“Those cars aren’t you,” he tells me. “You need something that screams ‘get out of my fucking way.’ Besides, those cars are fucking expensive. You need to learn in something cheap that you can fuck with.”
I shake my head. “I’m not learning.”
King scoffs. “Just wait until Grayson hears that your ass can’t drive. He’ll have you speeding down highways and drifting around corners in no time.”
I groan, watching as he expertly shifts through the gears and unintentionally turns me the fuck on. “You’re really going to tell them, aren’t you?”
He laughs and the sound grates on my nerves. “Just try and stop me, babe.”
A heavy sigh pulls from between my lips as I relax back into the car and scan my gaze over the impressive dashboard. Maybe he has a point about keeping this car. I’m not going to lie, it’s nice. Very nice. “Fine,” I grumble. “But do me a favor and leave out the whole ‘scared’ thing. I don’t care if Grayson and Carver hear that, but Cruz … he thinks the sun shines out of my ass. I kinda like how he thinks that I’m some kind of superhero who can do anything she puts her mind to.”
His eyes soften and it somehow eases the pain that lives within my chest, helping me to forget just how shitty my night has been. He doesn’t say another word, just drives through the silent streets with my eyes glued to his body. What is it about a guy who can drive a stick shift? Fuck me, it’s the hottest thing I’ve ever seen, but just when I think it couldn’t get any better, his hand finds mine and he uses his knee to steer the wheel.
Dead. I’m fucking dead.
Ten minutes pass before King pulls up at a familiar old house and my heart instantly races, and not in the good way. I glance across at him, confusion quickly taking over. What does he think he’s doing bringing me here? “What are we doing?” I ask him, my tone sharp as I wonder if I was right for putting my trust in him. “Why’d you bring me here?”
A smirk kicks up the corner of his mouth. “You said you were lonely, and now we’re going to fix that.”
My eyes bug out of my head and I gape at him. “By hanging out with Irene?” I ask, swinging my gaze back toward the shitty foster home that I’d stayed in when I first came here. “Are you insane? I couldn’t think of anything worse. What the hell are we going to talk about? The brutally messy way I slit her deadbeat husband’s throat?”
King just sighs, and as he does, the sound of Irene’s yappy dog fills the silence.
I watch him as it finally clicks. “We’re not here to talk to Irene, are we?”
He shakes his head. “Irene’s been gone for nearly two weeks and that dog has been left here to starve. It hasn’t been washed, fed, walked, nothing. And from where I’m standing, it looks like that dog needs a friend, maybe just as badly as you do.”
I look back at the house. “You want to steal Irene’s dog?”
King doesn’t respond, but I don’t need him to. I already know exactly what he’s going to say.
My gaze shifts back to King’s just as a wide smile stretches over my face. “Let’s do this,” I tell him, and not a second later, we bail out of the Mustang doors and race toward the yard, putting ‘operation save the yappy little dog’ into place.
CHAPTER 25
“What’s its name?” Grayson grunts, leaning against the brick wall of the house as he stands between Cruz and Carver, all three of them only now just realizing what the hell King and I had gotten upto last night.
“I … uhh,” I cut myself off, glancing at King across the yard as he fills up a water bowl for the dog. “I actually have no idea. Irene and Kurt never spoke about the dog and I wasn’t going out of my way to talk to them about it, so I guess from now on it doesn’t have a name, unless one of you wants to track Irene down to find out?”
Cruz shakes his head, looking horrified by the idea of having to actively search that woman out. “A new name it is,” he announces, walking forward and looking over the dog who plays at my feet, begging to be scratched. “What is it?”
I shrug my shoulders. “How the hell am I supposed to know? A Pomeranian maybe?”
“It’s a Yorkshire Terrier,” Carver says in a brazen, dismissive tone, forcing my stare to his. I’m thrown back to the party where his eyes stared into mine as our hands slowly sailed up Sara’s skirt, though that only reminds me of why I was so pissed and ready to play with him in the first place. I really don’t need another day where all I can do is think about just how alive Carver can make me feel. “And that’s not what Cruz meant. He was asking if it’s a boy or a girl.”