would speak about; there wasn’t anything to say. Kenji had led her on, stolen her heart, then kicked her to the curb, the end. But they did have other things to discuss, because now that she’d brought up Britney, she was mad. Maybe it was the alcohol talking, but she had things to say to Kenji “Casanova” Tanaka about his taste in women.
“You knew how awful she was to me, how she made my life a living hell, and you not only took her to prom, you dated her for a year!”
A befuddled expression on his face. “I know you two didn’t like each other, but I thought it was, you know, girl stuff.”
“Girl stuff?” Was he really that clueless? “She tried to make my nickname Runt.” The only reason it hadn’t caught on was that pretty much all her friends and packmates already called her Jem, and she had enough dominance even at sixteen to scare most people into shutting the hell up before they used anything else.
Kenji had always called her Garnet. He’d just liked it.
As she’d liked hearing her given name on his lips.
“I thought she was just messing with you when she said that.” He scowled. “You never minded when I called you Short Stuff.”
That was because he’d been her friend, who she knew didn’t mean anything by it. The same way she’d affectionately called him Beanpole when he first got his height. By eighteen, the muscle had caught up with the height and he’d been gorgeous. “Jesus, Kenji, Britney was a first-class bitch.” Garnet wasn’t about to pull her punches. “She got her kicks from picking on younger girls.”
“It’s not like you couldn’t handle her.”
She’d still been a teenage girl with the attendant fragile ego . . . and she’d been carrying around a truck-sized crush on her older brother’s best friend. The same friend who was standing in front of her right now. “Whatever. I lost all respect for you the day you hooked up with her.”
His mouth fell open. “I was a teenage boy!” he reiterated. “She had boobs out to here and legs up to there and she thought I was the best thing since sliced bread!”
Garnet had apple-sized breasts, if she was being generous, and, given her height, her legs were never going to be a supermodel’s. Baring her teeth and folding her arms across her chest, she smirked. “All. Respect. Lost.” She leaned toward him. “Poof.”
“Yeah?” Suddenly belligerent, he got in her face. “What about you? Dating No-Brains Bacon?”
Seeing red, she pushed at his chest. “His name was Barton, and he was a nice guy!”
“Who had a lot of space inside his skull. Must’ve been all the knocks he took on the football field.”
Garnet refused to admit that sweet Barton had, in fact, been a little intellectually challenged. “At least he knew how to handle a real woman.”
Kenji’s growl made her own chest rumble in challenge. “You were fucking fifteen when he moved on you,” he gritted out. “I should’ve done more than punch out his lights.”
Garnet’s eyes went wolf. “That was you?” Barton had broken things off with her without warning, after turning up with a black eye he’d shrugged off as a training injury.
Kenji’s muscles bunched. “He was a fucking senior and you were—”
Garnet plowed her fist into Kenji’s face, slamming his head sideways.
He jerked, one hand going to his jaw. “What the fuck, Garnet?”
“That was for Barton,” she said, her breath ragged. “And for me. Thanks to you, I had to go stag to the junior dance.”
His eye already looking like it might blacken, causing a twinge of remorse in her gut, Kenji said, “Better than you being taken advantage of by a guy who should’ve known better.”
Furious heat flooded her face, wiping out all traces of remorse. “I knew what I was doing.”
“Fifteen!” Kenji said again, his voice more growl than sound. “And you still looked like a kid. He was a fucking deviant.”
“I had boobs!” She shoved her hands under those boobs. “Just because you go for balloon-sized tits doesn’t mean anyone who dates me is a deviant!”
Eyes flicking up from her breasts, Kenji growled low in his throat. “That’s not what I said.”
“Yeah? Sure sounded like it.”
“God damn it, Garnet, I—” No warning, just his strong, beautiful hands thrusting into her hair and his mouth slamming down on hers.
Pleasure, raw and violent and vicious, punched through her with the force of a freight train. Finally, her body sighed. Finally.
Hard on the heels of that