Sold Short (Sidelined Book 3) Read online

  Owen almost knocked her over with his bear hug. He was so enthusiastic, when he broke free he moaned about his aching back. Reid offered her a high-five, as if their favorite team had just won a major game, and then a life-threatening hug.

  Sarina avoided Dev’s eyes so he stood and blocked her path. There was nothing more important than getting her alone. Rival companies could launch a raid on their talent pool and he’d open the door for them if it got him one step closer to Sarina’s hand in his.

  “I’ve got people waiting,” she repeated.

  “We’ll come back to this,” Owen said and walked out.

  Reid followed without a word, but he wore a silly grin. Sarina called after him but he kept walking. “He’s going to do something stupid.” She struck out after him, expecting Dev to move out of her way. But he wasn’t doing that anymore. No more dodging.

  Their bodies brushed and Sarina’s breath caught. “Get out of my way.”

  “No.” Childish. Accurate.

  “Don’t make this weird, Dev.”

  He hadn’t seen Sarina for three days. Three days during which Ana spotted and vomited till she could barely stand, and the possibility of losing the baby felt real, until an ultrasound confirmed everything was normal. Three days during which Rani arrived and apologized with knowledge and food Ana could keep down, and not a single word of rebuke.

  And during those three days when he should’ve been two thousand percent focused on his baby sister, he’d thought of little else than the intensity of those kisses with Sarina, and how close they’d gotten to removing any doubt they were more than friends.

  He thought about her heartbeat under his hand, her hips bumping his, her breath across his jaw. He thought about the heaviness in her eyes and the electric current under her skin and how all of that lit him up like only now was he alive.

  He’d thought about whether anything he felt would change if she was pregnant.

  “The weird thing is what we hid from each other,” he said.

  She frowned and a protest formed on her lips. He put his hand on the glass wall to remind him it was there, but it was a sound barrier not a visual one, anyone of dozens of Plus people could see them. But right now, with a flush bright on her face, he wasn’t sure he cared.

  “How are you?”

  “There’s no point discussing it. The chances—”

  “Are twenty percent of conceiving the first time.” He’d done his homework. “You could be pregnant and I care how you are and it makes no difference to how I feel about you.”

  Her eyes were pinned wide open, a little wild and unfocused. She kept twisting the leather bracelet on her wrist. “We can’t do this now.”

  “I want to kiss you so badly it’s all I can to do to stay standing. Tell me it’s not the same for you and I’ll get out of your way.”

  “That day, the pool, that’s not happening again.”

  “No?” Everything in the way she looked at him said if the walls weren’t glass, if the world weren’t watching, it would be shared breath and tripping hearts.

  “I have—haah,” she said, when he took her hand. The flush of heat was on her neck now. “Don’t,” she said as he rolled his thumb gently over the bumps of her knuckles, every muscle in his torso tightening in the effort.

  If he closed his eyes he might be able to hear her pulse. Standing this close he could smell her perfume, the one she wore most often, something of the sea in it, fresh and breezy. “I can’t stop. Can’t not think about us. What we were together. What we could be.”

  “We were a car crash. It can’t happen again. I won’t let it.” But she was standing closer now and when he pushed his thumb under the leather band at her wrist, her mouth dropped open and she gave two quick panted breaths before yanking her hand away.

  “Tell me you don’t want me to touch you.”

  “I don’t want you to touch me.”

  He said the word, “Liar,” in the faintest of voices.

  Her lashes fluttered. Her breath was coming fast, swelling her chest. He stood between her and the glass, between her and the anyone who would care. She dropped her chin to her chest. “What are you doing to me?”

  There was only one answer to that. “Everything.”

  “Sarina.”

  They both startled at Christopher’s voice and Sarina stepped away, touched her hand to her face, and shoved her fingers in her hair.

  “You have the—”

  She cut him off, snapping. “I know. I’ll be there in a second.”

  Christopher stood there with a tablet in his hands and a surprised look on his face, his eyes bouncing between Dev and his unusually frazzled boss. “What did you do, Dev?” he asked.

  “Give us a moment,” Sarina said.

  Christopher tapped the top edge of the tablet with a glossy black fingernail. “You don’t have a moment, unless you want to be rude.” He looked at Dev and his raised brow said I don’t like you very much right now.

  He let Sarina go. Stood in her office and watched her walk down the corridor with Christopher, off to fix or further whatever part of Plus needed attention, and he was jealous even of that.

  SEVENTEEN

  It was late. Owen and Reid were both gone. Christopher had waved goodnight, but Dev was still in the office and there was a risk Sarina would run into him in the empty garage. She could hear him along with other voices and music, stopping, starting, stopping again. It’d be drum solo if it kept going. She should sneak out while his robot had his attention.

  But she sat and listened to him laughing—it was infectious when he let go—remembering how he’d stared at her during the meeting earlier without any of his usual humor and how that’d made her skin prickle. He wasn’t paying any attention to the meeting and she’d have called him on it, but she was apprehensive about what he might say. It was usually Reid who could make her feel apprehensive that way.

  But everything she thought she knew about Dev was currently suspect, as though he’d interviewed well but his references didn’t check out.

  And then he’d touched her hand, caressed her knuckles and that soft skin on the inside of her wrist. If Christopher hadn’t arrived she might’ve done something she regretted. Like invited Dev to the storage room on level two and let him touch more of her.

  Unhelpful thought. Especially as it came with a physical sensation that made her close her legs together tightly.

  She logged off. Not finished with the day, knowing she’d log back on from home. She got to the car park without incident, and then her beat-up piece of shit car she’d been an idiot about not updating wouldn’t start. She flooded the engine trying to get it to kick over, but it flatlined: click, click, click, dinosaur, extinct.

  How many years had Dev been telling her to ditch it? How many car website links had he sent her, test drives had she done with him? But still she clung to her fifteen-year-old Ford Focus. It was the first big thing she’d been able to buy for cash after paying off her college loans with the money she’d made from Plus. It was orange for God’s sake. Sunray Gold had sounded exotic when she’d mostly caught the bus. She could’ve bought a top of the line Tesla or any of the European imports and not broken a sweat. She could’ve done that every year, but she’d clung to the Focus as if buying a better car would make her a worse person, make her one of those lucky one-percenters who forgot how real people lived.

  She hung on to the Focus for the same reason Reid still owned the first bike he’d bought, and up until Zarley arrived, lived in an apartment with near to no furniture because it did the job, and it was enough. But Reid’s Harley got sexier over time, holding on to the Focus was an eccentricity because she was one of the one-percenters and what was the point of pretending otherwise, and since she was also a woman, possibly about to have a kid, she needed a more reliable car.

  She got out and locked it out of habit.

  “Wanna ride?”

  Should’ve broken into the only other car left in the lot, hot-wired
it and roared off, rather than give Dev an excuse to drive her home.

  He walked past her to Gita, opened the passenger door and stood there waiting. It would be too dumb to Uber up a ride, too much of a statement, the start of an argument she didn’t want to have.

  She got in the car. “Don’t say it.”

  He maneuvered Gita out onto the roadway. He grinned. It was smug. A look he rarely wore. Dev was the least self-satisfied person she knew. “Don’t look like that.”

  He tried to eat his lips and sensibly kept his mouth shut. He drove the lumbering, big show-off car she’d never really liked as if it was easy, yet she knew it was heavy; and even modified, handled differently on the road. Cars said so much about people. Owen drove a top of the line action-man car, no expense spared, but Owen had grown up with wealth, he knew how to use it well. Dev didn’t come from money and his beloved Gita was a look at me car, causing a spectacle wherever he took it.

  How could she love a man who owned a ride like this? “This is a ridiculous car.” That got her a quarter turn of his head, but he didn’t respond. “It’s like you’re trying to prove something by driving it.” Old car, trying too hard to be hipster cool. Big car, small dick. Though, probably not that, because she’d . . . “Why don’t you get a normal I’ve made it, I’m a cashed-up, tech industry dickhead car?”

  “Are you finished?”

  Only getting started. “You can’t do that thing where you stare at me in the office. You can’t touch me like you did. It’s creepy.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Just because no one ever resigns from your team doesn’t mean you’re immune to whoever is coming after our people.”

  “I don’t think that.”

  “How did I never realize you’re superior?” She slapped a hand on the seat. “You come across as humble, well-meaning, the kind of guy who’s nice to old ladies and small kids, would never kick a dog, but then you have this car and it’s all just a put-on.”

  “You think because I have a classic car I’m a bad guy.”

  He kissed like a bad boy. Not the kind of kisses that should come from a man who had neat hair and probably ironed his t-shirts.

  “You can’t have this car when Ana has her baby.” He had to know that.

  “What exactly are you upset about?”

  “I’m not upset.”

  He laughed and that was incredibly annoying. She was steamed up, yep, because her own stupid car wouldn’t start and he’d warned her about taking better care of it and he’d just shown up to rescue her right when she needed him, and things were different, he wasn’t allowed to do that anymore.

  “My car is broken.”

  “Not really.”

  “What do you mean, not really? It wouldn’t start.”

  “Because I wanted to catch you before you went home.”

  She hadn’t wanted to be caught. “Did you tamper with my car?” He wouldn’t. They were five minutes from her street.

  Half-smile. He did.

  “You broke my car deliberately, so you could what, get me alone again?”

  “Yup.”

  “I can’t . . . I don’t . . . Why would you do that?”

  “You were going to avoid me. That was your plan. I didn’t happen to like that plan, so I made a new one.”

  “By vandalizing my car.”

  “Arrest me now. I did it. I’m guilty. I’m bad to the bone.”

  He was infuriating. “Who does that?” Who sets himself up as a white knight and then admits that’s what he’s done is a bastard act? “What an insanely dumb thing to do.” Who is part of your whole adult life and never once looks at you in a way that makes you wonder if your underwear might not burst into flames and it’d be impossible to explain that to the nurses in the burns unit at Good Samaritan Hospital.

  There was no explanation for it. There was only the need to make that fire happen, and knowing it was wrong because you’d already made a decision without him that made it impossible to make another one to include him. That he was acting out of some misplaced need to rescue you because clearly you’d lost your mind and right at this moment, parked in the idiot clunker in your own driveway, you didn’t know if you wanted to be pregnant, only knew that if you didn’t kiss him you would lose your mind.

  She lunged at the door, yanked on the handle, but he must have locked her in. She turned to shout at him to let her go and the look on his face made her swallow those words. He couldn’t look at her like that, like he’d tamper with her and she’d like it, like he might know how to break her and fix her and break her again.

  “Sarina.”

  Open the damn door. Let me—“What?”

  “I’m going to kiss you now.”

  He leaned in, took her shoulders and brushed his nose on hers, tentatively touched his lips to hers. The whole world held its breath with her, waiting for him to take more and when he did, putting a hand to the back of her head, nipping, teasing then finally fastening on and opening up, traffic lights changed, planes took off, babies cried, men laughed and women sighed, the temperature rose, the seas shivered, coral spawned, plants unfurled and animals howled.

  It was there in that kiss, all the busy of the world and all the power. It went into her body like a truth serum that made her chase his lips, twist around to get closer, hold onto his knee to make sure nothing prevented the descent into a deeper kiss that started on her lips and landed on her senses with the weight of history and the future combined.

  Someone groaned first. Someone licked first. Her teeth and his clicked, eyes closed to feel it more, or to survive the soul suck of it. He angled her head and went for her neck and she sizzled inside the drag of his lips, trembled when he hit on a spot behind her ear. Her make-out sessions with Colby had been hot and fun, this with Dev was more like a contagion. Serious. Unstoppable. The more they touched the more she wanted, the harder it got not to care about his stupid car, and his decade and more of lying about what his hands and his kiss and his closeness could make her feel.

  “Inside,” he said against her ear, and an epidemic started in her chest.

  “No,” she said, a bite to his chin, eyes clashing. Didn’t matter if he meant inside the house or inside her body, both were too much of a risk. She had to quarantine his attack to make it out alive.

  “You want this.”

  Yes, yes, but it was too late and too mad and so gorgeously desperate it couldn’t be real, it was a mind trick, a fever dream. Left her weakened and made the struggle too hard. “I want.”

  “Yes.” He was at her throat now, licking, mouthing, and she was braced on the door. There was a handle stabbing her in the back of her ribs but if she moved he might stop and the press of his body, the urgency in his hands was as much sickness as it was wellness.

  What made her laugh was something less than panic but greater than joy. And once she’d started, she couldn’t stop. It shook through her and pinned her eyes open, made her hands drop from Dev’s neck. He pulled away confused, and his mussed-up hair and those million-lash eyes blinking in surprise cut her breath off.

  This was wrong, she wasn’t some teenager testing the limits. They’d had a no-kiss limit for years. They had approved touch zones that were friendly and affectionate, comforting and familiar, they weren’t intimate, incendiary and too late to matter.

  She sat away from the door. “You don’t get to do this to me.”

  Dev put his hands to his head. “I’m not on my own in this. I’m not doing anything you’re not doing back.”

  That laughter must’ve been the beginning of losing it. She scrambled to her knees and launched herself on him, getting a steering wheel slammed into her hip but his arms and his lips and his impossibly sexy helpless groan as he wrapped her tight and kissed her mean and dirty, and the truth of this was she’d made a mistake, she hadn’t expected enough from him and had discovered what he could give too late.

  It was a sour realization and it broke her.

  The sound
she made next was more a sob, a shock of awareness; his hold loosened and she pushed away. “We can’t.” She might be pregnant and not to Dev. She didn’t look back, put both hands to the door handle and yanked it down, pushed on the door and tumbled out. “Go.”

  She waited inside her house, standing in the entryway for a long time before she heard Gita’s engine come to life, and when the car pulled out, she heard its distinctive throaty rumble as a battle cry.

  EIGHTEEN

  Not one of these guys was father material. Gavin was a surfer dude with woven bands around his wrist and hair to his shoulders. Connor was bookish, with glasses and a bunch of nervous gestures, Alex was a genius according to Ana. He had political ambitions. He towered over Dev.

  Despite the fact they were the future keepers of law and order, it was impossible to see what Ana had been thinking by fucking all of them, but of course she wasn’t thinking about anything but the pleasure. Dev closed his eyes and gathered his focus. Thinking about Ana having sex was going to give him an aneurism, make him wish they were all pre-med. In Gita last night, all he’d been thinking of was the pleasure too. Getting Sarina’s breath to short and her body to tremble, having her grip on to him as if the earth was spinning too fast and she was worried about being tossed off. It wasn’t enough.

  He sat beside Ana on a sad couch in a quiet student lounge as she made her announcement and watched the impact as it landed. The Dude was sanguine, the Book was panicked, and the Hulk was mad and trying not to show it, though swearing in Spanish didn’t help.

  “I’m not asking for anything, except for each of you to take a blood test so we know,” she said.

  “You’re not asking for anything, except you brought your brother, so what’s that about, Ana?” said Alex, not quite hulking out, but his shirt seams were straining.

  “Be cool, A,” said Gavin. “This is hard for Ana. She doesn’t need agro from you.” He smiled at Ana. “A baby. A freaking baby. You feelin’ okay?”

  “Did you think that whoever is the dad might want to have a say in this?” Alex said. “Connor, back me up?”