Page 215 of Midnight Curfew

In a flurry, they jump into the two trucks they drove here and race back down the road, toward town, blocking both lanes.

Dallas bears down on me, his features spilling with rain two inches away from my face. “Anna-Katherine?” he calls. “Stay in the car for me, okay? I won’t hurt him.”

I should tell her to call the cops.

“Maybe if you fuck me really good,” I coo, “I’ll turn your house into a bed-and-breakfast.”

Fire lights in his eyes, a mixture of amusement and anticipation gleaming behind them.

“You can live and work there,” I go on, “and I’ll come visit you. I’ll climb into bed to get my payment off you once in a while.”

“Or maybe…” he says, gazing at my mouth, “I come home from working late to find you naked in the sheets, and I climb into our bed, so hard for you”—he locks eyes with me—“always so hard for you, and I wake you up for a nice late-night fucking before we fall asleep wrapped around each other and wake up in the morning to do it all over again.”

My dick fills with heat, his image instantly possessing my mind.

“In our shower.” He opens his mouth, looking like he’s dying to eat my lips. “In our pool, on your desk…”

Is he serious?

What the fuck?!

“You think that’s what I want?” I push him away. “I stopped wanting that years ago! You don’t impress me!”

“I will.”

I almost laugh. Son of a bitch.

He thinks he has power over me. I can imagine how the conversation at their house went down. He only stole from us to get your attention. Just string him along…

I push him away. “Did you really think this would work?” I growl. “That I’m in love with you, and I’ll fold and just give it back?”

“I think you love me,” he says.

Arrogant piece of shit.

“I think you never stopped,” he continues, moving in for me again. “And you want to be with me all the time and you think about me all the time, and nothing holds a candle to how it feels when I touch you. That’s what I think.”

“Bullshit!”

“Because that’s how I feel, too.”

My throat closes, and I struggle to swallow, watching his chest rise and fall as he gazes at me, unfaltering.

I don’t want to hear his lies. I don’t think about him all the time, and I don’t want a life with him. I’ll never trust him again. There’s nothing he can say.

“You talk shit, that’s all you do!” I yell.

“I’m sorry for everything I did to hurt you.”

“You’re a liar!” My chest fills with fire, and we’re back in the parking lot on that rainy morning so long ago when he threw me away. “You think everyone revolves around you and that I’ve been obsessing this whole time? I’m done with you!”

Now it’s my turn to walk away.

But he reaches out and grabs my face. “Like hell you are!” he bites out. “Nothing feels like you do, and I knew it years ago, but I was prideful, okay? I didn’t like myself, and I was absorbed in my own bullshit. So I drowned it out, so I wouldn’t have to feel it, and that’s what you were supposed to be—something to numb me—”

He searches my eyes, and my hands ache to hold him back.

“But it started to hurt in my chest just to look at you,” he tells me, “and I got scared! I was twenty fucking years old, Callum! I was a kid, too, and it was inevitable that I would fail. I knew myself enough to know that I’d do something stupid to hurt you eventually.”