Page 43 of Never Again

“You really didn’t leave me with much of a choice,” Quinn murmured as his gaze shifted back to her beautiful blue eyes and noted the strain still there. “Is your head still hurting?” he asked, already getting up to grab the pills off the kitchen island and a bottle of water from the fridge.

“It’s fine,” she said, lying her adorable ass off.

“Here,” he said, handing her the pills and a bottle of water before reclaiming his seat.

“Thank you,” Bailey grumbled with another sniffle as she reluctantly took the pills. “Now,” she said, clearing her throat when she was done, “where were we?”

“You were enthralling me with your tale of woe,” he reminded her, leaning back in his chair as he watched her.

Shifting, Bailey said, “Right,” with a firm nod as her pout turned determined. “Get ready to grab that box of tissues.”

“I’m ready,” Quinn assured her with a solemn nod that had her lips twitching.

“Once upon a time,” she began only to smile when he murmured, “Now, I know that this will be heartbreaking.”

“It will be,” Bailey assured him before adding, “Brace yourself.”

“Consider me braced,” Quinn murmured.

“Once upon a time, back when I was sixteen, I met this boy in detention and-”

“Why am I not surprised?” he said dryly at the mention of detention.

“I was a miscreant,” Bailey admitted with a solemn nod.

“I’m sure that you were a terror,” Quinn drawled, already having a pretty good idea of how she landed in detention.

“I really was,” she said with a sad shake of her head and a heartfelt sigh.

“You were reading in class, weren’t you?” he asked, remembering all those times he’d spotted her sitting in the principal’s office, trying to appear innocent as she kept sneaking peeks at the book she had hidden in her backpack.

“I might have glanced at a book to pass the time,” Bailey hedged, clearing her throat before moving on. “Anyway, so there I was one day, enjoying a lovely stint in detention when this boy decided to hack into the school’s computer system and was having a difficult time getting through their firewall. So, being the helpful and considerate person that I am, I helped him break through while we bonded over our love of hacking.”

“That, of course, led to us discovering that we also loved video games. We started hanging out and playing video games, and one thing led to another, and we started working on a video game together. It took us three years, but finally, it was ready. We got a very lovely offer for the game and we decided to accept it, only to find out that he’d accepted another offer, one that set him up with a very lucrative position.”

“And I’m guessing that he forgot to mention your name,” Quinn murmured, wondering why her brother was pushing her to go out on a date with the asshole.

“He really did. He offered me an unpaid internship with the company, one that would allow me the privilege of working on his team and fetching him coffee,” she finished with a helpless shrug.

“What did you do?” Quinn asked, watching her as he absently drummed his fingertips against the armrest of his chair while he thought about all the things that he would have done to the asshole if he’d been there.

“Hacked into his computer and destroyed the game,” Bailey said, shrugging it off like it was no big deal.

“How did he take it?” Quinn asked, only to go still at her next words.

“He made my life a living hell.”

CHAPTER24

“We had a deal,” Bailey felt obligated to point out to the large man who didn’t understand her caffeine needs as he picked her up.

“Your story didn’t move me,” Quinn said dryly as he carried her towards her room.

“Why are you lying to me? I saw the tears in your eyes,” she said, loving the way that his lips twitched.

“As sad as your tale of woe was,” Quinn began.

“And it was sad,” she readily agreed.

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