Sinners' Playground (The Harlequin Crew #1) - Caroline Peckham Page 0,65

naked which was a mental image I really wanted to verify the accuracy of.

Damn beautiful ghost tits. She is not getting in my head.

"You should really try chilling out sometime, Nathan." She pressed her finger under my chin to close my slack jaw then sauntered past me.

"Nathan?" I spat, turning to watch her and my eyes immediately fell to her pert ass cheeks before she dove into the pool and disappeared into its depths.

I seized the moment to adjust my swelling dick in my jeans, trying not to be head fucked by this girl all over again. She'd gotten to me before, I knew the taste of her spell. And I wasn't going to fall under it again.

She resurfaced in the middle of the pool and floated on her back, gazing up at the stars hanging above us in the sky, acting like I wasn't even there.

She knows my name isn’t fucking Nathan.

I was too stubborn to leave so I just sat back down on my lounger, my elbows on my knees as I continued to watch the siren in the water, her hair shimmering colourfully around her as she tried to lure me in. But I didn't let any girl get under my flesh anymore, none of us did. We'd all built our own type of armour and mine was made of ice and spite. No one had gotten within a mile of my heart since her. But when I looked at her out there, I was painfully aware of the cut she'd left on that ruinous muscle, a wound which was starting to pull apart and bleed.

"Where is he?" she asked after a while, her gaze still on the stars.

"Who?" I grunted, sipping my rum again and figuring oblivion was probably a good friend to hang out with tonight.

"Maverick," she said simply.

His name was a bullet to my chest, a blade in my skull. I swilled a measure of rum in my mouth, avoiding answering, unsure if I even wanted to answer. What did I owe her anyway? But then I thought of the night she'd left and guilt stirred in my gut. We'd abandoned her as deeply as she'd abandoned us. I knew I wasn't innocent in any of this. But I'd also watched my friends shatter over her for years. Fox had never let go, always searching for her, always sure the next lead would take us to her. But all the trails inevitably ran cold.

She had been gone as completely as if she were dead. And I'd figured out we were better off that way a long time before Fox and JJ ever gave up on her. But eventually, they did. And things got better. We weren't completely broken anymore. We had fun again. We built a life, a family. The three of us were stronger than ever. If she'd stayed, we would have lost each other. She would have driven a wedge between us so deep that we all would have been cast adrift.

But I had a dark secret that no one else was privy to. I knew who she would have chosen. My heart had been ripped out a while before anyone else's when I'd learned that fact. But I'd never uttered a word of what I’d witnessed to anyone. Not even to her. But finding out you're not the one to the girl you would have died for was a pretty bitter pill to swallow. I’d swallowed that motherfucker down and moved on eventually though. That was life. It was a soul-sucking bitch.

I let the silence stretch between us, figuring it didn't matter if she knew the truth. Maybe if she knew then she'd realise staying here in hopes of getting her hands on the rest of those keys was a fool's game. It wasn't gonna happen. Even now her key was in plain sight to me, it made no difference. It didn’t stir up old desires of what lay beyond the door it opened, because that dream had been put to bed a long time ago.

"The night you left, Luther set the cops on Maverick’s ass over Axel's murder," I started and she swam to the edge of the pool, folding her arms on the ledge as she listened. "He needed a fall guy to go down for it, seeing as they already had the body and all, so he picked the one who no one would miss but us. And as our opinions meant shit back then, we couldn't stop