then push down her shorts as well, leaving her in a barely-there mismatching bikini—yellow on top, white on the bottom. And that bottom? It cut in on her ass. Not quite a thong, but not that far off either.
Fuck.
Hard-ons and board shorts didn't exactly get on well together, so I took a few slow, deep breaths, attempting to force my gaze away from her nearly-bare body.
"Hey," I said, when my gaze lifted, gliding over her back, seeing some kind of ink on the back of her shoulder. "What's the ink?" I asked, leaning forward to try to get a better look.
"It's a wheel," she declared before rushing forward, and jumping into the water, leaving me to wonder why the fuck she'd have a wheel tattooed on her shoulder. And since it was her only ink, I had to imagine there was some meaning behind it. People who only got one thing were either chickenshit about the needle, or only wanted something on them permanently that meant something.
She wasn't a collector like Remy. She didn't have more than a few like the rest of us. The Henchmen logo being the newest we all had inked somewhere on our bodies.
I mean to ask her about it when she surfaced, but she never fully did again. Instead, she pushed herself through some punishing laps that made my own look tame, only coming up to suck in some air, then getting back to it.
My phone fell onto the chair, forgotten, as I watched. Though, thankfully, for the desire I was already struggling with controlling, the water did a pretty good job obscuring all her fun bits from view, letting me get some control back over my body.
It wasn't until about twenty minutes later that she surfaced.
But only because McCoy and Seeley were rushing out the back door, yelling about a car, making me jump up, call out her name.
"What?" she asked, surfacing.
"Get out of the pool," I demanded, reaching down, grabbing her arm, not waiting for her to follow orders, dragging her up onto the cement myself.
"What's going on?"
"There's a car."
"We're rural here, but there are cars," she said, brows pinching as she reached up to push water off her face.
"This one as slowing down," McCoy insisted, body tense, always ready for a confrontation if they became necessary.
"But what... oh," she said, nodding over toward her driveway where the car was pulling in, looking vaguely familiar to me. "That's my brother," she explained. "You can, ah, put the guns away. I'm pretty sure he doesn't plan on murdering all of us," she added, pulling her arm, attempting to dislodge my gasp, but I wasn't ready to let her go just yet. "Jones!" she called as loud as she could as soon as her brother was out of the car.
His head turned as her other arm lifted, waving in the air above her head, making his gaze go to the house, then to her again as he made his way in our direction.
"Harm, what the fuck?" Jones asked as soon as he was close, his gaze slipped from his sister's face to me, to my arm holding onto her. "You leave a bruise on her, and you're going to have to answer to me about it," he said, jaw tight. He knew he stood no chance against me, but I respected his desire to protect his sister.
"Why are you here?" Harmon asked. "You didn't call."
"Yeah, speaking of not calling. How did you forget to call me and tell me that something is wrong with your house? And you are staying over here?" he asked.
"Oh," she said, face falling, guilt making her grimace, realizing he was keeping tabs on her via her livestreams. "It's, ah, it's complicated."
"Complicated," he repeated, gaze slipping to me again. "Yeah, I bet it is. You know, I knew shit was weird when you didn't say what was wrong with the house. If there was a leak or infestation, you'd have made a joke about it. I knew I needed to come over here and see what was really going on. Why are you crashing with the bikers? Why won't he let your arm go?"
"Because he's an overprotective barbarian," she said, yanking away, the water making her slip out of my grasp, turning away to grab a towel, pulling it around her mostly-bare body. "Look Jones, it's just that..." she started, trailing off, chewing her bottom lip.
"It's that we've had some noise from some competition," I supplied, watching Jones's gaze slide to