Her face flamed, but she didn’t move to listen to me. If anything, my order made her more scared. Not that I could blame her, though. I stayed away for years. I let her think I didn’t want her. Didn’t crave every inch of her body. Even if I couldn’t have her, I still wanted her.
“Drop them and bend over.” I plastered a bored expression on my face, one that would keep her from knowing that even being in the room with her was making my fucking year.
This time, Kennedy listened. Frankly, it was both a blessing and a curse, because while I practically heard angels singing as she stripped down her pants, she wasn’t doing it so I could taste her… or take her.
Three painstaking minutes later, I’d pulled the tick from her ass and disposed of it, the entire time trying to ignore the desire to spread her legs and take her.
“T-thank you,” she stammered.
I turned to face her, and while she was pulling her leggings back up over her stomach, I bit my lip to cover the groan that threatened to break free. Kennedy turned me into a bitch, and I didn’t even give a shit about it. Just being around her made everything better. Almost okay.
The lock clicked, and the fantasy I had of bending her back over the table evaporated. She’d slipped by me to unlock the door, and I couldn’t even blame her for wanting to get away.
“Kennedy.” Her name was a fucking prayer on my lips.
“Don’t worry.” The smile she gave me sent my heart racing, the exact same way it always had. “I won’t tell anyone about you having your hands on my ass.”
I snorted, unable to help myself, and then my mouth opened and I said the one thing that would send me straight to hell.
“Kennedy, if I had you again, I wouldn’t give a fuck who heard that I had my hands on your ass.”
5
Kennedy
“So, did Linc let Dom pull that tick off your ass?”
Even mentioning Linc’s name sent my brain back a week. His hands on my hips, and the look in his eyes when he didn’t think I’d seen him. News flash, I had. I couldn’t crane my neck hard enough when he dropped to his knees.
Hell, I struggled for the entire interaction not to lean back and press my ass against his face. The tick being stuck on my skin made things inconvenient, but it didn’t take away the desire for Linc to claim me as his own. Then, way too soon, he stood up and his hands weren’t blazing a path of arousal and need through my body anymore. Instead, I was left practically panting with a need that only he was capable of creating or fulfilling.
Just like that, all the years that passed between us vanished. I was hurtled through time and space back to a night when Linc, against all odds and reason, let me claim him as my own.
“Hellooooo. Earth to Kennedy.” Mom snapped her flour-covered fingers in front of my face, smiling when I blinked owlishly and stared at her. “I asked you if Linc actually let Dom get that tick off you last week. You didn’t call to tell me how it went, and I almost resorted to calling Dom to find out.”
Heat stole up my cheeks at the memory replaying itself over and over in my head and I had to swallow to try and buy myself time to give her a vague enough answer so that she would leave me alone.
But she didn’t even wait for me to say anything before she started talking a mile a minute, turning her back to me in favor of the food she was making. “I don’t think he did. Not Linc. He had that growly look in his eyes. The same one your father gets when one of his rookies gives me a compliment and he wants to break him in half, and then give him the shit shift for a month to make himself feel better about it.”
I sighed, hoping she’d get the hint and let me off the hook without eventually giving her an answer, but she didn’t bite. Instead, I stood in the kitchen and watched while she wiped her hands impatiently on her apron and went back to cooking like she’d been born behind a stove. The look she gave me would have had me confessing my worst sins ten years before, but I wasn’t a little girl anymore. So I didn’t give her the answer she so desperately wanted.
Instead, I pulled out my phone and sent my little sister Casper a text.
K: Your mother is absolutely batty.
C: She’s your mother until after the babies come. Then she’s mine so I get free babysitting.
I snorted at her response, completely ignoring the righteous indignation coming from Mom’s direction.
K: Hurry up and pop out the twins. You’re getting fat.
C: I’m telling on you.
Mom gasped, and I looked around to see her staring at her phone, her mouth hanging open. Damn, Casper really had told her on me.
“Kennedy Marie Townsend.” I winced at her use of my full name. “You called your sister fat? How dare you? She’s pregnant, with twins. You better be careful, or karma's gonna bite you in the ass. Just like that tick. How do you even get a tick on your ass anyway? It’s barely spring. What did you do, just go sit in the grass naked until you got bit?”
I watched her sniff dramatically and then turn back to the massive bowl of what looked like biscuits that she was kneading with every bit of the frustration I could tell she wanted to take out on me.
“Stuff it, Mother.” My words came out bratty, but I wouldn’t be taking them back. I was a grown-ass woman, and if I wanted to call my annoying, pain in the ass sister fat because she deserved it, I would.
But I also took out my phone again.
K: This means war, you know.
C: Yeah, but it was soooooo worth it. How’s your ass?
K: I’m gonna kill you.
C: You want my babies. You won’t do shit.
Mom completely ignored the fact that I’d gone silent during my conversation with Casper, and I looked up to see her staring out the window almost longingly.
“Cassie should be here.” Those words hurt her. Her shoulders were slumped when she glanced at me with tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry, Kennedy. I shouldn’t have said that.”
A ball of moisture appeared in my mouth out of nowhere, and I knew there wasn’t any way to get out of the conversation we were long overdue for. Not the one about Linc and the tick on my ass. Or Casper and the twins. Or the fact that Parker and Remy finally pulled their heads out of their asses and had their own chance at happily ever after. No. We needed to talk about me.
“You know,” I swallowed down the immediate rush of bile that filled my chest and threatened to spew out. “Cassie saved my life.”
The scar on my wrist itched, like it did whenever I thought about my little sister, or the night I’d tried to kill myself.
More tears filled Mom’s eyes, and immediately I regretted saying anything. But instead of turning away from me, she turned the stove off and wiped her hands again before taking a seat at the bar attached to the side of the counter, staring at me expectantly.
“My senior year in high school, I was raped.”
Mom’s gasp filled the otherwise silent kitchen, and I had to look away so that I didn’t get caught up in the tears that I knew were falling down her cheeks. But she didn’t say anything. She didn’t break the moment, and she didn’t try to minimize what I was going through.
“Cassie and Casper spent months trying to figure out why I’d try to kill myself out of nowhere. They started this entire murder board of reasons, and they couldn’t.” I started to mentally count the grooves in the wood floor of our kitchen in an attempt to keep my heart from bursting out of my chest with how hard it was beating. “I wasn’t depressed. You know that. Even after everything that happened, I wasn’t depressed. I just… I couldn’t control anything in my life except that, and I was bound and determined to get it done.”