“Oh no, a naked girl in the kitchen! We need to install an alarm system! Someone get us a guard dog!” He gives an exaggerated eye roll. “Anyway. Are we doing this?”
I let him down not so gently. “We’re not having a threesome, now or ever. This new ass-flashing craze of yours is bad enough.”
Brenna’s gaze strays toward the windows again. “I should probably go soon.”
“Wait until the power’s back,” I say gruffly. I don’t like the idea of her being out on the roads. Several traffic lights had been out on our drive home, and I spotted more than one fender-bender.
“What time is it?” she asks. “If I’m going to leave, it needs to be sooner rather than later.”
I lean forward to check her phone. “It’s almost ten. Maybe you should—” The screen suddenly illuminates with an incoming call, and since I’m looking right at it, I can’t miss the name of the caller.
“Eric’s calling,” I tell her, my tone harsher than I intend.
My peripheral vision catches Brooks grinning at me. Yeah. He knows exactly how I feel about this.
“You’d better get that,” I prompt.
Her expression is suspiciously stricken. She snatches the phone and hits the Ignore button.
“Who’s Eric?” Brooks attempts to sound casual but fails. I’m glad he asked before I did, though, and the wink he gives me reveals it was intentional. I nod back, appreciating the solid.
“Nobody,” she says tightly.
Well, that tells me nothing. Is she seeing somebody else? Does she have a roster of guys she hooks up with, a bench full of McCarthys?
The hot jealousy burning my gut is not a pleasant sensation. I’m a competitive guy, but I’ve never competed for the affections of a woman before. Because no woman has ever chosen another man over me. That sounds pretentious and I don’t care. The idea of Brenna seeing other dudes is not okay with me.
Which creates another first: I’ve never been the one to initiate the are-we-exclusive conversation. How does one even bring that up?
When her phone buzzes with a voice-mail alert, I feel even testier. “Are you going to check that?”
“No need. I know what he wants.”
The unwelcome jealousy burns hotter. “Is that so?”
“Yup. Whose turn is it now?”
“Mine,” Brooks offers. But as he sorts the tiles on his tray, Brenna’s phone rings for a second time.
And then, after she ignores it, a third time.
“Just answer it,” I mutter.
With a heavy breath, she reaches for the phone again. “Eric, hey. I told you I don’t have time for—” Her sentence comes to an abrupt halt. When she speaks again, concern has softened her voice. “What do you mean you don’t know where you are?”
Brooks and I exchange a wary look.
“Slow down, slow down. You’re not making any sense. Where are you?” There’s a long silence. “Okay, stay put,” she finally says, and I swear her voice cracks a little. She blinks rapidly, as if fighting tears. “I’ll be right there.”
26
Jake
“Thank you so much for doing this.”
Brenna’s voice is barely audible, and she’s sitting directly beside me. The rain is nothing more than drizzle now, the brunt of the storm having finally blown past us, but beyond the windshield, several streetlights still aren’t functioning. I’m behind the wheel of the Mercedes, because Brooks had too much to drink. He’s in the backseat, though, after insisting on tagging along.
“I mean it,” she stresses. “You guys didn’t have to come. You could’ve just let me borrow the car.”
I glance over darkly. “Really, and let you drive in a storm—”
“It’s not storming anymore,” she protests.
“—in a storm,” I repeat, “to track down your ex-boyfriend?”
At least that’s what I understood of her objective, when, in a panic, she begged to borrow Brooks’s car. Apparently she dated this Eric dude in high school and now he’s in trouble.
“What kind of trouble is he in, anyway?” I demand.
“I’m not sure.”
I give her a sharp look.
She seems to be grinding her molars. To dust, from the looks of it. “Drugs,” she finally mutters.
“What kind of drugs?” I’m not purposely trying to interrogate her, but I do need to know exactly what we’re walking into.
Rather than respond, she gazes down at her phone to examine the map. Two fingers pinch the screen to zoom in. “Okay, so he said he can see a street sign—Forest something,” she says absently. “He thinks it’s Forest Lane.”
“That narrows it down,” I say sarcastically. “There are probably dozens of Forest Lanes or Streets or Avenues around here.”
She scans the map. “Four,” she corrects. “One is about ten minutes away, the others are upstate. I think it’s probably this one near Nashua. That’s closest to Westlynn.”
I blow out a breath. “So we’re driving to New Hampshire?”
“Is that okay?”
I don’t answer. But I do click on the turn signal and get in the right lane to be ready for the I-93 ramp. “Who is this guy, Brenna?” I grumble. “He sounds sketchy.”