Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys #5) - C.M. Stunich Page 0,82

in front of us and over to my face. She isn’t done with that bit of conversation, about the pretending and all that.

“Hael,” she warns as I lift my eyes from my phone screen to glance over at her. “Seriously. You can be real with me. With us. You don’t always have to be chipper and happy and smiling all the goddamn time. That must get old?” She phrases this last bit as a question, but I’m not quite sure what to say. Does it? Even I don’t really know the answer to that.

Blackbird seems content to wait, taking off her seatbelt and leaning back against the bloodred leather. She throws her legs over the top of mine, and I groan as my cock twitches in response. Even that casual touch is enough to ignite all the fire in my blood.

“It’s how I cope,” I tell her, and she nods because, of course, she’s smart enough to have figured that out already.

“Your smiles are like Cal’s hoodie or Vic’s chain-smoking,” she says as I lift a single brow in question. “Just a tic that you don’t know how to function without.”

“Oh, I see.” I grin back at her, even though I’m quite literally doing the exact fucking thing she just accused me of. “My beatific fucking smiles are just tics, huh?”

“Be. Real. With. Me.” My girl stares me down with bright emerald eyes, their color enhanced by the liquid gold of the setting sun. I’ve never been much of a poet—my vocabulary is half-slang, the rest curse words—but something about this woman makes me want to try to be better.

“I’m pissed at Victor,” I admit, and Bernadette nods yet again. She’s too smart to have not seen it. “I’m pissed because he kicked me out, and then he fucked you with Aaron. That should’ve been me. He owes me an apology.”

“So tell him that.” She slips out of her pink leather jacket and tosses it into the back seat, reminding me that there’s no bra underneath her shirt. Her nipples are peaked points, straining against the fabric, and I find myself rubbing a palm over the growing erection trapped inside my jeans. Bernie notices, of course, but all she does is hook a mischievous little smile. “Tell me that. Are you mad at me, too? For letting him get away with that crap.”

I think about that for a minute. Am I? Could I ever be mad at Bernadette for anything?

“No.” I pause for a moment and then shake my head, raking the fingers of my right hand through my hair. “Maybe. Just a little.”

Her smile gets just a bit wider, a bit more real.

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry,” she tells me, and I feel a bit of that hot ache buried deep in my chest cool a little. Her beautiful lips, those words … it’s too much. I can’t help myself when I reach out a hand and cup the side of her face, bringing my mouth to hers. The first kiss is almost … sweet? Wasn’t even aware I was capable of such a thing. But it’s like pressing a flame to dry kindling. Just a few brushes of lips later and we may as well have doused our mouths in gasoline and set them on fire.

“Eight minutes,” she murmurs against my lips, and then I’m yanking her onto my lap, encouraging her to rub that hot cunt of hers against my erection. The pink leather of the cigarette pants dips beneath the hard press of my fingers as I kiss along the edge of her jaw toward her ear, savoring the sweetness of her pale skin. “Let me make it up to you.”

Bernie’s inked hands drop to my button and fly, undoing my pants with sure, steady movements. I watch her with slightly parted lips, hunger roaring inside of me. How many times did I imagine this girl when I was with somebody else? Pretty much every fucking time.

Obsession.

We wear it and perform it well in Havoc, now don’t we?

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I say, pausing her hands before she gets the chance to free my cock from the confines of the tight denim. “If you’re planning on sucking me off, Miss Blackbird, then I’d like to remind you that you already owed me. I made you come first when we fucked in the driveway, so this is hardly making anything up. This was mine to begin with.” I fist a hand in her hair and then kiss