Page 68 of That Girl is Trouble

“You’re seventeen.”

“Eighteen soon.”

“I’m not having this conversation.”

“If you’re worried about the law, age of consent is—”

“Don’t,” I say, cringing. “Jesus Christ, Kat. Enough, all right?”

“So… too young to fuck, but not too young to be on my knees? Or bent over your bike? Not too young when it serves you. Got it,” she bites as she pulls out of my grip.

I scrub my hand over my face and sigh. “No. Too young for all that. I’m just a bastard with no self-control.”

She hums in response, circling my bike slowly as she takes in the heavy wood around us. “What is this place?”

The road ahead goes deeper into the brush. Eventually, it opens up into a huge slice of land with a condemned barn and an overgrown wheat field. There’s so much abandoned land in these parts that it’s been easy to scoop up property when it suits me. The idea came to me after all that shit went down in December. Someone was already buying up real estate little by little. I imagine the intent is to take over, develop, build up the tourism, push out the South Bay Sinners. But this is my fucking town. I can’t have that, so I started too.

Hasn’t been all that easy with the cash flow problems I had after losing so much product in the fall. Had to do a lot of shady shit these past few months to keep us afloat. But now that things are on track and we’re making money again, I’ve started to reclaim what’s left.

“Old farm down there,” I tell her. “Couple acres. Thinking about buying it.”

She snorts. “For business, I assume?”

“Why?” I grin. “Can’t picture me livin’ in the sticks?”

“Definitely not.” She holds up her cell phone. “Practically no service here. You’d go nuts without your phone.”

“You get reception until you hit the tree line. Trees circling the valley block the signal. Kind of why I like this place, actually. Wi-Fi or sat phones. I get to decide who talks to who.”

“That tracks. Axel Donovan always telling people what to do,” she teases.

“You baiting me?”

She notches her teeth into her lip. “Is it working?”

“No,” I say with a low chuckle. And because I’m an asshole, a selfish one who can’t keep my mind clean when she’s around, I say, “But you better hope it doesn’t. Next time, I’ll take my belt to you, and you won’t sit right for a week. How’s your ass?”

She bites down on her smile. “Sore.”

“Good. Let’s go. I gotta get you home.”

“I don’t want to go to my sister’s,” she argues.

I sigh. “Thought you two were good now. You gonna tell me what this is all about? Why you’re lying to her again?”

Kat only gives me silence, and so I ask, because I told Triss I would.

“What’s going on with you?”

“Nothing.”

“She said you didn’t go to prom. Or your grad. Don’t all you women love that shit?”

She shrugs. “Didn’t seem important after… after everything. After him.” Anger bubbles to the surface with that last word.

“Gotta live your life, Kat. Jess wouldn’t have wanted you to put things on pause ’cause of what happened.”

“Yeah? Well, he doesn’t get to want much of anything anymore, does he?” she says, a little more edge to her voice, warning me to drop it, to back down.

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