closer to her, and she pulled her knees up defensively as I perched on the side of her bed. “I didn’t know you knew her. It wasn’t some contrived thing.”

“I don’t care, Maverick,” she muttered as she grabbed her phone and began scrolling.

“I think you do.”

She shot me a sidelong look. “The only thing I care about is this place. Natalia Rogain can drown in hair bleach, for all I care.”

“That ‘fuck-the-world-before-the-world-fucks-you’ attitude,” I commented. “Did you learn it somewhere special?”

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