Sinners' Playground (The Harlequin Crew #1) - Caroline Peckham Page 0,27

wouldn’t believe it. My heart wouldn’t believe it.

I refused the truth in front of me because it just wasn’t feasible that she was standing here after all this time. This wasn’t a dream or a nightmare or some fucking vision here to taunt me.

I’m awake and she’s here.

I’m awake and she’s back.

I’m awake and she’s home.

Her hair was a dark sea of hazelnut, tumbling over her shoulders almost down to her waist, her honey brown skin kissed by a thousand suns since I’d seen it last. Her stormy blue eyes were painfully deep, dragging me in and I knew I must be imagining this, but the vision was so fucking real that I didn’t care what drug I was on so long as it remained in my blood forever.

She was the girl who’d gotten away. The girl who I’d had to accept would never, ever walk back into my life. Until she had. Right this fucking second.

My eyes kept roaming her features and the shock of finding her before me gave way to horror at the bruises shadowing her face, her neck. Someone had hurt her. Someone had laid their filthy fucking hands on her and marked her. Rage and vengeance collided inside me, twisting into a cold and hungry creature which longed for the death of the person responsible for this. It didn’t matter if a whole lifetime stood between the last moment I’d seen her and this moment of her return. Nothing changed my desire to protect her. From everything and everyone who sought to hurt her. I will make them pay.

“Look what I found,” JJ sang from behind her and I realised he was holding her hands behind her back. A prisoner? Interesting.

I schooled the shock on my face as fast as I could, but there wasn’t much I could do for my heart which was about to bust out of my chest and give the game away. Her eyes drank me in as deeply as I was drinking in her, like we were so thirsty for each other that no body of water on earth would quench us. But then that thirst in her eyes was gone and a hard wall stood in its place, blocking me out before I’d even had a second to dive in.

“Hey,” I breathed like a fucking moron. Hey? After ten years, that’s all I’ve got to say? Fucking ‘hey’??

“Who are you again?” she asked, her brow furrowing as if she was trying to place me.

I grunted angrily, knowing she was playing with me, but on some level, I feared she wasn’t.

“Like you could forget,” I growled.

“Rogue?” Chase rasped and she turned, looking at him where he was standing by the kitchen island, an unlit cigarette forgotten in the corner of his mouth.

“Oh right, the Harlequin boys,” she said coldly. “Well I’m glad a few of you are here so I can tell you all to fuck off at once. If you can pass the message onto Maverick too? That’d be swell.” She tugged at her arms and JJ released her, smirking like he was having the best day of his life. And I should have been too. This was everything I’d wanted for so long, and yet the way she was acting said I was not going to get the warm reunion I’d dreamed of a thousand times. Where she wrapped her arms around me and her lips found mine because she’d missed me as much as I’d missed her. She’d have a reason she never came back. Someone had kept her away, something had happened that meant she couldn’t return to us. Why wasn’t that happening?

JJ tsked. “We’d rather you didn’t mention the prick, pretty girl.”

She frowned at that and the crease between her eyes was so familiar to me it made me ache.

Before I realised what I was doing, I’d reached out and brushed my fingers over that tiny crease to smooth it out then ran my hand down to her jaw, tilting her chin up to look at me…making sure that she was real I guessed. Despite those fucking bruises, she was painfully beautiful as a full grown woman. Tattoos adorned her flesh in places and I wanted to examine them all, learn their meaning and have her tell me every single thing she’d done between the last time I’d seen her and now. A deep and unnerving possessiveness filled me over her. A claim I’d laid on her ten years ago awakening in me once more,