“What?”
“Preston said he wasn’t the liar in the family,” I say. “I thought Colt was. But it must be you.”
“You really have to talk about my cousins while I’m still inside you?” he asks. “I was getting hard again.”
“You talked about my brothers when we were hooking up.”
“That’s different.”
“How?” I ask. “Because they’re my family, not yours?”
“Because they’re not girls who want to fuck me.”
I snort and roll away from him, sitting up to arrange his blankets over my legs while Devlin disposes of the condom in the trashcan beside his bed. “Preston does not want to fuck me,” I say. “He hates me. He wants to hurt me, so yeah, he’d probably rape me because he knows how badly that fucks a person up, but he doesn’t actually want to fuck me.”
“He hates you because he can’t have you,” Devlin says, pulling me back down beside him. “Because you’re the only girl who doesn’t cream her jeans when he starts talking shit. Because you never bowed down to him. It kills him that you weren’t interested.”
“In a guy who basically sexually harassed me from the second I walked into this school? Gee, that’s a real shocker. How could I resist that?”
Devlin smiles a little. “I’m glad you resisted,” he says, tucking an arm around me and pulling me back to him. “I want to be the only man you can’t resist.”
“You are,” I say, leaning in to kiss him. “But don’t tell me your family loves me. Your dad got arrested because of me.”
“Not because of you,” Devlin says, folding his arm under his head and staring at me with those intense blue eyes. “I promise he’ll love you if you’ll give him a chance.”
“You hid me from your mom,” I remind him.
“That was before this,” he says, squeezing my hip. “That was when it was goodbye.”
“So… What? You want to introduce me as your girlfriend now?”
“Mom loves us,” he says. “She might be upset about your family getting us arrested, but she’ll come around. And my dad doesn’t hate you. The guy helped name you, Crystal. You should get to know him.”
“Okay, I gotta hear this,” I say. “I know you think your family is omnipotent in this town, but my parents didn’t even live here when they had me.”
“That was the idea for the first candy,” Devlin says. “The one my dad came up with.”
I lean up on my elbow. “That’s not true. My dad named the first candy after me.”
Devlin holds up both hands. “Okay. Not trying to argue.”
“I mean, the first one that was his,” I say. “Obviously, he got the store from my grandpa, so the first ones were his recipes, and then Dolce Drops put him on the radar, but Dolce Crystals came out the year I was born…”
Devlin doesn’t answer.
I flop back on the bed and pull a pillow over my face. “Which means he probably named them a long time ago,” I groan. “He’d been working on that recipe for years. Oh my god. He didn’t name his signature candy after me. I’m named after a stupid hard candy.”
“Hey,” Devlin says, pulling me close again and pressing his nose against my neck. “It’s not so bad. If that’s the worst you can say about your dad, that’s nothing.”
“You know that’s not the worst I can say about him,” I say, uncovering my face. “And what would you know? From what I hear, your dad’s a regular saint.”
Devlin arranges the pillows to lie on his back, an arm under his head. “He really is,” he says, sounding pretty damn smug.
“But he cheated on your mom,” I say, laying a hand on his chest. I remember what Dolly said, and suddenly I’m glad she wouldn’t tell me. I want him to tell me this, to tell me everything. Talking to him is as addictive as touching him.
Devlin’s face tenses, and his muscles tighten under my fingers. “Who told you that?” he asks, his voice edged with the coldness I remember too well.
“Your mom did,” I remind him. “At that party where you led me around on a leash. Remember?”