Sinners' Playground (The Harlequin Crew #1) - Caroline Peckham Page 0,117

lamp, my toes just touching the tiles beyond the door which led into the en-suite.

The way the door opened meant I couldn't see the shower from my position beside it. I could just turn back and leave, ignore the heavy pounding of my heart or the weight in my chest and ask him when he was finished. But I didn't leave.

"J?" I asked softly, moving to stand right at the edge of the door so that only a tilt of my head would gift me a view of him in the shower behind it. "Are you...alright?"

There was a silence that followed filled with nothing but running water which made me question whether or not he'd even heard me and I almost called out again right as he replied.

"Come here."

I should have refused, told him I'd wait in his room or just left altogether, but for some unknown reason, I found myself stepping out from behind the door and looking at him as he stood there in the dark in the black tiled shower cubicle with water cascading down his bare skin and his eyes full of demons.

He held a hand out to me and I stepped forward to take it, my gaze taking in the sculpted muscles of his abdomen and the swallow tattoos I'd fantasised about before landing on his cock which was hardening at my attention. But as I snapped my gaze back up to his, it wasn't lust I found waiting for me in his eyes. It was hurt.

JJ pulled me towards him and I stepped into the shower without questioning it. The hot water drenched me the moment I moved beneath it, plastering his shirt to my frame and making me gasp.

"I missed you so much, pretty girl," he breathed as he curled his arms around me, one hand sliding up my back and pushing into my wet hair.

"I worked every day to make sure I didn't miss you," I admitted in reply, pressing my cheek to his chest and hearing the solid rhythm of his heart beating beneath it. Relief spilled into my veins at the solid, unmovable beat of it and I had to admit that I wouldn’t have been able to cope with it if he’d died tonight.

"And how did that work out for you?" JJ murmured.

I didn't reply but I wound my arms around his waist and held him close, forgetting all the reasons I had to hate him for just a little while as I let myself bathe in the fact that he was here in my arms. If I closed my eyes it was like no time had passed at all. I could pretend that we were just holding each other because of something that one of his mom’s clients had done or my foster carer, Mary Beth, hadn’t bothered to do. We could be the whole world to each other and fill the gaps that the abuse and neglect we’d got at home left in our souls.

"Was Maverick there tonight?" I whispered, almost afraid to ask, knowing that JJ didn't like to speak about him.

"Yeah," he said roughly. "He hates us even more than you do, pretty girl."

"And is he still... I mean, I heard you talking about people dying downstairs and I just-"

"It would take more than some turf war to kill that motherfucker," JJ reassured me, leaning down and pressing a kiss to my hair. "I'm not even sure he bleeds at all. The devil took that from him when he sold his soul."

I frowned against JJ's chest, not liking the sound of that and aching to hear the full story of what had happened between them. Chase had given me the bones of it, but they'd been brothers. Maverick had been raised in this house with Fox. A bond like that was damn near unbreakable...but now they were fighting on opposite sides of a war over a town we all hated as least as much as we loved. I felt like I’d stepped out of a dream when I’d left this place and I’d returned to a nightmare now.

I tilted my head back and looked up at JJ, meeting his gaze in the dark as water spilled from his face down onto mine, splashing against my lips, my cheeks, my eyelashes, bridging the divide between us as we lingered there.

He moved his hands to cup my cheeks, his thumb tracing my lips as he drank me in like he was trying to see every change in