His nearly black eyes sharpened. “Which means it’s in yours too.”
Fuck you,I wanted to spit out for no other reason than I wanted him to stop talking.
I already was burning for her, and that speculative fucking look of his said he knew it too. Scarlett’s wildfire had been swallowing me up since the first goddamn day I met her. Maybe even before that; I didn’t fucking know.
Was it weird that I’d never forgotten that first time I saw her back when she was a teenager? Was it fucking sick?
Maybe that’s why every hair on my body electrified the first time we locked eyes back at LAPD. She’d conducted enough heat under my skin to give me goosebumps with something as simple as eye contact.
Maybe I’d been craving attention from those fire-green eyes since the day they skipped over me all those years back.
“You’re bad for her, you know,” Demitri stated evenly.
Yes.
“She doesn’t need someone who burns as hot as she does. Or flies off the handle when she baits you, because she will bait you.”
Jaw clicking and head knocking back against the door, I fisted the neck of my whiskey.
“Thanks for the stellar opinion.”
“It’s not just an opinion. It’s a word of fucking warning. Scarlett isn’t a woman who will ask ‘how high’ when you tell her to jump. She’ll just do it off of a fucking cliff.”
My nostrils flared up at the ceiling.
If this conversation wasn’t pissing me off so much, that would have been hilariously on the nose.
“I’ve been with her a week,” I clipped. “I’m aware of how she is.”
“If you think a week is long enough to know her, then you don’t know shit.”
The bottle of Jack was mid-tilt at my lips when the sound of his cocky voice stopped it. Smooth glass rested in the curve of my bottom lip while my brain went to war with itself.
Half of it purred that I didn’t need to prove a damn thing to him and to finish the bittersweet pull of whiskey tingling my tastebuds. The other half chiseled out of ego and testosterone was beating its fists against its chest and shouting to put this arrogant fucker in his place.
The mouth of the bottle tipped up and back down against mine, going back and forth until ego won out and I parted my lips from the whiskey and spared him a pointed glance.
“I know why she burned down the house.”
Then I rewarded my bad behavior with a deep swig.
Whatever. Don’t regret it.
Demitri blanched for all of two seconds before concluding, “Her dad told you?”
I scoffed into the bottle of Jack before pouring more back.
“Her dad didn’t do a fucking thing.”
Poison peeled down my throat and joined the heavy hatred in my stomach, boiling it to an angry fire.
That’s exactly what thinking about Scarlett’s father made me feel—like I’d swallowed a belly full of flames, and I wanted to spit them all over him so he burned the way his daughter did.
The way he made her burn.
On the floor, Demitri changed his tune to sound shocked. And a little disappointed too.
“She really did tell you.”