Page 17 of Hide and Keep

I stop myself from gesturing to the emasculating design on what was a very masculine SUV—myvery masculine SUV—and snarling, “More than you already fucked it up?”

“Two hours. Got it,” I bite out instead. Because that’s what’ll eat at me driving around in my blazing pussy on wheels—how perfect the paint lines are.

When I get in, Ever’s waving to the guy with a genuine smile tugging her lips.

I force myself to look away from it, my gaze falling to her legs instead. They’re not long but they are smooth and sun-kissed. Her phone’s wedged between toned thighs that I wouldn’t mind feeling clenched around my head as I ate her—

“You ogle glory holes the same way?”

“It’s too cold to be dressed like that,” I snap, tearing my attention away from her to start the engine.

“Have any other clothes you’d like me touse?” She chuckles at herself. She thinks she’s so funny. She thinks she won.

“Once we grab some from myslum, I will.”

My words shut her right the fuck up because she hasn’t won shit. I’m moving into Chateau Munreaux and her ass is gonna help.

Agolf cart crosses the four-way intersection in front of us, the older couple in it gawking at Crue’s Bronco, probably admiring its lovely new paint job. Crue pretends not to notice, continuing to drive one-handed through the neighborhood full of small houses so tightly packed in no one even has side yards.

It’s too early in the year for the hydrangeas to be in bloom, but every front yard we pass features their bright green bushes, already awakened and preparing for the months ahead when they’ll charm everyone with both their calming colors and pleasant scents. Our property has hydrangeas, too. In Sea Haven, everyone’s does. Mostly in blues and purples, but occasionally you’ll find one with white flowers, which bloom later, usually toward the end of summer and into fall. While ours are professionally manicured, these are all wild and overgrown, blocking entire windows, even parts of people’s crushed-shell driveways. Nobody seems to care about the imperfection. They just live with it. They just live.

Swallowing hard, I tear my eyes away from a quaint farmhouse with a welcoming red door and focus on the man to my left. Without that annoying baseball cap covering his face, I can make out all of it right now, including those moss-green eyes with slight brown central heterochromia near the pupils. And that scar he’s constantly trying to hide? I like it more in its entirety. I haven’t been doing it nearly the justice it deserves. He has a diamond earring in his ear I suspect isn’t real, and every couple seconds, he bites the corner of his bottom lip using his top fang before quickly releasing it. If I could kiss that lip again, I’d bite it, too. It looks delicious.Helooks delicious. And since I tasted him for myself, I know he is.

Ignoring me altogether, Crue’s taking in our surroundings, just like he did at Hide and Keep. He was working security then, too. After spending countless hours analyzing his every breath from that eye-opening night, I’d already pieced together as much. He wasn’t patiently waiting for somebody to find him like I assumed. He was doing his job. Which makes what we did that much more…forbidden. He wasn’t supposed to be paying me special attention. And yet, that’s exactly what he did.

I get preferential treatment everywhere I go, to the point it feels stiflingly commonplace, but his was different. Crue didn’t know what my last name was. He didn’t care. He just wantedme, enough to risk his job.

The only way someone in my real life would be willing to do the same is with the knowledge I’d be assuming the financial loss. Not even the hope that I would, but the surety.

Crue was willing to lose his job to be with me. He hesitated at first, but he’d just conceded when my father crashed my very first party.

All the questions I wish I could ask him play through my head.

Is this where you grew up?

Did you love it?

What was the best part?

Or did you move here recently?

Do you…live by yourself?

Do you walk to the beach I can spot at the end of the road?

What do you do once you get there?

But I don’t let myself ask any of them because that’d make him the guy from Hide and Keep, not the prison guard assigned to my cell, and I have to lose the latter.

What I wouldn’t give to keep the former, just for a little while, just until…

Why did it have to be him? For months, I’ve clung to the memory of this man, his lips, his touch, the way he protected me like it was natural for him. That memory was the one thing, the one beautiful, perfect thing in my life that my father couldn’t take from me.

But now he has. Unknowingly. It has to be some sort of cruel cosmic coincidence. There’s no way my father found out who Crue is…to me. And judging by the lack of recognition on his part, I don’t think Crue knows either.

So our first meeting is still my secret. It’s just going to haunt me now, like everything else my father gets his hands on.

When Crue pulls up to a Victorian colonial with an enclosed front porch, I tell him I’ll wait for him out here.

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