Sinners' Playground (The Harlequin Crew #1) - Caroline Peckham Page 0,223

pushed her down to sit on a bench beside me. I dropped the pack from my shoulders, unzipping it and taking out a fresh pastry I’d made at midnight. I handed it to her wrapped in paper, wafting the scent under her nose and she gaped at me like I was crazy.

“Fuck your croissant,” she snapped.

“It’s a pain au chocolat,” I corrected then looked out to sea. “But if you don’t want it, I guess a seagull will have it.”

“Wait,” she gasped because destroying good food had always been blasphemous to her. She snatched it from my grip and I fought a smirk as she bit into it then groaned like I’d just thrust my dick into her. My dad had left me to cook my own meals when I was teenager and around the time I was eighteen, I’d decided I didn’t want to live off pizza and microwave meals anymore. And once I could make decent food, JJ and Chase had conveniently shown up for meals most nights. We weren’t often on the same schedule these days, but they’d made me promise I’d cook every Sunday for as long as we’d lived together.

“Oh God, why did it have to be so good?” she moaned, taking another large bite and sending flakes of pastry tumbling all over her knees. She had a smear of chocolate by her lips and I reached down, wiping it away with my thumb and sucking it off. Everything tasted better dipped in Rogue Easton.

“Where are we going?” she demanded as soon as she’d devoured the whole thing and started eyeing my pack hopefully like there might be another pastry hiding in there. I made a mental note that the girl was as easily bought with food as her Mutt. Though I didn’t think even the best pastry in the world could stop her being angry with me. It seemed to make her slightly more complicit though.

“We’re going on a date,” I announced, looking to her for her reaction. Which was a pout. Great.

“You do realise that normal guys ask girls if they actually want to go on a date with them? Which, if you’d bothered to do, I would have refused.”

“Hence why I didn’t ask,” I said simply and she kicked me in the leg.

“That’s the part where you cut your losses and turn your attention to another more willing girl, Badge. It’s not the green light for kidnap.”

“You gave me the green light a long time ago, baby. I’m just trying to figure out how to make you remember that.”

“You remember things through Fox-tinted glasses. All I remember was a group of boys who followed me around like a bad smell. I would have cut you all loose eventually.” She shrugged and my heart yanked.

“Don’t do that,” I growled, turning the cruise control on as I turned to her and leaning forward, gripping the edge of the boat either side her. “You can hate me now, hate all of us. But don’t pretend the past meant nothing. I was there. It was real. The five of us had something not many people get in life and as fucked as it is now, I still believe some of it is salvageable. At least for four of us.”

“That’s the first time you’ve acknowledged that Maverick was important to you once,” she whispered, a flicker of pain in her eyes as the first glimmer of the sun peeked over the horizon. My heart was pulled down into a pit of despair that I’d buried a long time ago.

“That’s what makes his betrayal worse,” I whispered.

“You betrayed him first. Just like you betrayed me first. Did you ever consider I might be here just to rub salt in your wounds? Make sure they never close. Make sure you never forget the hurt you caused me. Maybe I did die in that grave and I came back to haunt you, Fox Harlequin. I’m just a dead girl here to torment you.”

“If that’s the case then you’re doing a good job of it so far, hummingbird. But if you’re haunting me then that makes me your unfinished business. And I’m open to you taking your pound of flesh from me first, but after you’ve got your revenge, you’ll find all that’s left beneath that venomous need for vengeance is a girl seeking what she lost all those years ago. And I’m it, baby.”

I turned away from her, flipping the cruise control off and steering us across the waves in