He frowned. “You’re pretty fucked up, kid. Aren’t you?”
An indrawn breath announced Aly’s arrival. “What did you just say to my boyfriend?”
In a blink, I came back to myself, my smile becoming more genuine than creepy as I released Nico and turned to face his niece.
“He was teasing,” I said. “I made a dumb joke. Right?” I asked him.
His gaze slid from me to Aly. “Right.”
I clapped him on the shoulder. “Thank Moira again for dinner. It was delicious.”
Aly frowned as she reached us, sensing something was off. “Are you ready?” she asked me.
“I am,” I said before turning back to her uncle. “Can’t wait to do this again next month.”
Nico looked a little green at the idea, but he managed to say goodbye to Aly and see us out the door without giving anything away.
“What the hell did you say to him?” she asked as we made our way toward my car.
“I told him he had a nice arse.”
Aly choked on nothing.
“What?” I said. “He does.”
I unlocked the doors, and we climbed inside. She turned to me as I started the car, her eyes narrowed to slits. “You threatened him, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but in my defense, he started it.”
“What about trying to stay on his good side?” she asked.
“Turns out, he doesn’t have one.”
She punched my arm. “Are you out of your mind? Do you know what he could do to you?”
I turned to face her. “The better question is, do you know what I could do to him?”
That brought her up short. I could see the wheels spinning in her head as she reviewed everything she’d learned about my computer skills. “But the risk…”
I reached out and smoothed her hair back from her face, looking for an excuse to touch her. “I understand the risk, but I don’t think it’ll ever come to that. Nico is a smart guy. He knows a truce between us is preferable to setting his whole world on fire just to prove he has the bigger metaphorical dick.”
She grimaced. “Gross. No relative dick talk.”
“You understand what I’m saying, though. The threat was just a threat. He needed to realize that he can’t bully me like everyone else. And he also needed to know that he can’t push me out of your life just because I’m not Italian enough for his liking.”
Her gaze shifted from my eyes to my mouth and back again. “Did you have to wait until I was out of the room to do it? I would have liked to see you go all alpha on him.”
I cocked a brow at her. “Alpha, huh? Is that something out of your porno books?”
She rolled her eyes. “They’re called spicy romances, and they’ve taught me as much about myself as your masktok account has.”
“Yeah?” I asked. “Like what?”
“Like when we’re at that Airbnb we booked in the mountains, I want you to chase me down and fuck me in the woods like an animal.”
It was my turn to choke on nothing. Yup. Yes. I could definitely do that for her.
“Speaking of my masktok account,” I said. “You want to hold the camera for me again tonight? People seem to like the new content since you’ve started helping.”
She groaned and turned to buckle herself in. “As long as you don’t publicly thank me again. I’ve gotten, like, a thousand new followers since Wednesday.”
“You know people pay for that kind of social media growth, Aly,” I said, unable to keep the teasing note out of my voice.
She turned back to me, deadpan. “Yeah, but do they also pay their new followers to threaten them? Because that’s all I seem to get.”
“They just want to make sure you’re treating me right. They’re still not sure about you after that one time you made me sad.”
She rolled her eyes. “If they only knew the truth about what happened.”
I grinned. “They’d probably think it was hot.”
She sighed. “You’re right. Who am I kidding? I’m living their fantasies. I will always be the enemy.”
I gripped the back of her neck and pulled her toward me. The car had barely heated up, and our breath frosted between us.
“Hey,” I said.
She looked into my eyes from an inch away. “Yeah?”
“I love you,” I told her, unable to keep it in any longer.
“I know,” she said.
“You do?”
She nodded, her hair tickling my forehead. “Yeah, you’ve been saying it in your sleep for the past week.”
“Oh.”
“Hey,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“I love you, too. And no matter what happens, we’ll get through it together. I don’t have anything tying me here. If we have to, we can copy Pretend Brad and flee the country.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” I said. “But if it does, I’m down, too. I can do my work from anywhere or become a hacker for hire. We have options.”
She grinned. “Okay, but can we agree on someplace warm? I’m over this cold.”
“Wherever you want, baby,” I said, leaning in to kiss her.
Epilogue
Aly
Icrashed through the undergrowth with all the grace of a water buffalo. Twigs snapped beneath my heels. Birds shrieked overhead, announcing my presence. I ignored it all and kept on sprinting.
Right now wasn’t about stealth; it was about speed. I was being hunted, and if I had any hope of escaping my fate, I needed to put as much distance between myself and the man who chased me as possible.
The midsummer sun sat high in the cornflower blue sky, baking the forest with its heat. Sweat beaded along my forehead as I leaped over a fallen log and kept on running. The trees were laden with leaves, their lower branches reaching out to grab at my hair and clothes as if trying to slow me down, and the air was so humid that I could feel it pressing in on me like a weighted blanket.
I put on another burst of speed, defiance burning through my veins. Josh was not going to catch me. Why the hell had I made that bet with him? I must have been out of my mind at the time or suffering from sex-induced diminished capacity.
Was that even a thing?
Six months ago, I wouldn’t have believed it possible, but since then, I could think of several times that I’d been dicked so good I’d briefly forgotten how to do basic things like walk unaided or solve simple math equations.
The wager was straightforward: if Josh caught me within the next twenty minutes, I lost.
I really didn’t want to lose. Losing meant making my first-ever appearance in one of his thirst traps, and he would have full creative license over exactly how I took part. Knowing him, he’d use it as another chance to needle me, and I would either be embarrassed by it or become the internet’s most hated woman for the second time in less than a year.
That would happen over my dead body.
Maybe literally, if I didn’t start paying better attention to where I was going.
I skidded to a stop just before a drop-off. A glimpse over the edge revealed a long, steep descent into a boulder-filled ravine. My heart nearly fell out of my ass as I realized how close I’d come to having a Very Bad Day.
I glanced behind me. Shit. I must have gotten off the main path somehow and ended up on a game trail. Doubling back would cost me precious minutes I couldn’t spare, so I forged onward, following what looked like another game trail that ran parallel to the ravine and further up the hill. I had to slow down because of how close it skirted to the ledge. One wrong step could send me tumbling over, but I took heart in the knowledge that if I had to be careful, so would Josh.