There Goes My Heart (The Sullivans #20) - Bella Andre Page 0,2

him.

The last thing he’d expected was to find her getting bombed on bubbly at nine in the morning. If someone had asked him for a one-word description of Zara Mirren, he would have said bulletproof.

Today, she seemed anything but.

The bare bones of her story were bad enough. He couldn’t imagine stealing one of his brothers’ girlfriends. The sibling code was crystal clear—if he, Brandon, Turner, or Hudson so much as looked at a woman, she was off-limits to the others. Family came first.

Zara’s stepsister obviously didn’t feel the same way, not only having no compunction about cheating with Zara’s boyfriend—but about agreeing to marry him too. He supposed some people might somehow think that because they were now headed to the altar, “true love” had won out in the end and that all wrongs were now made right. But Rory didn’t see it like that at all.

If anything, it only made their betrayal cut Zara deeper.

It was why he’d impulsively offered to go with her to the engagement party. He didn’t have to be Zara’s best friend to hate the thought of a colleague wading into that shark tank on her own.

And, not to toot his own horn, but he had it on good authority that he scrubbed up pretty well. It wouldn’t hurt to make her ex a little jealous after the nonsense the jerk had put Zara through—not only cheating on her, but with her stepsister.

If some guy did something like this to one of Rory’s sisters…

His hand fisted on the handle of his mug. No one deserved to be treated like dirt.

Even if Zara was a total pain in the butt.

And snored like a vacuum cleaner.

A car door slammed in the parking lot as the other artists who rented space in the warehouse started to arrive. Rory might not be Zara’s bestie, but he knew enough to be absolutely certain that she would hate anyone else in the building seeing her like this. She didn’t just come across as bulletproof, she was also fiercely proud.

What’s more, he would never forgive himself if something happened to her while she was drunk. Especially after what had happened with Chelsea last year…

Forcing the thought back into the dark recesses of his mind, he put his hand on Zara’s shoulder and jostled her gently. “Hey there, sleepyhead. Why don’t I take you home so you can dry out in bed?”

She opened one eye. “I always knew you wanted to get into my pants.”

Her words were slurred enough that he almost couldn’t make them out. Nor could he hold back his laughter. “In your dreams.”

“I was dreaming,” she grumbled, “until you woke me up.”

Still laughing at the idea of wanting to get into her pants—the fact that he had been turned on when she’d licked bubbly off her fingers was surely down to his year of abstinence, rather than the fact that it was Zara doing the licking—he put one of her arms around his shoulders, slid his arm around her waist, and hoisted her up from the table.

“Where do you live?” he asked.

“None of your business.”

Even when she was only half there, she was still a stubborn pain in the rear. It was pretty impressive, to be honest.

“Then my place it is,” he said.

He waited for her to exclaim in horror, but at this point she really was down for the count. He slid her glasses into his pocket, then lifted her into his arms to carry her out to his truck before anyone could catch sight of them.

Thankfully, she woke up just enough to help him lift her into the passenger seat and buckle her in. But by the time he reversed out of the lot, she was leaning fully against him. Not wanting her to slide into the footwell, he put his arm around her and held her close as he headed toward his house.

In a million years, he never would have seen any of this coming. Zara, he’d noticed at various warehouse events, wasn’t much of a drinker. It was how he’d known something must be wrong this morning. Had Zara truly been celebrating, it was far more likely she would have asked his sister Cassie to bring her those marmalade candies she loved so much. His sister was a marvel with sugar—but even he couldn’t stomach marmalades. Only someone as weird as Zara would like an equally weird candy.

His house was on the shore, a lighthouse that had been in such a state of disrepair the State