Page 63 of Missed Sunrise
His answering frown had me rolling my eyes in turn as I got out of the truck, and he did the same.
“Make sure you lock it before?—”
“—before I close it, I know,” AJ finished for me, cutting me off. He rounded the truck and came to stand beside me, looking entirely out of place with his hands in the pockets of his pressed suit. “I’ll never understand why you bought this junker and returned that sweet Mercedes your mom got you for your eighteenth.”
I offered him a droll look. “I know you don’t.”
Keeping close to the tree line, I picked my way up the path, and he fell into step behind me with his hands still stuffed in his pockets, but apparently he wasn’t done talking.
“So, Miss Barb’s house, huh?”
I said nothing, instead cutting through the woods for several yards until I poked my head out of the brush and checked thatthe coast was clear. I didn’t expect anyone to be hanging around, but what I was about to do wasn’t exactly legal.
“Miss Barb used to tell people she had trained alligators in all these woods surrounding her property,” AJ whispered from beside me. “And trip wires that would make sirens go off if anyone walked into them.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “I told you, do not banter with me. This is a banter-free excursion.”
He snorted, and I was very annoyed that he’d taken my anti-banter speech as banter.
Say or think the word “banter” one more time, dickhead.
I was the dickhead.
The dickhead was me.
I knew something that would shut us both up, though.
“Okay,” I said, turning toward him and putting on a brave face. “We’re breaking into the Big House.”
I wasn’t sure if calling Barbara Ann Copeland’s two-story, white-columned home “the Big House” was started by her to add to her own mystique or if it was called that before she bought it, but it’d stuck either way.
His eyes widened. “You’re not serious.”
Mine narrowed in challenge. “I am.”
He poked his head out from the tree line and surveyed the backyard. “What do you even want from in there?”
“Jesus Christ, dude, I’m not going into Bree’s grandmother’s burnt home to steal something for myself.”
He scoffed. “That’s not what I meant. I meant, like, why? Just… why?”
“Funny,” I said, making the snap decision to let some of the raw hurt of the past two years show on my face. “I’ve been wondering the same thing about you.”
We locked eyes for a few seconds, and for the second time since I’d picked him up, Alexander Juno’s shoulders sagged. “Fine.”
Confident that no one was about to witness my flirtation with illegality, as Liem proba?—
Nope.
I wouldn’t let myself think about him right now or wonder what he was doing over in Gulf Shores with his family who loved him so dearly—as they should—while I was doing something he probably would have?—
Regret kicked me. He would have 100 percent approved of this and risked himself to take part in it.
But after how I reacted to the scrapes on his hands and his cut eyebrow, including him may as well have been a funeral dirge for my nerves, so no. I shouldn’t have called him.
But he was going to be so mad when he found out about this. Or maybe not? The fact that I couldn’t predict his reactions was definitely part of the allure of Liem Lott.
And ironically was also the part that scared me utterly shitless about him.
