Had I? Had I given in, submitted? Handed over every thought and worry to them?
I had. Shit.
“There’s nothing between us,” I countered. “I told you, there can’t be.”
“There can, if you let it,” Shane added.
I studied them. They were so handsome. So… nice. And sexually skilled beyond anything I’d ever experienced, and they hadn’t even gotten naked.
“Why?” I asked. All of a sudden I remembered how it had f
elt with Chad, my asshole ex. The feelings of inadequacy. Of shame. Of feeling less.
“Why what?” Finch asked, running a hand over his beard.
“Why do you want me so much? Is it because you didn’t get off?” I asked, glancing down at the fronts of their jeans. We were back under the strings of fairy lights, and I couldn’t miss the thick outlines of their dicks straining against the material.
A couple walked past, and Shane waited to respond until they were out of earshot. He took a half step closer. “Don’t insult us or yourself. We want you because you’re smart. Funny. Hot as hell. Sexy.”
“You got all that from the, what, the half hour we talked?” I was lying to myself. I’d learned a lot about them in that amount of time. I wouldn’t have gone off with them otherwise.
Both shrugged.
“You come like a dream,” Shane said.
“When you know, you know,” Finch added.
When you know, you know.
My heart thudded at those words because they were dead-on. Shit. I felt different with them, like I was everything they said. That I was more than my badge, that I wasn’t just a woman to fuck. They intrigued me. They made me hot. Hell, they’d made me come, and that scared me. They scared me.
Yeah, I was afraid of how they made me feel, but I’d learned it was safer for my heart to keep men at a distance, not on their knees with their faces between my thighs.
I’d been stupid thinking I could do simple. It was what I wanted, but I couldn’t pull it off. One orgasm didn’t mean forever. It couldn’t.
“I told you no strings. I can’t have more. All I know is… is, I have to go.”
This time, when I tried to get past, they let me. I tracked down Poppy and said goodbye, then fled. From feeling, because it hurt too much. Alone was better than broken.
4
FINCH
“We shouldn’t have let her go like that,” I said, keeping my eyes on the road.
It had started snowing before dawn and hadn’t let up since. At least six inches had fallen, and another foot was expected before the front moved on. The roads, at least this far out of town, had not been cleared. I didn’t give a shit because my truck was huge and had a plow on the front. With my driveway being a half mile long and it snowing all the fucking time, I used it frequently.
“We didn’t have much choice. I didn’t see any handcuffs on her, but I wouldn’t put it past her to have arrested us,” Shane muttered.
There had been no point in staying at the party after Eve left, so we’d both gone home. Me, with a taste of her pussy on my tongue and a raging hard-on that wouldn’t go down, even after I rubbed one out in the shower.
“You could have asked Poppy more about her.”
He turned, glared at me. “This isn’t middle school. I’m not going to ask Poppy about a girl we think is cute. The one thing my sister and I don’t do is talk about our sex lives. If I discover she’s not a virgin, I’ll have to go kill some guys.”
“She’s twenty-four. She’s not a virgin,” I said, slowly shaking my head.
“She’ll be a virgin when she’s sixty and a grandmother,” Shane shot back, making me grin. “Forget about Poppy. I want to talk about Eve.”