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"Um, babe," Hutton said.
I turned to him. "What? You see him?"
He shook his head. "No." He pointed toward a security camera directly opposite my wrecked house. "I'd guess he's watching through that."
"Fucking creep." I stuck up both middle fingers to the camera.
My phone pinged again.
I look forward to breaking both of those. Right before I break you, bitch.
Yep, I should have ignored him, but I wrote,Don't call me bitch, and hit send.
He responded a moment later with a laughing face emoji and a dog. A second later he added an eggplant, a donut and a panting, hot face.
"Ewww." I thought about replying with a clown or devil face, but he might think I was referring to myself.
"You know you can block him, right?" Cooper said. He sounded like a teenager explaining new technology to someone who prefers older technology…
Oh. Well, anyway, I grimaced at him. "He'd only change numbers and contact me again. He's a slug." And frankly I could have done without the mentions of what he did to me. I knew he was trying to get to me, but shit, it was working. I should be tougher than this.
Iwastougher than this.
The street was now buzzing with people, including TV cameras and roving journalists. They seemed to be hunting for witnesses to talk about my house sinking into the earth.
Newsflash, I didn't want to talk about it.
"Let's get out of here." I glanced at Jake.
He sighed, but nodded. "Hutton, Cooper, you guys stay here and deal with any questions. Tell them you don't know anything, but you're authorised to liaise with the owner to organise the clean up. We'll do whatever the engineers recommend."
"You trust me, huh?" Hutton looked smug.
"Fuck no, but it's not safe for Ivory. You can't do too much damage here." Jake gave him a sarcastic smile, then put a possessive hand on my back to guide me to the car.
"Are you going to tell me I should try to trust him?" he asked as he opened the passenger side door.
I gave him a look for apparently assuming I suddenly lost the ability to open a car door. "At this point, I'm not sure I trust myself."
"As long as you trust me." He actually waited until I was sitting in the car before he closed the door and walked around the other side.
"Yeah, I might," I told him as he slipped into his seat. Part of me wanted to tell him to find a quiet street so I could fuck him in the back seat. It was long enough to comfortably fit us both. Jake did like luxury in all of his cars.
Then I remembered I was trying to keep my distance. And this was Sydney. Quiet streets were like virgins—hard to find, and harder to fuck in. Yeah, okay, that sounded better in my head.
"You can always trust me," he said, his blue eyes intent on my face. "You know that, right? Whatever happens, whatever or whoever you do, I will always be right there, ready to catch you."
Fuck, he had so much love in his tone it broke my heart a little. How was I supposed to keep my distance from him when he adored me as much as I adored him? We had tied our lives together a long time ago. Some knots couldn't be undone, even if they strangled us both.
"I don't plan on falling," I said softly. Literally, figuratively or in love. I knew he understood my triple meaning. I also knew he didn't buy it any more than I did.
Frozen steel, I reminded myself. Even if I ripped out my own heart in the process.
I don't know, maybe I had no heart. If I did, surely I wouldn't turn my back on someone who looked at me the way he did. Maybe I was a coward. I had never let anyone in fully, since I was a kid. I trusted people, sure, and that was a huge deal, but lowering all of my walls… That was something else entirely.
I supposed I fit the nickname Ice Bitch. I acknowledged long ago I wasn't a nice person. I was okay with that. I was a killer surrounded by killers. I was cold, sarcastic, composed, distant.
But when I looked back at him, a hidden part of my heart begged to melt. To let him in. To let Ben, Cooper and Hutton in. I was a crappy person, but even crappy people needed to be loved.
