Page 33 of The First Deal

I could barely breathe, all I wanted to do was kiss those perfect lips that were hovering before my own. But I needed to speak, needed to listen, needed… needed… “I need to know everything before I know which way I’ll go.”

“Where shall I start?” he asked, his breath warming my shivering lips.

“Start with Quinn,” I said.

“Can I kiss you first?”

It took every ounce of willpower for me to shake my head. “But you can hold me.”

He did just that, and I snuggled close to him as he stared off into the distance and told me his life story. Or at least the key parts.

It turned out that Quinn was the result of a woman attempting to baby-trap him. It hadn’t worked, and Quinn had nothing to do with the woman who had birthed her. She walked away from her when she was thirteen. She turned up on Shane’s doorstep telling him that she wanted to come and live with her dad from then on.

He welcomed her in with open arms, and at Quinn’s request, he kept their relationship a secret from the world. The only people who knew who Quinn was were family and his closest friend. Oh, and Lynda, but Quinn hadn’t been happy about that.

“But she called you dad in front of me,” I butted in.

“She did, and when you left, she had a freak-out. She slipped up, and panicked, thinking that you’d run off and tell someone that she was my daughter. She wants to make a name for herself without mine overshadowing or buying it. An artist, my little Quinny is, and a damn good one too, she just needs her big break. One gallery to take a chance on her, and that’ll be it, her name will be everywhere.”

I grinned at the pride in his voice. That girl, who was exactly one month younger than me, was the light of his life. I wondered if she was part of the reason that he was always smiling, just thinking about how great she is, and how he pretty much single-handedly raised her in secret during some of the hardest—teenage—years of her life.

Shane went on, and he told me stories of holidays he had taken with her and Christmases. He told me about her dating life, and his hold on me tightened when he admitted that part of his dislike for Leo Birch came from the little ‘toerag’ flirting with his daughter at some party in Rome.

It turned out that Quinn had been on a girls’ trip that very weekend that we had visited the country back in the summer, and when Shane had left me in bed to go and deal with Leo, he had found him at a party putting moves on his daughter.

He then told me about his sister, his childhood, and a few of his sexual encounters, not in a way that might make me jealous though. No, he was telling me to show how little he cared in the past. It highlighted how scared he had been to let me in, to even admit that he wanted me. It was new. Brand spanking new.

Then he finally moved on to Violet, his closest friend.

“I need to tell you something, and I’d really like it if you kissed me before I did,” Shane said, urging me to face him.

“Why?”

“Because I’m not proud of it, and I need one last kiss before you throw me off of this roof.” He pushed my hair behind my ear, and I melted.

I was enough of a warmed-up puddle to lean forward and press my lips to his.

He claimed my mouth like he was about to lose me, and I had to cling to his collar to stop myself from pulling away too soon. My chest was tightening, worry prickling my heart, but I needed this kiss. I needed it to be a happy one because if it was anything to go by, it might be our last.

He held me close as his tongue explored my mouth, and finally, I felt that rush of happiness that I knew he could drag out of me. It was stronger than the worry, just, and for a moment, I fell into a blissfully ignorant state.

Then he pulled away.

It all came back to me, hitting me in the chest and taking the wind out of me in the process. Not that I let on as I leaned back and urged him to go on. “Tell me.”

“Violet came to my house the day after our first date,” Shane began. “It wasn’t one of her usual visits where we’d day drink and sunbathe on the roof. It wasn’t a lunch date. It was something entirely new.”

He inhaled loudly, then blurted the rest. The rush of words left him so fast I almost missed them, but I caught it all. The deal, her insistence, his reluctance, him telling her it wasn’t what he’d want, her telling him that it didn’t matter, he’d want it someday, and then they’d had sex, on the roof, on a sun lounger, one of the loungers that I had sat on sipping champagne in a little red bikini.

“I didn’t finish,” he said quietly. “And I didn’t think about it after. I didn’t want to do it again, and I haven’t”.

“She wants you to though?” I asked, my throat scratchy as I processed his confession.

I had thought that the biggest bombshell would’ve been Quinn, not that he had fucked his best friend the day after I had come all over his face in the back of that cute Italian restaurant.

“She does. She only mentioned it once again after, but she was reminiscing, so I thought she was over it. I was out of her system, and she’d seen sense. But then she came to collect again, that day that you met Quinn.”

I jolted, my spine straightening, hands clutching to the windowsill as I wobbled. I knew I wouldn’t fall, but still, those words shocked me.

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