Page 64 of Bend

“Got a minute?” I ask.

My voice makes it clear I’m not asking for permission.

Her chin lifts a little, defiant even now. “Do I have a choice?”

“No.”

She watches me come closer, and I can feel the tension building between us with every step. It’s not loud, it’s tight. More dangerous. The kind of tension that hums under the skin and makes every word feel like it could tip into something worse.

Or something else.

She lets out a slow breath through her nose. “Then I guess I’m all yours.”

There’s attitude in it, but I catch the strain underneath. Fuck. I hate that I catch it at all.

I stop in front of her, close enough to see the way the breeze keeps catching pieces of her hair and throwing them across her face, and the smell something soft and feminine under the grease and fuel is clinging to the air around us.

It doesn’t belong here. Neither does she.

That thought should make this easier.

Instead it just makes me angrier, because I don’t know if I mean she doesn’t belong here because she’s too good for a place like this, or because I haven’t decided if she’s a threat to what we’ve built.

“So do you finally want to tell me why the hell you didn’t say who you were that night? Or any time in between?" I ask.

No warm-up or easing in. I’m already too wound up for that.

Her expression barely shifts. “That’s how you want to start this?”

“I mean I feel like we’ve wasted enough time dancing around the truth, don’t you? So why didn’t you tell me who you were?”

She folds her arms tighter across herself. “You didn’t exactly hand me a full biography either.”

I laugh once, short and sharp. “Not the same thing.”

“No?” she asks. “Because it seems pretty fucking similar from where I’m standing.”

My jaw tightens. “You didn’t need one. You already knew all about me.”

Her eyes lock on mine.

“Exactly how much do you think I learned about you?” she shoots back. “And why the hell do you think I was so fixated on you instead of my own brothers?” She rolls her eyes, sharp and annoyed. “Jesus, you’re making it sound like I’m some creepy stalker fangirl.”

“Aren’t you?” I ask, the word coming out harder than I mean it to. “What was the plan, then? Use your newly discovered brothers as an in with the Speed Demons? Get your claws into not one, but three of Tampa’s most eligible bachelors?”

The second it leaves my mouth, I know I pushed too far.

I see it hit her.

She goes completely still.

“What?” she says, and the quiet in her voice is worse than if she’d yelled. “You actually think I’d do that?”

She scoffs, turning her eyes back toward the street, but I catch the hurt in them before she looks away.

“I didn’t plan any of this,” she says. “I didn’t go to that bar knowing you’d be there. How could I?” She glances back at me, her expression tightening. “And in case you forgot, Isla brought me over to your table. I didn’t exactly invite myself.”

“Still doesn’t explain why you knew all that and said nothing.”