Page 20 of Omega's Forbidden Heat
He doesn’t know if he’s going to do anything about it, or what he would do. But it doesn’t sit right with him, that her family didn’t want the fuss. If she was his, he’d have ransacked the whole goddamn village until he’d wheedled the little rat out of their hiding place.
“I don’t care what they say, you know, Jack. What any of them say.”
She means about them. She means her brother and her parents. Her scent spikes and her pretty lips part, her eyes darkening. He drags himself away.
“I have to go.”
“Right,” she says, obviously reading his thoughts on his face. “Well, thanks for your help.” She shuts the door and it’s only when he turns to walk down the drive that he sees the parcels still sitting there on the gravel.
Chapter Eight
Thursdays keep her at the university until early evening, her day full of lectures and study sessions, so it is dark and cold by the time she pulls her little car into the driveway at home. The heating in the old car blows asthmatically these days and her fingers are numb from gripping the freezing steering wheel. She blows on them as she grabs her bag from the passenger seat and climbs out of the car.
The house glows dimly. Finn is in.
She drops her bag and coat over the banister and toes off her trainers. Then she stalks through to the kitchen where she can hear laughter.
Jack and Finn sit at the round table, paperwork and an open laptop spread over the surface. Finn grips his sides as he laughs that loud Finn laugh and Jack peers at him sheepishly.
They both turn to look her way as she stalks in and she can taste the atmosphere in the room shift. She can almost feel it too, like the very air has tightened so hard it might snap.
“What are you guys doing?” she asks, eyeing them suspiciously, noting how Jack avoids meeting her eye.
“Jack’s helping me with the business accounts.”
She stares at the two of them quizzically and it forces Jack to look her way. He answers the question on her face. “I took a bookkeeping course while I was,” he swallows, “inside. I thought it might be what I could do for work.”
“You’ve always been good with numbers,” Finn says.
“So is it what you’ll do?” Amy asks him.
He shakes his head. “No, it’s boring.”
Finn laughs again. “Why’d you think I’ve been putting it off for so long?”
“You shouldn’t, though,” Jack leans back in his chair and folds his arms across his chest. The muscles in his biceps bulge and harden when he does and it makes her gulp involuntarily. “It makes it more difficult when you actually come to do it.”
“That’s always been the difference between you and me.” Finn smiles at him. “You always got your work done ahead of time. I always left it until the last minute.”
“And then begged me to help you.” Another of Jack’s smiles flickers across his lips. “Like now.”
An ache radiates through Amy’s chest, one she can’t help. It’s like old times seeing them together, easy in each other’s company. She’s never been one to want to undo things, to regret them. But when it comes to Jack, she has an uncontainable need to wind back time and force things to play out differently. It would be her one wish if she was ever granted one. That and the one that would make him as easy in her company as he is in her brother’s. But she can sense the tension in him. He is trying to disguise the way he watches her, and the way his scent betrays things his lips and his body won’t.
“I was going to cook some dinner,” she says, striding over to the counter and plucking off a grape from a bunch in a ceramic fruit bowl. She pops it in her mouth and crushes it between her teeth and she knows he’s watching her from the corner of his eyes.
“You’re cooking? No thank you,” Finn says with a smirk.
“There is nothing wrong with my cooking.”
Finn addresses Jack. “Twenty years old and she still can’t cook.”
“I can cook.”
“And what was it you were going to cook, then?”
She curses that he’s caught her there and her cheeks flame. “Beans on toast,” she mutters.
Finn shakes his head in disgust.
