I nodded.
“Did you fuck around with Alesha, Carly’s sister?”
A laugh that bordered on hysterical escaped my lips. “What? No. That’s insane!”
Aaron didn’t budge.
“Rosen, come on. You know me. At least well enough to know I’m not out chasing jailbait to get my rocks off.”
“Actually, I don’t know you that well. You just got here, remember?”
“Fine. Then you’re just gonna have to trust me. Teenage girls annoy the shit out of me. I don’t want to hang out with them, and I certainly don’t want to bang them. The only woman I’m interested in is Carly.”
He continued to eye me as though there was a bare bulb swinging above my head in some top-secret interrogation office.
“Rosen, I swear. Whatever her little sister is saying, it isn’t true.”
Although, it did explain why Carly had turned ice princess on me, mere hours after she’d spilled her darkest secrets to me.
“All right,” he said, finally dropping his mask. “But, Nick, you need to know Carly is like my little sister. If you break her heart, I’m fully prepared to break your kneecaps, arms, and then your neck. In that order. Got it?”
“Loud and clear.”
Aaron’s threat didn’t surprise me. In fact, I’d been expecting it for a while. After my initial assumptions about the two of them had worn off, I’d begun to see their brother/sister dynamic and had figured at some point, as I got closer to Carly, he’d deliver the protective big brother speech.
“All right. Well, you’ve got some major damage control to do if you ever have a shot at getting with her,” he added.
I shook my head. “She really thinks I fucked around with her sister?”
Aaron softened. “She doesn’t know. She’s confused. But that’s what Alesha told her. That last night she came in drunk and the two of you messed around on the couch.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
I raked my hands through my hair, forgetting the grease coating my knuckles from the last two hours spent on the F-4. “I gotta go talk to her.”
Aaron clasped my shoulder and walked me out of his office. “Give her some space, man. She needs a little time. Besides, we got a shit ton of work to do.”
I hated to leave it alone for even another minute, but I respected Aaron too much to go against his advice. So we went to the hangar and got back to work, side by side, as though he hadn’t just been about to plow a fist through my face minutes before.
The immediate crisis was gone; I had to figure out how in the world I was going to make it up to Carly.
The Siren was already closed by the time I could wrap up my day at the museum and get down to the beach. As I pulled into the abandoned lot, I saw the lights were still on and took a deep breath. “Here goes nothing,” I sighed, pushing out of my truck.
Carly was behind the counter, staring down at something on the counter, a distracted look on her face. I stood at the door for a moment. Watching her. Wanting her. She was buried so deep in my veins and I knew the small taste I had wasn’t nearly enough. I wanted to discover all of who she was.
Last night, she’d trusted me enough to let me in deeper than anyone else, at least that she’d been willing to tell me about.
But now, her trust in me was broken. And even if I could convince her of the truth, she was bound to put the walls back up that I’d need to scale again.
I was willing to put in the work. Carly was worth it.
When I tapped on the door, she bolted upright, a flash of fear on her face.
Shit. I hadn’t stopped to think that she might still be shaken after everything that had happened the night before.
When she figured out it was me standing under the antique lantern on the side of the building and not some bush dwelling creeper, the fear drained away and a hard look set her mouth in a firm line. Her eyes narrowed at me and my heart pounded at the scrutiny on her face. I could just about read her thoughts.
None of them pleasant.
“Carly, please?”
She looked at me for a moment, then, with a dramatic sigh, rounded the counter and came to the front door and flipped the lock to let me inside. “What do you want?” she demanded, storming back to her safe haven behind the counter.
“I want to talk to you. Seems there are a few things we need to get cleared up.”
“I should have known…” she muttered, rolling her eyes.
“Yes, Aaron told me what you think happened. What Alesha claimed happened.”
She flicked her eyes to mine. Waiting.
“I didn’t touch your sister.” I hated that I even saw a shadow of a question in her eyes. How could she possibly not know that it was her that I was interested in?