Page 4 of Devil's Luck

“What the fuck?”

“Hey Remi.” I smile down at my tiny sprite of a sister-in-law. If I didn’t love her so much, I would tell her to fuck off and just shut the door in her face.

But I don’t do that. I never would. Remi is Nola’s best friend, so that means unless I want this night to end with both women kicking me out and followed by my brother shooting me with one of his high powered rifles, I need to be nice to the woman shooting lasers at me from her eyeballs.

“What are you doing here?”

“I came to see Nola.” That’s the short and sweet version of why I’m in this room, but it’s all she needs to know for now. “Are you all packed and ready to head home? Declan and Shane will take you.”

Hands on her hips, she keeps firing questions. “And what about Nola? How is she getting home? Why are you really here? Does Tadhg know you came? Did he put you up to this?”

“No, Tadhg doesn’t know I’m here, but I’m sure you’ll tell him all about it on your ride home.” Resting my hands on her shoulders, I steer Remi backward out of the room a few steps. Lowering my voice so only she can hear me, I give her only the answers she needs. “Remi, you know I love you, but you need to let this go forright now. This is something I’ve put off for too long, so can you trust that I know what I’m doing and everything will be okay?”

And just like that, the light bulb goes off above her head. With a tiny hop and a squeal pinched between her lips, Remi wraps me in a tight, quick hug then steps back, but not before poking me surprisingly hard in the chest. “Don’t break her heart, Fergus. I’m trusting you.”

“That’s the last thing on my mind,” I place my right hand over my heart and tell her the God’s honest truth.

And with a short nod, she’s gone.

Now my work really begins.

Shutting the door with no interruptions this time, I find Nola seated on the plush couch on the far side of the room, her fingers nervously twisting a few of the frayed strings hanging from the bottom of her shorts. While I’ve seen her in similar outfits before, maybe even this same one, everything about this moment is different than ever before.

This moment—the reason that we’re alone for the first time ever—it’s lifechanging.

If what I hope is about to happen tonight happens, our friendship will take a leap into another stratosphere, morphing into something more electric, more overwhelming . . . more everything. The air between us charges with palpable tension, acurrent that crackles as our eyes lock—those deep pools give me a whole new meaning of home.

Her medium brown hair falls over her shoulders, with a few flashes of pink strands mix in the longer strands, framing a face that is both familiar and mesmerizingly new like I’m seeing it again for the first time.

Deep within me, the yearning that I could no longer ignore pulls me to her.

“Fergus?” Her voice is soft, almost a whisper, but it slices through the silence like a knife. “What’s going on?”

“Don’t you get it?” I reply, trying not to sound like a bumbling idiot. “After hearing your voice this morning, I needed to see you. I couldn’t not to be with you.”

“But why?”

My heart races as I sit down beside her, our knees brushing against each other’s. The heat radiating from her skin sears through the wool fabric of my Brioni suit pants, igniting a shiver that spreads throughout my entire body. Touching her skin to skin for the first time, I place my hands on top of her still fidgeting fingers and pull them free, then intertwine them with mine. Feeling the softness of her skin against mine, it ignites a fire in my stomach, a yearning I could no longer contain.

“Oh, Nola. Did I wait too long to do this? Too long to try and make you mine?”

“Yours?” she says with a small gasp, like she never imagined my words as possible.

“Yes.” I nod. “Mine.”

Nola’s eyes drop and she watches my thumbs rub along the back of her hands for a few seconds. When she finally looks back up at me, there is a sparkle in her eyes I’ve seen several times before. It’s her happy smile. The one she gives with no guards or restraint. “How long have you felt like this? And why now?”

“When you sassed me about maybe flirting with you this morning, I felt like maybe you were giving me the green light. It was like you were opening the door to something different and I had to step through it to see if I was right.” I lift one of her hands, bringing her skin to my lips for the first time. “Was I right?”

Her lips curl into an even bigger smile, and I watch the last sliver of underlying nervousness disappear from her gaze. “Am I crazy for saying that I felt something different too?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Will this change us?”

“Everything will be different. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.”

We sit in silence, eyes locked as a moment that feels as heavy as the velvet curtains framing the window passes. Finally, she breaks the stillness. “This may make me sound like a teenagegirl, but I’ve had a crush on you since the day we met,” she confesses, with a small chuckle.

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