by Emilia Finn
I roll my eyes. “I didn’t consider the actual act, Smalls. Relax. He asked if I saw it in my head, and the answer was yes. For just a second while we were discussing Brenten and William, I saw it in my head. I saw porn once too, that doesn’t mean I’ve actually been tied up in a room full of leather and chains.”
Evie’s face burns red, and I swear, that almost never happens. “I’m fairly certain Will would take you to that room if you mentioned it. He probably has a Google alert set on his phone to let him know every time he’s near something that would make a woman blush.”
“You mean like how you’re blushing right now?” I tease. “Aren’t you married?”
“I’ve seen porn too, Livi. Doesn’t mean I’m gonna fuck the actors. And just so you know, William Quinn is bad news waiting to happen. I’m not saying that like it’s a bad thing,” she adds when I turn and scowl. “It’s just a fact. Some guys were born bad, and there’s no way to say that without just… you know, saying it. You’re our good girl. You skipped your teen rebellion phase, but that basically means everyone’s waiting for it to happen now. When we’re sixteen, a rebellion is sneaking out and drinking at parties. But now you’re old enough to drink, and you don’t have to sneak. Which means your rebellion is going to be huge. It’ll means orgies and handcuffs and leather and butt balls, and in conclusion, Ben’s gonna have a heart attack.”
“Butt balls?” I reach out and flick her ribs until her bow pose collapses and she falls to her face. “What the hell is wrong with you? Butt balls!”
“You know what I’m saying!” she exclaims on a laugh. “You saved your rebellion and lulled us all into a sense of safety. Now there’s gonna be wild shit going on, and I’m the one who has to hold your brother down when he hears about it.”
“Ugh.” I lay on my stomach, lift my legs off the floor, and reach back to create my own bow. “You didn’t tell him about what William said the other day, right?”
“Are you insane? If I had, Will would already be dead, and you’d be back in your tower.”
Why must everyone insist I belong in a tower far, far away? “You’re married now. I thought there were rules about telling your husband every little thing about everyone?”
“Girl, I tell him everything about me. Everything about Wes. Everything about my feelings and hopes and dreams and sexual deviances.”
I screw my nose tight. “Like butt balls?”
She snickers. “Butt balls aside, your business is yours alone. You’re not in danger, you’re not dealing drugs, you’re not stealing cars, which means he doesn’t have an automatic right to know what’s going on in your life.”
“But you’re saying that if I was stealing cars, you’d tell him?”
She purses her lips and tilts her head side to side for a moment. Her thinking pose, her concentration even while her shoulders bulge and burn from her new position on the floor. “I think it would depend on why you’re stealing cars. I have a healthy dislike for snitching, which is what telling Ben would be. But I’m also loyal to my Sasquatch. So…” She pauses. “Damn, it would be a toss-up which way I go on that.”
“You’d totally snitch to him,” I grumble and release my hold on my ankles. I move into a cobra; arms forward, palms on the mats, lift my torso, and stretch my spine. “Nothing beats your loyalty to the all-powerful Yeti.”
Evie follows my moves and works on re-strengthening her core after a too-big baby separated her abs. “Talking to a guy isn’t something I feel like I should automatically snitch about,” she concludes on a groan as she stretches her back.
I lower my torso, lift my butt, and work my way to my feet, but keep my hands flat on the floor. We’ve barely begun our session for today, so before we move onto ‘cool things’ – Evie’s words – we must warm our bodies first.
“But seriously,” she presses after a moment. “You thought about Will and Brenten at the same time?”
“No. What does he do for work?”
“Huh?” She brings her eyes to me. “Who?”
“Will. What does he do for work? I know what he did in the city when it was just him and his sister, but what does he do now?”
“Err…” She bounces her top-end a little and elongates the stretch in her legs. “I don’t know. I’ve never asked. I guess I kinda just expected he went out to the steel mill and got a job there. Or maybe he went to the Monaco warehouses.”
“But you don’t know?” I press. “Has old man Harris mentioned anything?”
“The owner of the mill?” She shakes her head. “I haven’t seen him in town for a while, and even if I had, I don’t typically ask him for a report on his hiring and firing activities. Why do you wanna know?”
I shrug and try to brush away her enquiry. A woman is allowed to be curious about the new guy in town – the exceptionally tall, ridiculously well-built, handsome fighter with a butt chin and sexy blue eyes guy in town. “Looking isn’t cheating, Smalls.”
She snorts. “I never said it was. But it sounds to me like perhaps you have a guilty conscience.”
“I do not.” I scowl. “Shut up. William is the new guy in town talking about orgies. We had…” I wrestle with my thoughts and wonder how much I’m supposed to tell my sister-in-law before it crosses the line from girl talk to must tell Ben territory. Or worse yet, before it crosses into something I’m not willing to talk about. “William and I… had a moment a few years ago.”
“Wait.” She releases her hold and stands tall, but because I’m a master at evasion – well, sort of – I stay down low and force her to drag me up. “A moment?” she demands the second I’m vertical again. “What the hell kind of moment did you and William Quinn have? And why am I only finding out about it now?”
“It was nothing. It was just… a moment.” I close my eyes – it’s totally a yoga thing – lift one foot to rest against the side of my knee, and lift both hands high above my head. I’m a tree, damnit. “It was just a moment,” that potentially changed my life, “and at that point in time, I was single, so I did nothing wrong.”
“You were also, what? Four years younger,” she asks with a teasing lilt in her voice. “Five years?”
“You sound awfully judgy there, Kincaid. Do we have a problem?”
She places her foot, lifts her arms, and when she tips to the side, catches her herself on me and rests one hand on my shoulder to keep her balance. “I’m not judging,” she lies. “But I’m hella curious. Did you sleep with him?”
“What? No!” I shove her off my shoulder and fix my pose. “I think maybe I’d have told you about that by now, no?”
“I don’t know! Would you? You’re pretty effing gifted at keeping your cards close to your chest, Liv.”
“I’d have told you,” I grit out. “Sleeping with William Quinn isn’t exactly something I’d keep to myself.”
“So, no sex.”
I close my eyes again, but shake my head when her hand touches my shoulder for balance.
“Did he touch your bathing suit areas?”
I already regret mentioning any moment whatsoever.
“No! What the hell is wrong with you today? It’s all butt balls and filthy sex and touching dicks. You’re stinking up my training room with this shit.”
She makes a soft grunt of ‘dunno’ in the back of her throat. “Did you know hormones go crazy after having a baby?”
“Don’t you dare.”
“I’m horny all the time, Liv. Like, all the time. It’s a sickness.”
“You’re a sickness. Shut up.”
“And it’s not even about me coming all the time. Like, sometimes, I just wanna help him out. That’s how wacked my hormones have been.”
“Stop!”
“And he’s mellow as hell because of it. I mean, it’s not like we were shy about it before, but at least we could save it and waited for bed… or his truck.”
“Smalls! That’s my brother.”
“But now it’s anywhere. All the time. A bunch of times ev
ery day. And because I’m so ready for it, it’s really easy for him to make me come. So he hardly even has to work for it anymore.”
“I’m done. I refuse to listen to this bullshit.” I lower my arms and place my foot back on the floor. “I’m going home.”
“No.” Evie loses her pose with a honking laugh and grabs my arm before I can escape. “I’m playing… well, mostly. So you had a moment. Please tell me the kind of moment, or I’ll continue telling you about my multiple orgasms.”
“It was just… I don’t know.” I pull away from her grasp and reach for my water bottle. We’re hardly moving, hardly exercising, and yet, the heat is blistering. “We had dinner at the estate that time a few years back. He was there, and I was there.”
“I was there too,” she singsongs. “You think I didn’t see him staring at you?”
“Right.” I let my gaze drop. “Pretty sure everyone knew about the staring. It was…”
“Intense?” she inserts. “Yeah, we all saw. Was that the moment?”
“Yes… no… well.” I sigh. “Not exactly. I took the dessert dishes to the sink later, when everyone was relaxed and chatting. I dropped the pile onto the counter, emptied scraps into the trash, so Kit wouldn’t be stuck scraping dried pie off the next day. But when I was done, when I turned to leave the kitchen…” I stop, lick my lips, and meet Evie’s eyes. “He was right there. I crashed into him, like, the crash where our chests touched and I almost shot through the roof because he startled me.”
“Did you kiss?” she whispers. She’s past her teasing stage, and firmly into intrigued. “Tell me he kissed you.”
I shake my head and swallow down my nerves. “We didn’t kiss.” Although, it was certainly going that way in the end. “He was shooting for cliché, because he held on to my arms for a moment, he didn’t let me move away, and because we’d crashed and I was startled, my hair had flipped forward a little and covered my eyes.”
“He tucked your hair back!” Evelyn Kincaid is a wife, a mom, a seasoned, badass fighter. But she squeals now, and grins like a child in a candy store. “He tucked your hair, Livi!”
“He tucked my hair.” If only that was the end of it. “He doesn’t respect personal space, because he remained in mine, held on to my arm with his left hand, then he reached up and tucked my har back with the right. His palm was scratchy,” I remember. “Calloused and rough.”
“Ugh, I love when Ben’s hands are rough.”
“He’s so much taller than me, so I had to fold my neck back.” I look up. “Either that, or I would just stare at his chest.”
“It’s a nice chest.”
“Yeah,” I sigh. “It’s a nice chest. He has this thing.” Lowering my gaze again, I reach up with a shaking hand and touch my chin. “This chin that draws my eye and sends me crazy.”
Evie chews on her lips to hide what I suspect is a wide smile. “His chin is noticeable.”
“And his eyes. They’re like mine, but different.”
“Blue,” she adds on. “But his are darker, dirtier.”
“Like jeans a man has been working in all day long.”
Evie stops whatever pose she’s half-assing, and instead turns to face me. “It was a moment, Liv.”
“It was a hair-tucking, after hours of staring. And he stared at the gym earlier. He has this way of looking, and definitely admiring, but it doesn’t feel dirty or gross. It just feels…”
“Sexy?” she offers. “Old man Harris looks at us like that, and we want to run home and take a shower.”
“But William stares, and I just feel…”
“Special?”
I nod.
“Beautiful?”
I nod again.
“It was a moment, Liv. How did it end?”
“That night?” I clarify. “Daddy walked into the kitchen.”
She snorts. “Oh dear.”
“Needless to say, the moment was over. Then the next day was fight night, then a couple days later, they were screeching out of town with the cops on their heels and really bad things being said about them. And!” I add on with a little more enthusiasm than needed. “Let’s not forget William isn’t even his real name.”
“Soph legitimized—”
“I know he has legal ID now, but it’s common knowledge his name wasn’t always William. He’s not hiding anymore, Smalls. So why doesn’t he go back to his birth name? Why continue to hide?”
“I don’t…” She rolls her lips between her teeth. “I don’t know. I’m not sure he’s actually hiding anymore. He just likes that name more than the one he was born with, so he kept it.”
“We’re born with a name, Smalls! We’re whoever we are on our birth certificates. We can’t just go and choose something else because it’s convenient.”
“Er…” She snickers. “You’re preaching to the wrong girl, Liv. My name wasn’t always Evie. I was a Frankston, then Kincaid, and I’m a Conner now, right? Because for some archaic reason, women still take their man’s surname. And should we talk about you, Miss Hypocrite? Because you weren’t born a Conner either.”
“It’s my mom’s maiden name.”
“To some people, a name is all they have. They’re proud of it, they want to pass it down through the generations. And that’s cool. That’s their journey. But then you have people like Ben, who wanted nothing to do with the name he was born with. You have me and my mom, who couldn’t keep our birth names because it was too dangerous.”
“Well that’s diff—”
“You don’t get to choose who’s allowed and who’s not based on your own mood! Will was born with a different name, he didn’t want it anymore, so he changed it. He has legal documents that prove he is who he says he is. So what’s the damn problem?”
“He just…” I lift and drop my shoulders in surrender. “I don’t know why I care. I’m the daughter of a cop, I was trained to be suspicious. And now he’s in town and says he’s staying, he has no formal education, and no one has mentioned hiring the new guy, and yet, he signed a lease on an apartment, which means he’s getting income from somewhere.”
“Wait.” Evie pauses for a moment, her brows furrow in the silence. “How do you know what education he does and does not have?”
Our eyes meet. Tense. Questioning.
But then she smiles and releases me. “Ya know what? It’s sounds to me like you have a bunch of questions to ask him if you ever get a moment alone.” She brings her hands up and presses her palms together – a type of prayer pose – and closes her eyes. “Either you’re a woman in lust, and girl, good luck with that, because I suspect it’ll be like riding a bucking bull, or you’re working undercover for your lawyer boyfriend, in which case, stop being a fuckin’ snitch. It’s gross.”
I roll my eyes and lower to the floor. Resting on my knees, I reach my arms forward, and stretch my body out. “I have no interest in helping Brenten increase his conviction numbers. He’s my boyfriend, not my boss. Get onto your knees.”
“That’s what your brother said last night.”
I whip my gaze to hers. “What?”
“Huh?” She grins. “What happened when you got to Oz and Lindsi’s place after the day at the lake?”
I scoff and shake off her sexual filth. “Daddy gave me the beady eye for an hour or two, but that’s because he doesn’t want any more moments. Mom followed me into the bathroom and watched me pee, just so she could ask what we spoke about in the water.”
“Did you tell her?”
“Yes,” I answer without hesitation. “I don’t keep secrets from my mother.”
Mostly.
“Even the thing about being in bed with two men at once?”
I laugh. “Yes, I told her that too. She laughed and called him a cocky son of a bitch. She said something about irony and arrogant men. Then she had to race back into the living room, because Ben and Daddy were planning a mutiny over the phone.”
“Ugh. I heard Ben’s side of that phone call,” she grumbles.
“Something about pitchforks and grenades being shoved up Will’s ass. Ben grilled me about what was said in the water. He was seriously riled up about it.”
“But you didn’t tell him?”
“No. I tried the multiple orgasms thing.” She turns to me and smiles. “I can report that it’s an effective distraction tool in my marriage.”
“You’re so fucking disgusting, Evelyn. I swear.”
“I told you I was horny!”
“Well… that was an interesting topic to walk in on.” Mom’s voice comes from the doorway and draws Evie and I up and around. “Perhaps such discussions should be saved for girls’ nights and copious wine.”
“Lindsi?” Evie’s face burns bright red with humiliation. “You, uh… Wow.” She clears her throat. “How much of that did you hear?”
“Distraction Tools 101.” Mom strolls into the training room with a grin and a swagger. “Personally, I can attest to the fact that men are easily distracted.”
“Mom!”
“But since it’s you and my son,” she continues. “I’m going to request that you never ever tell me those details again. I just got tingles along my spine, and I don’t mean that in a good way.”
“God.” Evie drops back to the floor and groans. “Don’t tell my mom what you heard.”
“I’m totally gonna text her as soon as I get back to my phone. It’s, like, girl code and all that. You, Livi, Bean, Brooke… you have your own little posse and girl code that no one breaks. But before you, there was us, and Tina and I chat alllll the time.”
“Awesome,” Evie grunts. “Just awesome.”
“What are you doing here, Mom?” I lift a brow and wait for her eyes. “Apart from tormenting Smalls about her Sasquatch obsession.”
“I was coming to ask if you could take my classes for this afternoon?”
“Self-defense?” I question. “Sure. Where will you be?”
“Oz needs a little R&R. Work is seriously stressing him out, babe. He was out until after midnight for the last three nights in a row. But he’s supposed to be on day shift.”
“Lots of hours,” Evie’s tone takes on the concern that we all feel. “What’s Uncle X doing to him?”