She scoffed, everything sounding more ludicrous to her by the second. “Are you getting high on my paint supply? Who are you talking about? Who would do such a thing?”
“Take a wild guess, Molls.”
“I have no clue what you’re talking about!”
“I could kill him for making you cry like this.” Julian sat down on the living room sofa and threw his shoes off with a bang. “This obsession with my brother just pisses me the hell off, Molly. Like nothing in my life has ever pissed me off before.”
She crossed her arms, suddenly glaring. He might have been pissed off, but he had no idea what was wrong with her. That she cried because she realized the entire masquerade night had been a stupid illusion in the first place. That the man she’d thought she loved…just wasn’t the Garrett she knew. And like all the other men she’d ever met in her life, he would end up paling to Julian in every possible way she could imagine.
But how could she admit to this man, whose respect she craved and wanted above all others, that she just might have screwed it all up and was not really in love with Garrett? That the man she wanted was…unattainable. And that his brother and her sister had been warning her away from him because he would hurt her?
Oh, how she’d wanted to tear their eyes out when she heard them! Even if they might be right.
She gnawed on her lower lip and said nothing, focusing instead on getting ready to vent her frustrations on the only person she could vent with.
Julian.
“Just tell me what you see in him all of a sudden that you find so irresistible. Tell me why you’d go cry on his shoulder and not with me.”
Oh, God, what was happening to her?
Her legs went flaccid with a mere look into those stormy green eyes. He was so handsome, his jaw square and rigid, his eyebrows two sharp, bleak slashes. He was more enraged than she’d ever seen him before. She could even think he was jealous, and the thought summoned a deep, dark stirring in her that she’d been feeling more and more frequently lately—at the most inconvenient times. A powerful little ache in her body that craved for him to wrap his arms around her and… She didn’t know what she wanted him to do.
She ached for closeness with him, almost trembled with the need. She wanted to smell his scent all around her and to feel his hands everywhere and enjoy the hardness of those big, big biceps bulge as he held her imprisoned against his body. She wanted him so close, closer, closest. A
s if mere friendship was no longer enough with him. As if revealing every intimate detail of her life to him, her fears, her desires…
Was. Not. Enough.
Anymore.
“Are you planning to answer me, Molly?”
Molly’s throat seemed to be working extra hard to get the words out. She didn’t know why her nipples were beaded under her cotton turquoise sundress, why the way Jules was shooting fire at her with his eyes made her breathless and shaky and strange. She fought against the sensations, struggling to focus on his question.
She threw her hands up in the air in frustration. “I don’t know, Jules! All right? Maybe I hated when he was overly protective of us, the way he took it upon himself to chaperone you and me. He never let us have fun together, like we were doing something wrong, and we weren’t. You may be hot for anything that walks but he never realized that we were always just friends. But I truly don’t think he was being deliberately mean. Maybe he was just trying to do the noble thing out of caring and respect for me and out of respect for my father, who protected him.” She softened her voice as she tried to save the last remains of her hope.
Julian’s glare could have melted all the ice in Alaska. “Garrett pulled you away from me because he knew that— He knew I—” His face darkened, and Molly’s nipples pricked with wanting as she watched his fingers curl into fists at his sides. An image of those fingers clutching her breasts when he’d whispered sexy confessions into her ear returned to her, and she swallowed. This was so not the time to get worked up about that.
Jumping to his feet, he plunged a frustrated hand through his hair and thoroughly ruffled it. “And what about him and Kate? Hell, Molls, have you not seen the way your sister looks at him? You’re both pining away for the same man.”
Molly blinked in stupefaction, her eyebrows pulling low when she registered what he’d said. “You’re lying. You—you can’t mean that— Kate doesn’t feel that way about him.”
“Kate is like a sister to me. I know lust when I see it, Molls.”
Horrified, Molly gaped at the thought of her sister loving Garrett. So quietly? And for how long? It couldn’t be.
Fiddling with one enormous hoop earring, she shook her head several times. “Jules—you don’t understand. Garrett and I have done things. We kissed one night and it was…magical, like it was meant to be.”
Freezing in place as though she’d said something monumental, Julian openly gawked at her until his expression emptied into such a blank look that it might have been comical if she didn’t find it thoroughly alarming. “He kissed you?”
Molly offered him an embarrassed little nod, then groaned in self-pity and buried her face in her hands. “I’ve never felt such a connection in my life except with you. What I felt that night seemed so real, it was like we recognized each other, like we knew we were soul mates…”
But it was all an illusion, and I can’t understand it and I’m so confused.
Julian stalked a short distance away as though he didn’t know what do with himself, and then he returned, his jaw muscles working restlessly. “You’re kidding me, Molly. Say it now, Molls. Right. Now. Tell me you’re kidding me, Moo.”
She could only imagine how it looked to him, the guy she had been devouring with her lips yesterday, that she’d let his brother do that, too. What was wrong with her? Why had she felt nothing when she’d looked at Garrett today?