A fluffy black and white Border Collie raced over and slipped out the screen as soon as it was open and sat at my feet, tail thumping on the ground.
“Good boy,” Jane cooed. She came over and rubbed his ears. “We only decided on his name this morning but he’s very intelligent. Did you see how fast he came to you when he thought you were calling him?”
Amelia and Scarlett fell to their knees, obviously overjoyed to have a dog to pat. Harvey grinned at me. Until that moment I had no idea that dogs could grin, but there was nothing else to call it—his lips were pulled back tight, showing a little teeth, and his ears lay flat behind his head and his eyes were half closed.
“Where did you get him?” I asked, not impressed enough by the grinning to forget the main issue.
Harvey rolled on his back, and John knelt to rub the dog’s chest, glancing up to answer me. “He was a stray. We came across him on our walk this morning and brought him home. Gave him a feed, a bath, and a name, so now we’re set.”
“You need to take him to a shelter,” I said, though I didn’t think anyone was listening. It wasn’t that I had anything against dogs, but I didn’t want Amelia getting used to having one around then pestering me to have one permanently. “He can’t stay,” I said a little louder.
“Why not?” Amelia said, her eyes confused.
“Well, to start with, we don’t have a permit.”
Scarlett made a pshht sound. “We could get one.”
She held my gaze and my heart missed a beat. It was the most significant sentence she’d given me in forty-eight hours, and part of me wanted to clear everybody else out so we could keep talking, just on our own. I missed chatting to her, the easy way things had been between us. Had we ever fought this long before? I couldn’t remember a time when we hadn’t been able to resolve an argument in one conversation. And I hated like all hell the tension between us now.
Which just served to highlight why I couldn’t kiss her again. If two days of not talking was killing me, then how would I cope if I ruined everything and she stopped talking to me all together? Better safe than sorry.
Harvey sat up again and lifted up his left front paw, whining softly at me, drawing my attention away from Scarlett. I frowned down at him.
Jane rubbed his ears again. “He can’t go anywhere yet. He has a sore paw.”
“You know where they can fix that?” I said. “A shelter. They have vets there.”
Amelia looked horrified. “What have you got against Harvey?”
“Other than my backyard turning into a dog toilet? He’s not our dog. Someone is probably looking for him. A shelter will check that out.”
John laid a hand on my shoulder. “We rang the pound and shelters this morning when we got back. They haven’t had any calls about him. I left my number in case.”
I had a feeling I was fighting a losing battle. Then I turned back to Scarlett and she looked up at me and giggled while Harvey licked her cheek, dislodging her glasses. My breath caught in my chest, and I realized I would probably do a whole lot more than let her parents keep a dog in their tent if it meant Scarlett wasn’t mad at me anymore. Surely John and Jane wouldn’t be staying much longer anyway…?
“Okay,” I said, “here are the rules. He doesn’t come inside the house. All dog poop is cleaned up. He goes to the vet for shots so he doesn’t give any of us rabies or whatever dogs carry.” I looked pointedly at Amelia, so she was clear on this last point. “And he belongs to John and Jane, not to us. He’ll be moving on when they do.”
“But—” Amelia began.
“Those are my conditions, take them or leave them.” I looked around the group, and they all nodded, even Scarlett, who was back to not meeting my gaze.
It seemed I’d won this little battle, but I had a feeling the dog war had only just begun.
Chapter Nine
Scarlett
Later that night, long after Amelia was asleep and the lights were off in the backyard, I was up in my painting attic, splashing color around on a canvas without much thought. I’d been sure Finn had gone to bed as well, until I felt him standing in the doorway. He’d been part of my life—part of me—for so long, I always knew when he was around.
“Tell me how to fix this,” he said, his voice deep and determined. “I want us to be friends again.”
Since we’d talked—argued—at the bar, I’d been thinking about our relationship pretty much constantly, and I hadn’t come up with any answers that satisfied me.
I turned and pointed at him with a brush coated in tangerine paint. “I’ve been wondering something. Were we ever really friends?”
“What the hell does that mean? Of course we’re friends. You’re my best friend.”
I shook my head. When I’d been thinking about us, this was the point that kept coming up—the thing that was frustrating me. “You see me as another one of your sisters. Someone you have to look out for. But I’m a grown up, Finn, and I have a set of parents if I need them.” I dropped the brush in a jar of water and crossed my arms under my breasts. “I don’t want that from you.”
“What do you want from me, then?” His intense blue gaze was hard to read, which was unusual. Most times I knew what he was thinking. Now, not a clue. Or not anything that made sense, anyway.
So I squared my shoulders and put the truth out there. “I want you to see me as an equal, not a third little sister.”
“God, Scarlett. I don’t see you as a sister.” He groaned and speared his hands through his hair. “That’s half my problem.”
I stilled but my pulse picked up speed. “What do you mean?”
He took a step closer. “I mean,” he said, his voice almost fierce, “I’ve been having the most un-brotherly thoughts ever since we kissed.”
At the mention of the word “kiss” my brain went into meltdown. I’d had no idea he still thought about that night. My eyes were drawn to his slightly parted lips, then back to his eyes, and the air around me seemed to grow thicker, heavier. I had about two seconds of warning for what was coming, but I didn’t move away. Couldn’t. Finn was about to kiss me again, and I was going to let him.
His lips brushed lightly over mine, and my whole body trembled. Then his mouth settled more firmly, pressing, then biting down on the flesh of my bottom lip. Electric sparks shot out through my body and I grabbed the front of his pale blue T-shirt. As soon as I did, I froze—last time we’d kissed, there had been a no touching below the neck rule. Not that this was another kissing lesson. I had no idea what this was, but no way did I want to do anything to prematurely end it. But Finn didn’t seem to care about me breaking the rule, since he didn’t stop, so I used the handhold to drag him closer.
He took the hint, wrapping his arms around my waist and stepping into me, close enough that I could feel his arousal pressing against my abdomen. A fire burned bright inside me—nothing in the history of everything had ever been as hot as Finn being turned on for me. Me. I moved my hips from side to side, feeling him, and he breathed my name against my mouth before taking the kiss deeper.
And in that moment, with Finn’s tongue stroking along mine and his erection pressed firmly against me, I knew I’d found heaven. I wanted to climb all over him, to take and be taken, to give in to my body’s demands. His hands smoothed up my back until they reached my neck, then he laced his fingers at the base of my skull, holding me in place.
After a minute—or an eternity, I’d lost the ability to track time—Finn eased away, kissing me once, twice, gently on the lips, then resting his forehead on mine as we tried to catch our breath. His hands still rested at the back of my neck, and my fingers were still gripping the front of his shirt.
Maybe I was out of practice with kissing but there were some things you didn’t forget. One of them was a kiss that felt like it gave your life meaning, and if I’d ever felt anything remotely like that before when a guy kissed me, I absolutely would have remembered it.