Page 9 of Carry Me Home
“Kind of risky, don’t you think?” he teased, using my words against me.
I laughed. “I’m holding all the aces. I can’t lose,” I joked, quoting a line from one of my favorite country songs.
He watched me put down the set: ace of hearts, ace of diamonds, ace of clubs. “Not all of them,” he noted, taking me literally.
The ace of spades had to be in that stack somewhere, and we were down to maybe ten cards more. There was a fifty-fifty chance it wouldn’t be me, but I wasn’t worried. I already knew how it would end.
I wasdefinitelygoing to lose.
After I had played everything I could—number cards that I could play off his sets or mine—I was still left holding ten cards, and a few of them had faces. There was no coming back from this.
Jack arched an eyebrow at me. I grinned unrepentantly. “Aren’t they pretty?” I murmured, tracing the calligraphy lovingly with my index finger.
The game went fast after that, each of us moving rapidly through our turns, Jack still holding that same single card, me playing what I could, until I was down to two cards in my hand. The deck had one card left and the ace of spades still hadn’t made an appearance. On his turn, Jack picked up the card with his right hand. He didn’t even glance at it, just put the card in his left down with the rest of his sets.
The ace of spades.
He’d had it the whole fucking time.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You could have gone out ten minutes ago.”
“I could have.” He discarded the four of hearts and stretched, lifting his arms up and out.
I tried not to stare. He was just sobig. His hands, his wingspan, the breadth of his chest. He took up so much space and, judging from the way my breaths turned shallow, all of the oxygen. “Why didn’t you? Were you letting me win?”
“You didn’t win. I wasn’t done playing, that’s all.” His blue eyes met mine. “It stopped snowing ten minutes ago.”
Oh.My skin prickled. He could have gone home ten minutes ago, but instead he had dragged out our game to stay here with me.
He hadn’t touched his third beer, I noticed. He was definitely sober enough to drive home. I glanced to the window. “The roads might be slippery, though. Essie would never forgive me if I let her twin brother die in a horrible crash.” It would be so easy for him to take the hint and blame the weather.
He didn’t take it. “My truck can handle it.”
Dammit.
“Janie.” He said my name like he was holding back a laugh. His large, warm hand covered mine and his thumb stroked over my knuckles. “If I’m staying, it’s not because of the snow.”
Butterflies erupted in my stomach. “What would Essie say about that?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer. “She’s my best friend.”
“Well, your best friend happened to marry my best friend, so I’m thinking there’s not a hell of a lot she can say about it without looking like a hypocrite.”
I bit my lip and looked out the window again. I felt…restless.Reckless. Maybe it was the fact that I’d harbored a crush on Jack Price since I was ten years old. Or maybe I just needed to get my bad out, like my mama always said. Either way, I was doing this. I squared my shoulders.
“I have a room upstairs,” I said.
3
JACK
I didn’t havetime to process the fact that I had just told my twin sister’s best friend something private that my own family wasn’t aware of yet. Janie could easily spill it to Essie, out of loyalty or accidentally. But I knew she wouldn’t. It didn’t matter that the woman was virtually a stranger to me, and I hadn’t even asked her to keep her mouth shut. I knew I could trust her. People played cards the way they lived life, and Janie? She didn’t have a dishonest bone in her body.
I didn’t open up easily, but I had opened up her—something else I couldn’t process right now.
Because right now, I was too busy trying to process the fact that Janie was my twin sister’s best friend and I was about to fuck her within an inch of her life.
We were already kissing when we crashed through the door of her apartment upstairs, our hands roaming each other’s bodies in search of whatever bare skin we could find. Her wrist, her neck, the inch of stomach above the waistband of her jeans—I wasn’t picky. I wanted all of it.
I cupped her round ass and pulled her flush against me as I swept my tongue into her mouth. God, she was sweet. Shetasted like the limes she had squeezed into her water while we played cards. I couldn’t hold back my groan and that seemed to drive her wild. Her fingers dug into my shoulders as she leaned into the kiss, making eager, greedy little sounds that nearly had me bursting out of my jeans. I was so fucking hard for her and I thought I might die if I couldn’t find out how wet she was for me.
